On Apr 21, 2007, at 12:51 PM, Jim Straub wrote:
> If one does not believe that it is a problem of the left that it
> largely
> exists in a navel-gazing isolated bubble, then, well, I confess I
> do not
> know how to move one on that question. My evidence is the left. Our
> milleu, all around us. Yes, there are working people in Berkeley
> and poor
> people in Boston.
There are poor people about three blocks from where I sit. The nonsense you see when walking around Berkeley - dream centers and nuclear-free zones (Berkeley! institutional home of a nuclear weapons lab!!) - is still just blocks from the mutliracial working class of Oakland.It's not a geographical thing - it's about social networks and a shared, or a non-shared culture.
> But I do believe leftists would have a better assessment of
> the balance of forces, which would better inform their approach, and
> probably lead to better organizing work, if so many were not
> bunkered down
> in their enclaves.
Or you could say that they/we hunker down in our enclaves precisely because we know what's out there, and it's not always very encouraging.
> Doug- I confess, I regard the cumulative accomplishments of the labor
> movement and community organizations as greater than that of the
> spartacists
> and pomo scholars.
I really don't know what the contribution of community organizing has been. In NYC, it looks like not much, but maybe I just don't know where to look. One of the reasons I wanted to write that activistism piece is because I'd been thinking for years about the barrenness of the Alinsky approach.
The Sparts put out a great paper. Their political contribution is minimal. "Pomo scholars," whoever they are, are often personally involved in all kinds of political work, from the peace movement to living wage campaigns. Don't make me dig out that idiotic passage from an Eric Alterman column where Alterman complains about the evil pomo-sters, and then quotes Nelson Lichtenstein as saying they did some of the best work on UVa's living wage campaign.
Ah, but the labor movement. It did a lot in the past, and I can't imagine any improvement in U.S. political life without its revival. But it's mostly braindead and ineffectual now.
Doug