Maybe I wasn't clear. (1) I wasn't aware that "the left," including long-haired (it's back in now, it seems) college kids had ever abandoned economics. Even back in when I was a poofy haired college kid, as I mentioned, one of the two big left activities on my sleepy and conservative Ivy league college campus in the late 1970s was union organizing rights. (The other was anti-apartheid.) Through the late 190s and today, "Seattle" type work around globalization, anti-sweatshop work, living wage organizing, etc. and the like have been very lively among students in past decade.
(2) It's not clear what work around "economics" involves. I belong to a group (Solidarity) that has a long time commitment to "industrialization." Lots of the members "went into industry" and have done good work in their unions, or working or union democracy. But they haven't exactly rocked the working class. Others I know just got sidelined into dead end assembly line jobs -- if they could keep them. Or is what Doug does work around "economics" -- he edits LBO, writes books with economics stuff in them. Does that count? Is it "economics" if I teach employment discrimination but not if I teach civil rights, or is employment discrimination too much about class and sex? Is it "economics: if I teach white collar crime but not if I teach about habeas corpus?
(3) You can't seriously be suggesting (I guess you can, Richard Rorty was, and I used to yell at him for this) that we've "done enough for now" by way of fighting sexism, racism (and these aren't economic concerns??!!), homophobia, and -- today, when the government is actively and openly practicing torture, detention with charges, and criminalization of vast swathes of speech -- repression of political speech!? That with an illegal war (waged, in some manner or fashion because of oil) that nobody seems inclined to stop, that we've done enough antiwar work? "For now." We can take this stuff up when? Maybe when union density gets back up to 15% in the private sector, or in 2025, whichever comes first, or what?
(4) Fact is, basic point. Nobody knows what to do. People like Rorty who think we should drop everything and work in the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, such as it is, to promote the immediate material interests of the working class, higher wages, better working conditions, more secure retirement benefits and health care (does that count as economic)? no more have a recipe for reconstituting some new version of the old New Deal coalition than people, if there are any, why say we should work only on "lifestyle" issues like abortion rights. If I thought that we could light the fire by, I dunno, industrializing, I'd be all over it in a New York minute. But I don't. Do you?
(5) There is nothing wrong with working to improve the material well-being of the working class. I'm all for it. But Taibbi is wrong to blame the college students for failing to do what no one else, including the rest of us, have figured out how to do, and which is probably beyond the power of any group other than the working class itself to do. That's why a sneer like his is not constructive. Neither is it constructive or sensible to suggest that Brian is detracting from the struggle by focusing on homophobia or bitch by addressing feminism, or me by harping on civil liberties, etc. Taibbi has got a real problem by the trail all right, but he doesn't know what to do about it any more than anyone else.
9#0
--- "Mr. WD" <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/07, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > formerly the Party of Lincoln! -- but maybe civil
> > rights is another one of those lifestyle things
> that
> > it's bad for long haired layabouts of
> > nose-ring-wearing students to bother about.
>
> This is a rather disingenuous characterization of
> what Taibbi was
> saying. The piece was not perfect, to be sure, but
> Taibbi makes a
> very good point:
>
> That point is that it is a happy reality that the
> left has made
> serious advances in the last 50 years in a number of
> arenas: women's
> rights, gay rights, civil rights, free speech
> rights, environmental
> politics, and so forth. This is not to say that
> further advances are
> not necessary, or that some of these gains are not
> being reversed.
> _But_, IMO, many on the left continue to
> overestimate the subversive
> value of working in these arenas. Emphatically, it
> is a good thing
> that these issues are no longer considered nearly as
> subversive as
> they used to be, but that is because capitalism
> thrives in a world
> that is far less sexist, racist and homophobic --
> and capitalism has
> proven good at adapting to popular concern about the
> state of the
> environment. I would submit that organizing on
> behalf of a
> formerly-reviled, now-mainstream organization like
> the ACLU or the
> NAACP is only marginally more subversive than
> organizing a golf
> tournament to raise funds to cure breast cancer.
> What is wrong with
> saying 'look, we've made decent progress in these
> other areas, let's
> get back to economics for awhile'?
>
> -WD
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo! Auto Green Center. http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/