[lbo-talk] Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)

[Joseph Catron]

Thanks for your post, WD.  I can't help notice that over those same 50
years, economic  power has flowed in the opposite direction, almost as
if the capitalists comprising elite universities' boards of trustees
and the corporate media's boards of directors had realized, about 1947
or so, which side their bread was buttered on, and decided that
identity politics war far superior, for their purposes, to class
struggle.

Yes, I readily admit to conspiracy theorizing.  But in retrospect, the
whole thing seems too perfectly conspiratorial to do otherwise.

On 6/15/07, Mr. WD <mister.wd at gmail.com> wrote:


> 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.