> Someone wrote me offlist with the very interesting and pertinent
> question: why are laboristas so bitchy? Why the constant assertions
> of authenticity, and the constant dis'ing of (essentially
> sympathetic) intellectuals? And why the intense sensitivity to
> criticism? One thought my correspondent had was that when you're
> losing so big in the real world, then you lash out at easy targets -
> because your real enemies are too busy ignoring you. I dunno. But
> it's an interesting question, and an interesting hypothesis for an
> answer. But I'd love to hear more.
>
> Doug
SA: Funny you should mention. Experienced this oh-so-many times, it seems to embody a contradiction: folks (sincerely) dedicated to social analysis, consciousness and social change, especially through inclusion, insisting on authenticity of experience, whatever that is, and spendning a lot of energy on finer points of doctrine. Purely anecdotally, sometimes bitchy is just, um, raunchy dialectic, just a mode of expression that intentionally foregrounds frankness and directness and even humour, I find it engagingly so. But sometimes it seems to be springing from some deeper animus which is more threatening to real discussion, and is more about positioning, or some agenda I'm not quite aware of or tuned into. The "not being heard by the enemies" explanation fits well, but I've also had those conversations in which I suspected that folks were just fine with that state of affairs, or maybe I mean, would be lost without it. There's a no doubt apocryphal story I read once in a Kenneth Burke essay, of all places, on the fortunes of the Communist Party in his neck of the woods in the early 1930s, which went something like, applications for memberships swelled in the post 1929 years, presumably with disaffected and sympathetic people who were formerly stockholders whose margins were called in, or similar set of newcomers to the fold. The potential expansion set off an internal debate one of the pivots of which was the authenticity of the applicant, dilution of the vanguard, out and out territoriality, although who knows what else might have been at issue. I never looked up party membership stats or annual meeting minutes to check it out, and I forget what point Burke was illustrating, but it stuck with me as a something of a truism in the politics of inclusion.
Just as a thought experiment, contrast laboralistas to some evangelistas, which appear to be having a lot more success organizing people, for better or for worse.