>
>
>
> ^^^^^
>
> In this context, the `activism'
> appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization
> and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise
> that government is inefficient and stifles `creativity;' 2) values
> individual voluntarism and `entrepreneurship' over collective action
> (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's `Brave Young Activist'
> award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth
> carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides
> enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for
> precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy
> Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and 4) reduces the scope of
> direct action politics to the `all tactics, no strategy,'
> fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and
> Liza Featherstone have described as `activistism' and whose potential
> for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply
> demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism
> to the right, by rejecting its `confrontationalism,' which severs its
> rhetoric of `empowerment' from political action and contestation
> entirely and merges the notion into the pop-psychological, big box
> Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of
> self-improvement/personal responsibility.
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Is Reed proposing the formation of a Leninist Party ? Rainbow
> Coalition ? Anti-monopoly coalition ? All-Peoples' Front ? or what is he
> proposing _is_ to be done ?
that was my question, as well.
it might be worth noting that he tells us more than once that what he is NOT saying is that you ought NOT to vote for obama.
maybe what he's mostly afraid of is just that so many progressives (maybe like vanden heuvel?) think that voting for obama will get us more than it will?
beyond that, we seem in the same quandary we have always been in.
afaict.
j