[lbo-talk] A good essay on Christopher Hitchens

[ravi]

On Apr 18, 2009, at 10:45 AM, SA wrote:
>
> They seem to be based on a core of grad students of Moishe Postone  
> at Chicago who say their touchstones are Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg,  
> Trotsky and Adorno. Their project is based on the slogan "The Left  
> is dead, long live the Left" and they seem to have a particular  
> animus against the 60's New Left and against Third Worldism. As for  
> their own politics - the poor dears, when you strip away all their  
> benighted grad school verbiage, it apparently boils down to the idea  
> that socialism means people should work less and have a guaranteed  
> income. Which is fine, but they mostly seem devoted to finding ever  
> more grandiose and opaque ways of saying that, without making much  
> effort to elucidate how it might actually be brought about.

Your post above (and another recent one about Chavez presenting Obama  
with a book) inspired me to bring the below response (which I had  
abandoned) from my Drafts folder. FWIW:

Hugo Chavez speaks of a "new socialism" and holds up a book by Noam  
Chomsky.

All IMHO: the 20th century struggles were dominated by anti-colonial  
movements and the broader frameworks in which they were grounded (e.g:  
Gandhi, Raja Ram Mohan Roy), and the civil rights struggles of  
particular groups. They were, it seems to me, influenced and informed  
by a range of moral/humanist traditions and practices with a history  
as old as human existence. Their counterparts (in the West) are some  
of the very individuals listed as those Hitchens takes up cudgels with  
for standing in opposition to his beloved internationalism: Chomsky,  
Zinn, others. (interestingly not former comrades from this  
internationalism).

I am reaching a point where I wonder if Hitchens and his detractors  
(as outlined in this piece, with his detractors being identified as  
"the Left") are irrelevant to the future. They own the terminology and  
to some extent the [verbal] debate, but I have reason to hope that  
third world movements hold the answers of the future.

	--ravi

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