but the isolationism and pastoralism are real strands in a lot of 'anti-globalist' thinking. It's quite popular in the International Forum on Globalization orbit, for example."
And Bob Morris: "Tom Wolfe once said "
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Cbc: Doug is hunting goldfish in the bathtub with a BAR. See Engels's list, someplacein Anti-Duhring of all the "ists" and "ians" that got in his hair in the workers' movement. But if I remember correctly, his tone, unlike Doug's, was fairly genial, sort of in the spirit of the '50s slang, "That's the way the cooky crumbles." And when a left begins to take shape in the U.S. it will OF COURSE be plagued by all sorts, many far worse than "isolationists and pastoralists" - a goodly scattering of FBI agents, miscellaneous provocateurs, Unitarians, single-taxers, moralizere, endless anti-thises and anti-thates: you name it, they will be there. And it's _mostly_ a waste of time and energy trying to "refute" them. One concentrates on building not on keeping pure.
Without many of the types that cause Doug to draw in his skirts, the November Moratorium in 1969 might not have frightened Nixon so and he'd gone ahead with his plans to drop nukes on the Chinese installations in North Vietnam. Pretty moteley types made up those demos. And as Andie remarked some years ago, in November 1969 they may have helped save the world.
Alan continues: I guess my thought, which has proven pretty difficult to get to the point that i can state it clearly, in response to Doug's comment was that while he's right that isolationist pastoralism resides on the left, its a clearly contradictory leftism and its romanticism and anti-intellectualism has been pretty well obliterated by folks from Marx to Bookchin, Galeano, Haraway and beyond... overstating the case, perhaps, sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just stupid... ====
Cbc: The various rag-tag & bobbletail that accompany all left movements (including anti-intellectualists) are not affected by the arguments of Marx et al - which do serve the important purpose of maintaining the morale of those who kow better. The work has to be endlessly redone every time a movement grows.. But that is just part of work in a movement.
Alan: In response to Bob's follow up, and at the risk of taking the conversation further afield, could we see Leary the progenitor of Hardt and Negri's argument that those within "the multitude" who've given up hope are acting politically and contributing to some sort of structurally inescapable coming collapse? If so, I am sortsa with Kesey. I may have misunderstood Empire and The Multitude but both - while they taught me a good bit - absolutely drove me up a tree.
Cbc: I skipped The Multitude but had similar reactions to Hardt & Negri. Every decade or so some there's another such intellectual bubble one must live with. They are part of the terrain is all. I do like your comparison to Leary. Better than my first comparison of it to _The Greening of America_.
Carrol