[lbo-talk] In the American Grain

Voyou voyou1 at gmail.com
Sun Apr 18 01:24:31 PDT 2010


On Sun, 2010-04-18 at 03:57 -0400, SA wrote:
> Maybe I should have spelled it out. The phrase "personal responsibility,
> hard work, and self improvement" came from a pro-Tea Party editorial.
> It's standard right-wing rhetoric. It resonates with many people. When

It's this "resonating" itself which is the problem, it seems to me, not the inability of the left to cast our positions in ways which tap in to this resonance. Rather than attempt to cast left-wing positions in ways which resonate with "personal responsibility, hard work, and self improvement," I'd rather see us resume the left wing tradition of attempting to persuade people that "personal responsibility, hard work, and self improvement" are indeed right-wing values which they ought to reject. I don't think anyone's put it better than Lafargue in 1883:

"The proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, the class which in freeing itself will free humanity from servile toil and will make of the human animal a free being, – the proletariat, betraying its instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm

--

"I had never understood why Socialism need imply the arraying

of oneself in a green curtain or a terra-cotta rug, or the

cultivation of flowing locks, blue shirts, and a peculiar cut

of clothes." -- Isabel Meredith, _A Girl Among the Anarchists_ Voyou Desoeuvre <http://blog.voyou.org/>



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