Mark Bennett wrote:
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> That said, I don't see that "The Second Coming" is a reactionary poem.
> Perhaps Yeats intended it to be, but it has drifted away from any authorial
> intent and is a universal lament now, appropriate to many situations.
I doubt that anything is "universal," but it is true that many poems of Yeats lend themselves to shifting contexts. But in tgeneral, literature offers no social or ontological truth, which must be brought to it by the reader. Yeats's poems, for reasons I don't quite understand, particularly lend themselves to this process. (Though it's hard to twist "England may yet keep faith" into any rational perspective.)
> Anyone pondering the enervation of the American Left when compared with the
> fury of the Tea Baggers would easily conclude that "the best lack all
> conviction, while the worst/are filled with passionate intensity."
For "The Left" to be "enervated" it has to exist, and no coherent left exists in the U.S. today. Recall that Lenin attacked NOT spontaneity but the WORSHIP of spontaneity. He recognized that there wasn't much for any left to work on lacking spontaneous popular reactions of some sort. There are 10s of thousands, perhaps 100s of thousands or millions out there who would respond positively to _visible_ mass movement. And there are thousands of quite un-enervated individual leftists out there putting forth quite varoed calls: anti-war, immigrant solidarity, single payer, living wage, opposition to No Child Left Behind to name a few. There is _some_ appeal to each of these, and the activists are able to attract small numbers of (more or less passive) supporters to their forums, demonstrations, and so forth., But all this does not and cannot create a Left that can be labelled as either enervated or un-enervated.
I t is not the [non-existing] left that is enervated: it is the potenial _constituency_ of a potential left that has been pacified/ / made passive, by the strength over the last several decades of capitalist culture and ideology. One of the most vigorous and intelligent activists locally is the leader of the local Move-On, and she really cannot imagien, conceive of, actual power outside the election of better people. That's not enervation, and its not stupidity on her part: it is very real capitalist power! And we, the scattered individual leftists of this period, are faced with only _one_ central question to guide our thought and practice: What can leftists, at a time when nothing can be done, do to make a contribution to those who will come forward at a time when something can be done? Sights and tears about an enervated left do not help.
And note: That nothing can be done is due _not_ to our weakness but to the strength of our enemy. But "he" and we both live in a world dominated by unpredictable contingencies, so we can and must assume that the time, the issue, will arise in which our work will make sense.
Carrol
P.S. Yeats had a cyclical view of history: "And those that build them again are gay." If one accepts the premise of vulgar Marxism, that the worth of Marx's work is prove that capitalism is exploitative, and that assumes that it is exploitation against which people will struggle, then capitalism is just another point in the cycle, not the unique social aberration that Marx, the real Marx, saw, and Yeats is right.