[lbo-talk] Yeats and "The American Left"

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 15:40:41 PDT 2010


It's kind of reassuring to pop back onto this list and see Carroll still making the same points. :)

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
> Mark Bennett wrote:
> >
> >
> > 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.
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