Alan Rudy:
My reaction to this last, very good, sentence was: "Huh, I wonder if the DP and union leadership ever even consider mobilizing their members/base or if the social movement/grassroots politics model is beyond their ken..." My sense, sadly, is that party, union, and DC-based "movement" organizations see themselves as leaders who direct adherents/followers/memberships not as the temporary heads of democratic organizations... and, worst of all, this perspective is shared by most adherents/followers.memberships. I know, quite well, that there have always been tendencies in this direction and that the 1955-1975 period of increased bottom-up driven activity is the anomaly in the second half of the 20th C... but it's still depressing.
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail. com> wrote[clip] ------
This is a good statement, with which I agree. But I really don't think it should be depressing. Again, I quote Yeats (from memory):
All things fall and are built again, And those who rebuildthe again are gay.
If a crushing hegemony of capital s the norm, and if movements that challenge that hegemony are rare and soon (in the past) lose their momentum and have (at some point) to be built again, I think those who hope to rebuild them (or contribute in some way to that rebuilding) should take Yeats to heart.
Carrol