On Nov 9, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
What strange times we live in. Pro-market Tea Partiers are intent on destroying capitalism, and socialists can only offer technocratic solutions for saving it. Bizarro world.
What's your idea for the eurocrisis? - Doug
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I don't have time right now to develop what follows, but I'll toss it out for the hell of it. It is probably also, as it stands, incoherent. But see it as a rough attempt to think out what we should be thinking about.
Leftists, as leftists, have no business having any opions on the eruocrisis. I'm glad some leftists, nevertheless, are thinking about it, because it keeps thought reasonably fluid if some of us know what the hell is going on from day to day.
But given this, the intellectual task of leftists today is to develop as fully as possible ideas of how we can prepare a context for struggles in the future. There are no struggles now. We can do nothng now. And as Eric implies, there is something grotesque in our offering ideas to save capitalism.
There is no left now, and leftists can do nothing whatever to have an impact on current state policy. Nor can we will a left into existence; when it does arise, it will arise partly because of our thought and of our (futile) efforts to bring a left into existence. That is why we need so much thought abut what we can do now that will make a difference for other leftists when sometime in the future they are bringing a left, a counter-hegemonic power - into existence. This means that all of us tryng to think must ALSO be involved in local efforts to carry out this sor that left goal. (Anti-war work is the most obvious, but there are many others.) Our 'theorizing,' that is must be drenched with our experience (continuing experience) of how fucking hard it is to (a) get people to come to a local action and (b) get some of those people to come to the next group meeting to share the thinking of what is to be done next. Thkeorizing not drenched with that practice is empty.
What we do now makes a temedous difference, but there is no way that we can know what that difference is. (Rosa Parks certainly did not forsee the Free Speech Movement or the Watts rebellion or SDS or the Panthers, but without the practice of her and the Montgomery NAACP none of these things could have happened. We are in the pre-Rosa Parks period so to speak, but like so many in the '50s we have to keep on doing thought-out things not knowing whether it will make a difference in the future but knowing that nothing else will.
And having some of us worrying about the Eruos, een being so foolish as to propose things to do with that crisis, seems in someway connected to our needs, een though it is foolish for leftists to think that their having an idea on the eurocrisis (whatever that is) makes any difference in the world now.
Carrol
On Nov 9, 2010, at 9:58 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
What strange times we live in. Pro-market Tea Partiers are intent on destroying capitalism, and socialists can only offer technocratic solutions for saving it. Bizarro world.
What's your idea for the eurocrisis?
Doug