[lbo-talk] Enthusiasm

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Sat Oct 30 06:28:10 PDT 2010


On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:


> Even had Fletcher neglected to make that point, he is - and has been for a long time - far more politically active, I am sure, than Beck and other cyber critics.

Of course, you have little knowledge of what people do away from their computer screens. But it does beg the question: is it necessarily a good thing to be politically active if your activities' goals are to cinch tighter the knot that binds the working class to the Democratic party?

More generally, it might be worthwhile to question this soft-left belief in the automatic functioning of democracy that Marv adheres to: if the left is active and agitating, then the rulers will bend to our will. Or, in the negative way it gets phrased today, the reason there is no radical action from governments today is because there is no internal political mobilization and consciousness and no external pressure. Besides making politics sound just like my lameass high school civics teacher used to, and besides taking a naturalized and unified view of who "the people" are and what they desire, the claim is empirically wrong, no? Yeah, 30s agitation led to accommodation, but late 60s and early 70s agitation led to just the opposite: reaction and repression. But similar conditions existed in both cases: internal political upheaval and outside socialist threats. Working-class action did not lead to beneficial state programs; there is no straight line from political activity to state response. Predicting capital's response is a fool's game.



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