[WS:] Very true. I would also like to add, that the third world trope that dominated much of the left wing discourse in this country throughout the last half of the 20th century was one of the main reasons why it lost its popularity.
There were two variants of that trope - the Che Guevara/Jane Fonda variant and the Dalai Lama variant. Both were left versions of the "noble savage" myth that juxtaposed the middle class society against a romanticized myth of a primitive man living a simple life away from civilization. The Che Guevara/Jane Fonda trope consisted of knee jerk support of any third world movement waving a red flag against US imperialism. The Dalai Lama trope consisted of knee jerk support of any movement creating the aura of spirituality against non-US imperialism.
Both tropes dominated the left discourse during the time when "outsouring" became the force perceived to erode the working and middle class in the US. Bad timing, indeed, because it sent the message that the left cares more about foreign "pet minorities" than people at home.
Do not get me wrong - I am not arguing that third world struggles were unimportant, albeit many of them were quite nasty and ill suited for any support (cf. Mao's cultural revolution or Pol Pot's rule in Cambodia.) All I am saying is that the knee jerk focus on "heroic struggles" abroad while remaining oblivious to eroding everyday "bread and butter" conditions at home was a bad strategic move that might have earned the left a "cool image" in the academia but lost any appeal to the working and middle classes.
Wojtek
On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 3:55 AM, Somebody Somebody
<philos_case at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Mike: That reality includes the existence of a burgeon of the advanced socio-economic system. People need to know and compare the new and the old systems before being convinced that the new is better than the old. Right-wing fiascoes and deceptive deus ex machina are not enough to pull people to the left side. A cooperative or other semi-socialistic business organizations can be more cogent than simple political and ideological inculcation. A picture is worthy of one thousand of words.Will the unionists do something like this?
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> Somebody: I agree. The psychological effect that the lack of a left-wing economic alternative has is so powerful that it becomes a material force. It's obvious that the perceived failure of socialism, the notion that's been tried already, is behind the weakness or even near absence of the left in East and South-east Asian countries, for example. On the other hand, the idealistic draw of Cuba and the survival of it's system after the Special Period helped keep left-wing ideology alive in Latin America. Conversely, there's been a vigorous class struggle in Egypt in recent years, but it's led to very little politically, with the opposition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and liberal Kifaya. If there was a left-wing alternative in the Arab world, then the situation there would be very different.
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> The scholarly literature on comparative capitalist systems is quite extensive these days. Yet the left seems strangely uninterested in comparative socialist models. I'm not an economist, but it seems like a more thorough study of what works and what doesn't work could inform attempts to create new models today. The left can't afford more failures. For one thing, if the Bolivarian revolution stagnates and Cuba reforms it's way into post-communism, we can kiss the Latin American left goodbye.
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