[WS:] I actually know a bit about CISPES, I was a part of it. It was fun, and a good cause too. Good tactics, but bad strategy. It appealed to college kids, but alienated middle and working class. And that is all that matters.
World history is full of heroic figures making a dramatic stand and losing. They make good literary heroes but otherwise they are not of much use, if their sacrifice fails to mobilize large segments of the population for the cause.
So let me repeat - all that imperialist blah blah blah in the US went to nothing , as the empire would have lost anyway, but it made the US left irrelevant for the US working and middle class.
Wojtek
On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Joanna wrote:
>
> Wojtek writes.... "As the left became more academic, it lost its taste for
> simplistic anecdotes and engaged in post modern gobbledygook (err.. "textual
> analysis and deconstruction" ) or straightforward neo-liberalism (esp. in
> Europe) ceding the ground to right wing demagogues. I think that it has a
> lot to do with material condition of the production of ideas - especially a
> growing cultural divide between the masses and the increasingly rarefied
> nature of academic discourse. Simplistic anecdotes did not win tenures and
> research grants."
>
> Cbc: If one asked Wojtek why the Marines on Wake Island at the beginning of
> the war didn't do better, he would pompously deliver a lecture on recent
> events at Johns Hopkins and present that as an explanation of why the stupid
> marines on Wake Island lost the battle after 21 days. He is utterly
> ignorant, he doesn't know a fucking thing, about what leftists have been
> doing for the last 40 years. He knows nothing of CISPES, he knows nothing of
> the anti-Apartheid movement in the U.S., which contributed signiificanly to
> its final overtharow. He knows nothing of Witness for Peace. He knows
> nothing of Solidarity, LRS, Committees of Crorrespondence, the Palesti ian
> support movement, the innlumeralbe struggles for a living wage ordinance,
> the Farah strike and the support for that, the Hormel strike, the attempts
> to build a Labor Party, the annual Scholars & Activists forums Carl Davidson
> sponsored in Chicago for a number of years, of the two Rainbow campaigns of
> Jackson, of the Peace & Freedom Party in California, of the Students for a
> Free Palestine organization which got Normal Illinois listed as a hotbed of
> anti-semitism by some Zionist organization; he knows nothing of the
> struggles of campus workers (janitors etc) which were strongly supported by
> - guess who: those post-modernists he blames for everything; he knows
> nothing of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and their struggles; he
> knows nothing of Labor Noites and the many struggles reported on there. In
> fact he knows nothing at all about the subject of left activity in the U.S.
> during the last 40 years, and hence all he can do is spout endlesds bullshit
> based on his own non-existent experience in left organizing.
>
> Many, even most, of these struggles were losing struggles. But some asshole
> who would blame the Marines on Wake Island for losing doesn't need to know
> anything more about WW2 than Wojtek knows about left activity in the U.S.
>
> It is really incredible that a allegedly educated intellectual such as
> Wojtek is so willing to enunciate pompous nonsense aboaut subjects of which
> he is utterly ignorant.
>
> Carrol
>
> I have a friend with a Ph.D. in Physics, who minored in economics as an
> undergraduate. He has an IQ of 170. He was arguing the other day (after
> reading most of the first volume of Capital) that I was a capitalist because
> I had some savings (capital). He also argues that anybody who has a 401K is
> a capitalist....
>
> It's not just the uneducated masses.
>
> TSigh,
>
> Joanna
>
>
>
>
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