My initial post was simply in reply to your observation about "demanding the impossible" ...which reminded me about Savio's comments about why the people he was fighting for felt that the issues had to be resolved "now" and why they rejected a slow, reformist, business as usual approach. And all I said and all that Mario said was that this urgency had something to do with the experience of growing up under the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation. In saying this, he was NOT trivializing the struggles of the 60's, he was just commenting on one aspect of that struggle.
This was a man whose entire life was defined by that struggle, who was admittedly one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation....who wound up in jail, in a mental hospital, and finally teaching at Sonoma State as a reward for his pains.
This tiff is especially distasteful since you know that we agree on the struggles of the 60's. But if your dick gets harder at the thought that you are a real Marxist and I am not....hey, whatever does it for you.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 8:04:44 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] NONSENSE RE THE '60S - was A Note on an old slogan
"It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists." Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class
This points in several directions; here I'm interested in its relevance to the early stages of the 1960s -- Say 1954 to 1963. The NAACP was the initiating force in this period, and its demands were well within American orthodoxy: they demanded simple justice, and the violent response to those demands in the South revealed to the whole nation what Blacks had always known. This generated strong revulsion -- moral outrage-- among a number of northerners (including, I think, the wife of the Governor of Massachusetts -- though that may have been later). Some of these northerners (including but not limited to students) joined in the Freedom Rides of 1961. Participation in collective action worked its quite common miracles, and the whites returned to their campuses determined to build solidarity with the just, the morally righteous struggle in the South. A fuse had been lit.
It was moral outrage in the first place, and not just in young people, that powered the early struggles of the '60s. Specific political issues were confronted. And from the beginning the media tried to trivialize this by locating it in a generation rather than in political issues. Savio's hauling in of a "generation" was simply a surrender to the lies in the mass media.
Carrol
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