[lbo-talk] A Note on the Middle 75%

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Fri Nov 18 20:12:51 PST 2011


On Fri, 18 Nov 2011 22:39:45 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> This is what I don't get. Mass imprisonment is
> one of the horrors of U.S. life. But elimination?
> Really? In this world, before the afterlife?

Carrol kindly credited me with a distinction between politics and policy, which I don't think I actually made as crisply as he suggests. Still, it's a good distinction. People who have a fundamentally insurrectionary program have no business thinking about policy. And one might suggest the contrapositive: people greatly concerned with policy will find it difficult to be very insurrectionary.

Just yesterday I had a long lunch with an old policy-wonk friend of mine, who's been heroically pursuing, for the last few years, a thankless and frustrating inside-baseball strategy on some good constructive progressive policy initiatives that I'm sure everybody on this list would approve of, as I do. He was a bit down at the mouth about the fact that the Occupations had taken the wind out of his sails. Oh, he was supportive and exhilarated, too, just as I am; but there was an undercurrent of regret that the Occupations might have actually made it harder for him to do what he was trying to do. We agreed that yes, the Occupiers are not interesting in manipulating the levers of a machine that they'd rather smash.

-- --

Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com

Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false.



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