Basically, what's slaying me here is that, amid all these claims that nothing will ever change, no radical change can ever happen in the current environment because of this ill or that (e.g., Dean's "sins") the fact is, if you look at the movements of the 60s, movements which so many will uphold as amodel, these issues and problems, these "sins" were evident in 1961 already. Clearly, then, these sins aren't the product of anything that changed recently, they aren't necessarily even a product of a "airy fairy" concepts of anti-racism since, the funny thing is, already, by 1962, there wwere already debates over what to fight when fighting racism at a time when it all seemed so obvious and clear what the enemy was. These "sins" weren't absent then (I think of all the books I read about alienated "organization man" and the atomization and hyperindividualism alonside crazed conformity during the 50s) and all of a sudden present now, ostensibly making it difficult for OWS to turn into anyhthing of import.
These may be what Carrol has been trying to say, I don't know. But when he keeps saying "we can't know" and "there are spurts of growth and period of quiescence" (to paraphrase) this makes sense looking very specifically at SNCC (and now) SDS.
BTW, weren't the early new lefties red diaper babies, contra Bhaskar's claim that student movements grew out of the peculiarities of dorm life? I mean, reading some of the bios, the people who sparked off new left movements were connected to reds and/or union labor.
> It does NOT men that people are wonderful or that they are even
> "trustworthy," whatever that might mean. In fact, as I will attempt to
> show, it means first of all that it is wrong to ever make either
> positive or negative judgments of the people, such judgments being
> politically paralyzing.
>
> But here is the point.
>
> IF you believe that capitalism must be overthrown, then you have to
> confront the fundamental fact that this is going to be done by the
> people or not done at all. Hence the character or the morals or the
> intelligence of the people are really stupid topics of study. No
> conclusions reached by such study can be other than apolitical, a
> repudiation of anticapitalist struggle, which must be grounded on the
> assumption that at some point "the people" will join the the struggle.
> That has to be the foundation of all anticapitalist strategy. If it
> turns out that the people fail to live up to the strategy, then that
> is
> it. Luxemburg's barbarism continues. But that is irrelevant, and
> worrying about it is a really silly attempt to use a non-existent
> crystal balll. Prediction on this is impossible and stupid to try. If
> we
> lose, we lose. Other species have died out. Join the crowd. A strategy
> grounded in "Trust the People" very probably won't work. A strategy
> NOT
> so ground es absolutely certain not to work.
>
> Carrol
>
> Carrol
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>
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