I suppose what you are detecting is fear. After all, what she argued earlier this summer, and was (I think) arguing recently when she was in Europe, is that the political quiescence in this country is due to three things that have "distorted" the left. Though she actually claims that there is "no left" because of these three things:
1. we have no democracy in the u.s.. so we can't use democracy to get what we want.
2. anarchism can't fight the market. she also thinks that anarchism and self-organizng multitudes (gesturing at hardt and negri) are popular among young people because they swallowed the neoliberal attack on the state and have come to believe that the state can only ever be the problem
3. liberalism by which she means something called participationism where people want to speak their minds, to express their individuality, and to chafe against discipline. She thinks that this kind of politics militates against collectivism. (Interestingly, and this is where the failure to actually understand what you are critiquing becomes a problem, there are schisms among DAN activists over the issue of "California" style and expressive individualism. I suppose, instead of claiming it as your unique insight, it's troublesome to actually have to admit that those you are criticizing came up with it first? lol)
How we got from the New Left to No Left (her words) is the loss of communism as an organizing "horizon". She maintains that there is no collective vision. This is why she see's bourgeois individualism in the insistence on leaderlessness and speaking only for oneself, no OWS. There are practical tactical reasons for this: so the enemy can't cut of the head, can't bring down individuals, and to maintain trust and solidarity.
If it turns out that a struggle is emerging anyway, then it throws into question the thesis that there's no chance for even a glimmer of political mobilization in the absence of this communist horizon. You certainly have no interest in seeing it succeed and a quick death makes for an excellent corpse to autopsy in your next book. At the very least, a good thing to do is continue to keep bringing your answers around to the occupations and stop asking your answers any questions at all.
What happened at the Jacobin debate is that everyone brought their answers to the panel and forgot to ask their answers questions - words that Doug liked to live by as he was once fond of quoting Catherine Driscoll saying that she liked to keep asking questions of her answers.
There is this interesting insistence none of it can work in the claim that it fizzles out. Wisconsin dies. Spain dies. 1999 dies. Just a bunch of disparate actions. But reading Polletta in Freedom is an Endless Meeting, there's this fascinating path from the New Left to what she calls Direct Action (which Polletta sees and the people involved see as distinct from anarchism - and this is why Graeber takes the positions he takes, as per Michael Pollack)
<> Somebody named Jodi Dean -- same one? -- has a blog containing <> a remarkably stupid and badly-phrased entry about the Great <> Drum Crisis. The links go to Gothamist and a Community Board <> brochure-ware web page. <> <> http://bit.ly/uNE27g <> <> There's much to enjoy here, but my favorite is the lede: <> <>> Tonight's meeting of the full Community Board 1 will test the <>> evolving compromise between neighborhood representatives and the <>> Occupy Wall Street protesters. <> <> This brought tears of mirth to my eyes. The idea that a Community <> Board meeting might 'test' anything, apart from the Sitzfleisch <> of the attendees -- and then, too, the idea that a NYC Community <> Board consists of 'neighborhood representatives'. Community Boards, <> as everybody who lives here knows, are evenly divided between <> landlords and lunatics with too much time on their hands. <> <> -- <> -- <> <> Michael J. Smith <> mjs at smithbowen.net <> <> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org <> http://www.cars-suck.org <> http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com <> <> "I think the American people want a solemn ass <> as a President, and I think I will go along with them." <> <> -- Barack Obama <> <> (Okay, okay, it was really Calvin Coolidge.) <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
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