Is Marv wrong that it is a remarkable (interesting, as you put it) thing - and one generally associated with either youth or a relatively comfortable personal situation - to respond to a discussion focused on the suffering of the long-term unemployed living through the equivalent of structural adjustment with "enjoy the struggle, win or lose"? I can tell you, my personal experience fits with the one my students report - the camaraderie, sociality and mutuality of struggle is thoroughly enjoyable but it is invariably initiated out of fear or pain and losing in a situation that starts with fear and pain exacerbates that pain, intensifies the fear, and rarely is anywhere near countered by the great collaboration and friends one builds in struggle… and this is especially the case when the struggle is over the conditions and quality of life as it is for many in Greece and rural Northern Michigan.
Is it also wrong to be frustrated with Carrol's ongoing penchant for telling everyone on the list what a true radical does and ought to do or support… (hell, NEVER argue for the kids, STAND FOR THE TEACHERS! right or wrong, win or lose! - as if that was a winning strategy) which almost always presents as a scolding to anyone who doesn't hew to his line. Marv's point is that this kind of revolutionary purity of the true radical will not survive the test of working class organizing against structural adjustment.
Many of Carrol's posts implicitly collapse and attack the personal insightfulness and practical politics of people he sees as making statements that aren't true to the true line of thought and practice… There's almost never a sense that real organizing goes up against real foes in really constrained circumstances where, more often than not, the struggle is as much to carve out the space for the next struggle as it is to attempt to build the next, larger struggle. Does anyone really think that arguments made on this list about the consequences for kids - given the fairly stable structure of schooling and the predicates of gainful employment - of budget cuts to school systems are made in a manner which abstracts them from the meaning of these same cuts and restructurings for teachers, for unions, for the left, etc.? Carrol's readings of peoples' posts are very very often not generous and rarely, if ever, include the possibility that the argument he's about to make fills in gaps that the person he's responding to agrees with but simply didn't include.
Marv also just noted that he's heard that Carrol, in person, is gracious and very different than his list persons. That is certainly my experience and it is one that makes his list persona sometimes easier and sometimes harder to take.
-- Alan P. Rudy Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
On Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2 May 2012 18:04:44 -0400
> Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com (mailto:marvgand at gmail.com)> wrote:
>
> > But he's also ridiculously self-deluding, as many armchair radicals
> > are, and it's his revolutionary pretensions which underlie his
> > Puritanical pursuit of the many "soft-on-the-DP reformists" he
> > perceives in his milieu.
> >
>
>
> Ridiculous? Self-deluding? Armchair radical? Pretension?
> Puritanical? All this in one sentence, and said of a person,
> not an idea or a position or a line of reasoning.
>
> Interesting to see the 'DP' dragged by the heels into
> this conversation. (Of course it ought to be dragged
> on a hurdle to Tyburn, and there drawn and quartered.)
>
> --
> --
>
> Michael J. Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net (mailto:mjs at smithbowen.net)
>
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
> http://cars-suck.org
>
> When one does a foolish thing, it is right to
> do it handsomely.
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>