[lbo-talk] LBO Tiff goes Viral on Counterpunch

Marv Gandall marvgand2 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 06:43:51 PDT 2013


On 2013-05-31, at 4:46 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:


> Tiff ramifies.
>
> <http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/the-shame-merchants/>

Pretty sad stuff. The article's only significance is to demonstrate again there is no way the small sects and internet leftists could coexist in a broad anticapitalist party - the ostensible ideal between rounds in the circular firing squad - at least for so long as they don't have any responsibility for leading mass movements, and even then…

Unbelievably, this latest blowup has been about Angelina Jolie's mastectomy.

Some examples of the the witless sarcasm and vitriol which increasingly substitute for political analysis on the American left:

* * *

“Doug Henwood just wrote that we were Edward Abbeyists.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“He didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“What does he know? He hasn’t left his apartment in the last 12 years.”

* * *

...the Socialist Worker types don’t do irony. They actually identify with Angelina Jolie, the woman who shops for babies in the developing world, the woman who backs interventionist wars, the woman whose films glorify the CIA and the looting of indigenous cultures. They identify with Angelina Jolie because they share her elite position in American society. They are rich and well-educated at elite schools, such as Brown and Northwestern. Many of them live off of trust funds. Most rarely converse with poor people and have only a vague, theoretical notion of what life is like when you are indigent, black and have just been diagnosed with breast cancer (if you can even afford to get diagnosed)...The dirty secret about the brain trust that oversees the Socialist Worker is that few of them are socialists and even fewer are working class people or even identify with them. And how could you, really, when you’re the heiress to a cruise-liner fortune or you issue your editorial communiqués from a mansion in one of the elite neighborhoods of upscale Evanston, Illinois...These days the finicky ISO has more in common with Scientology than any real revolutionary movement. It recruits heavily on American campuses, targeting young idealists, many of them psychologically vulnerable and politically naïve. They sedulously indoctrinate them into a stale and anachronistic ideology…etc. etc.

* * *

Whatever you may think of the ISO or Trotskyism - or the CP or the anarchists or the Socialist Party, for that matter - this reeks of ignorant red-baiting. The only irony in the piece is the editors of Counterpunch, not a horny-handed proletarian among them, lashing out at comfortable middle-class leftists whose audience resides primarily on or around university campuses.



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