how is this the realm of ideas?
it's real political activity these folks are engaged in and it shapes their consciousness, the choices they think they have in the world, and the notions about what it's possible to do to change it.
At 05:50 PM 5/24/2013, Marv Gandall wrote:
>Below is a rather overwrought illustration in today's Counterpunch of the
>idealist pessimism of the US left which I alluded to in my previous post.
>The cry of despair by the magazine's editor, Jeffrey St. Clair attributes
>the "somnambulism" of the masses to their "betrayal" by cowardly and
>wrongheaded liberals and DP-oriented leftists - a favourite theme of
>Carrol's and others on this and related lists. Liberal ideological
>hegemony is treated as the cause rather than the consequence of the
>decline of the organized industrial working class and of the mass
>international socialist movement which developed within it. There is no
>reference to the underlying material conditions which have ultimately been
>responsible for the decline, in particular the technological advances and
>global spread of capitalism which gave the system a new lease on life in
>the latter half of the twentieth century. Capitalism's unexpected
>resilience is in conflict with Marxist orthodoxy, which had been
>forecasting the system's imminent demise for more than 150 years. But
>since it is perceptibly easier to change ideas than material conditions,
>and ideas are the stock in trade of today's campus-based left, the
>development of a strong idealist streak in contemporary Marxism is not
>surprising.
>
>Counterpunch
>WEEKEND EDITION MAY 24-26, 2013
>Generation Leftover
>The Silent Death of the American Left
>by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
>
>Is there a Left in America today?
>
>There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory
>and critique. But is there a Left movement?
>
>Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic
>force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a
>counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its
>political managers?
>
>We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly
>Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its
>inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military
>conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront
>the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension
>raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?
>
>It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama,
>that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very
>moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at
>Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a
>long-moribund resistance movement back to life.
>
>Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into
>practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic
>civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and
>hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a
>parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the
>weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy
>of the man they put their trust in.
>
>This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of
>leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make
>even Nietzsche shudder.
>
>We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of
>mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the
>radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing
>essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.
>
>Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing
>war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya.
>Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.
>
>Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething
>disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No
>systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes.
>No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies
>involved in drone technology.
>
>Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern
>austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once
>again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current
>political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage
>bottom line math of neoliberalism.
>
>Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in
>the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in
>rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious
>pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.
>
>What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the
>sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces.
>
>The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is
>simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of
>the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever Obama mentions the
>plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he
>did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide
>blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining
>about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of
>white corporate culture.
>
>The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the
>economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the
>politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and
>sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare.
>Where's the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The
>sit-ins in congressional offices?
>
>A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the Obama administration's infamous
>memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen
>that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph,
>a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon's illegal bombing of
>Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama's killer drone
>strikes. Let's recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several
>high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including
>CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at
>Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of
>emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard
>troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding
>nine. The war had come home.
>
>Where are those protests today?
>
>The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes.
>Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across
>North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great
>Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table
>is plummeting in the world's greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in
>dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct.
>Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky
>Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast,
>wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to
>December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance
>are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait
>accompli.
>
>Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant
>to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama's mordant rhetoric.
>They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully
>defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal
>only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional
>glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left
>circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by
>Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.
>
>How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted
>economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas
>corpus, the assassination of American citizens
>
>One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the
>dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a
>nation of somnambulists.
>
>We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.
>
>Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book
>(with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion
>(AK Press).
>
>This is a condensed version of a talk delivered at the University of Oregon.
>
>http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/24/the-silent-death-of-the-american-left/
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