The following piece by WSPUS member, Ron Elbert, was presented as a paper to the 2006 SPGB Summer School, 'What's Left of the Left?':
They’ll Be Back: Left Bashing and the "New" Right
It's got endnotes and everything. I'm too good to you sometimes.
The following piece by WSPUS member, Ron Elbert, was presented as a paper to the 2006 SPGB Summer School, 'What's Left of the Left?':
They’ll Be Back: Left Bashing and the "New" Right
It's got endnotes and everything. I'm too good to you sometimes.
2 comments:
Thanks for that Darren. I was at the Summer School but had to leave just before that bit - either that or I dozed off and missed it!
Robert
That paper says a lot of obvious things...but that's not a criticism.
It's obvious enough that socialism-as-we-know-it exists within the same conditions as capitalism. That's Dialectics 101. And obviously we're living in a the cultural hegemony of capitalism. No surprises for anyone with a basic grounding in political thought. And globalisation (specifically, 3rd world exploitation) is the inevitable result of capitalism's impersonal drive towards a low cost base.
I often tease my American friends by telling them that they need a good dose of Marxism - Das Kapital instead of No Logo. They press all the right 'issues' buttons, their hearts are in the right place - but there's little thought given to structural, ie economic, ie class issues.
Yes, is partly down to the post-McCarthy demonisation of socialism, and partly it's down to the sort of divide and rule the paper talks about. But I feel there's another issue here.
I like the subtitle to Studs Terkel's book, 'Race: How Blacks and Whites Feel About The American Obsession' (my italics). Obviously, in America class is color-coded. Does this perhaps obscure the structural issues and lead the well-meaning liberal left into identity politics and other 'issues'.?
(Notwithstanding the CP-USA's early involvement in the vanguard of the civil rights movement; The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Bayard Rustin; etc. etc.)
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