One group of left intellectuals petitions another
Students in Britain almost overwhelm the treasury and surround Charles and Camilla's car; meanwhile, a small group of US left intellectuals writes an open letter more or less to itself.
I can't quite get over the bizarre premise of this letter: it's like getting a group of 60 people together to write an open letter to 10 of their friends: "Open Letter to the Rest of the Gang: You Are Missing Out on All the Fun!" I mean, are we really supposed to think that the 58 or so signers are less part of the "Left Establishment" than the nine targets? Sure, a few of the signers are not that famous, but the signers include Cornel West and Noam Chomsky who, last I heard, were at least as well-known and influential as Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, and Bill Fletcher. Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson, Jr. are the only targets on the list who possibly have a broader audience / recognition than the signers.
I suppose what really bothers me is that the power analysis of the open letter is so extraordinarily thin. "We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act." This collection of intellectuals should have been able to produce a better proposal for the political role of intellectuals than this - at least, some analysis of the roles of different layers of intellectuals in relation to mass movements of social groups who are still, in the main, "the led" rather than leading.
The whole enterprise suggests that if one were to evaluate the US left sociologically and top-down, starting with these intellectuals, one would find a left with no strategic grounding, unmoored from any mass base, moreso than at any other point in the last 100 (arguably 160) years. Thankfully, there are other optics available other than that of this echo chamber of "the left establishment."
This inward-looking stance aside, surely there is something to appreciate in this effort: a section of the left intelligentsia, much broader in its politics than Trotskyism or anarchism, calling for mass protest against Obama administration policies. We should embrace that, while recognizing that the pressure to adopt a "fight the right" stance going into 2012 (for such intellectuals and others) will be extremely high. Such a stance is not a priori wrong but we have to remember that the antiwar movement these intellectuals laud stumbled, perhaps, when it failed to stop the war drive before it started, but it really died as a movement (and reverted to being a "cause" or something of the sort) when most people buried their hopes in the Kerry campaign.
I would place more hope right now in two movements (or "arenas," if the term "movement" is too much pressure or too ossifying) which allude the attention of these intellectuals: the student-led anti-austerity movement which still simmers, even if we have not yet seen a worthy sequel to last year, and the immigrant rights movement which persists most strongly around the DREAM act, even if it does not quite resemble the heights of 2006-07. Young leaders (and movement intellectuals in the broad sense) have emerged in these arenas, and the student movement has also generated leaders / organizers who are now involved in various community struggles. Can a broader political expression be fostered expanding from these arenas; and/or can they anchor the formation of a political bloc? We are probably not there, yet, and within each of these arenas there are political problems, opportunities for energies to rise and fall. Yet the dialectic between these arenas and well-established left intellectuals seems more promising than a feedback loop between something called "the left establishment" and itself.
Let's hope that the open letter, for all its flaws, is a harbinger of courage.
In moments like this, it's tempting to indulge in the Europhilic self-loathing that infects much of the US left. I'm usually criticized these days for being far too close to a lilly-livered reformist, but catching up the royals in all of this has my blood boiling with Jacobin zeal: why merely surround their car and break a few windows? Off with their heads!
However, these polemical broadsides should be unpacked.
Developing an internationalist ethos and field of vision is worthwhile, and current developments in Europe are eminently worth following. Some sections of the US left have in the past been accused of an internationalism interested in anything but Europe - though a field of vision focused on Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and China can hardly be considered "global." Other sections of the US left follow dominant political culture in failing to recognize the persistence of anything beyond the borders of the US other than the "threat of the week."
Perhaps a touch of Europhilia is a welcome counterweight to all of this. I certainly don't want to fall into the Europhobia which hit the US shortly after 9-11. I'll have a side of white supremacy with my freedom fries, thank you.
The student movement (or defense of education, or anti-cuts, or anti-austerity movement, or whatever you want to call it - with significant strands that are mainly anti-capitalist) is pan-Euro-North-American in its outlook. Dense moments of activity have pinged from California to Greece to France to Ireland to Portugal to Spain to Italy to Britain. I don't mean to suggest that "California started it all" by putting it first on my list here - a fuller genealogy and exposition of the politics of this new student movement is long overdue.
I think that the student movement in the US has failed to imagine how it might engage in the national-popular political life of the US. Assuredly this is in part because this political life has become alternately rather dreary, frightening, and sometimes seemingly emptied of content. Yet engage we must; as much as student uprisings have been a global phenomenon, they also have only arisen in a series of national and state economic, political, and cultural contexts.
My "self loathing" comment is intended as a goad: we can all too easily lapse into a self-satisfied superiority and a real political quietism when we say things like the following: "Look at [England]; they know how to do it; why isn't that happening here? Must be because Americans are stupid / sheep / suburban / pawns of Fox News / hopelessly trapped in an individualist ethos / etc." The first half of this statement is also a useful goad, but we have to avoid kneejerk anti-Americanism which disengages us from the enacting a politics that could set in motion a trajectory of activity that leads to the changes we seek.
There is a need to catalog and mine the most redeemable traditions in US political culture and see if any bit of them still persists somewhere. I've been thinking a bit lately about Depression-era interdependence as a counterweight to atomistic individualism - one example of this sort of project. Of course, one can only get so far with speculative politics; one has to try them out. And here, I think pragmatism is one of those redeemable traditions, one which has been somewhat misunderstood as a legacy of moderation and compromise.
Finally, I may have lost my head making tongue-in-cheek proposals; I do not mean to suggest that royal decapitation should be a priority for the British student movement. One participant I read was probably right to suggest that Charles and Camilla were just another couple of posh knobs who didn't deserve to be the center of the media storm.
I can't quite get over the bizarre premise of this letter: it's like getting a group of 60 people together to write an open letter to 10 of their friends: "Open Letter to the Rest of the Gang: You Are Missing Out on All the Fun!" I mean, are we really supposed to think that the 58 or so signers are less part of the "Left Establishment" than the nine targets? Sure, a few of the signers are not that famous, but the signers include Cornel West and Noam Chomsky who, last I heard, were at least as well-known and influential as Norman Solomon, Katrina van den Heuvel, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Tom Hayden, and Bill Fletcher. Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson, Jr. are the only targets on the list who possibly have a broader audience / recognition than the signers.
I suppose what really bothers me is that the power analysis of the open letter is so extraordinarily thin. "We are writing to you because you are well-known writers, bloggers and filmmakers with access to a range of old and new media, and you have in your power the capacity to help reignite the movement which brought millions onto the streets in February of 2003 but which has withered ever since. There are many thousands of progressives who follow your work closely and are waiting for a cue from you and others to act." This collection of intellectuals should have been able to produce a better proposal for the political role of intellectuals than this - at least, some analysis of the roles of different layers of intellectuals in relation to mass movements of social groups who are still, in the main, "the led" rather than leading.
The whole enterprise suggests that if one were to evaluate the US left sociologically and top-down, starting with these intellectuals, one would find a left with no strategic grounding, unmoored from any mass base, moreso than at any other point in the last 100 (arguably 160) years. Thankfully, there are other optics available other than that of this echo chamber of "the left establishment."
This inward-looking stance aside, surely there is something to appreciate in this effort: a section of the left intelligentsia, much broader in its politics than Trotskyism or anarchism, calling for mass protest against Obama administration policies. We should embrace that, while recognizing that the pressure to adopt a "fight the right" stance going into 2012 (for such intellectuals and others) will be extremely high. Such a stance is not a priori wrong but we have to remember that the antiwar movement these intellectuals laud stumbled, perhaps, when it failed to stop the war drive before it started, but it really died as a movement (and reverted to being a "cause" or something of the sort) when most people buried their hopes in the Kerry campaign.
I would place more hope right now in two movements (or "arenas," if the term "movement" is too much pressure or too ossifying) which allude the attention of these intellectuals: the student-led anti-austerity movement which still simmers, even if we have not yet seen a worthy sequel to last year, and the immigrant rights movement which persists most strongly around the DREAM act, even if it does not quite resemble the heights of 2006-07. Young leaders (and movement intellectuals in the broad sense) have emerged in these arenas, and the student movement has also generated leaders / organizers who are now involved in various community struggles. Can a broader political expression be fostered expanding from these arenas; and/or can they anchor the formation of a political bloc? We are probably not there, yet, and within each of these arenas there are political problems, opportunities for energies to rise and fall. Yet the dialectic between these arenas and well-established left intellectuals seems more promising than a feedback loop between something called "the left establishment" and itself.
Let's hope that the open letter, for all its flaws, is a harbinger of courage.
In moments like this, it's tempting to indulge in the Europhilic self-loathing that infects much of the US left. I'm usually criticized these days for being far too close to a lilly-livered reformist, but catching up the royals in all of this has my blood boiling with Jacobin zeal: why merely surround their car and break a few windows? Off with their heads!
However, these polemical broadsides should be unpacked.
Developing an internationalist ethos and field of vision is worthwhile, and current developments in Europe are eminently worth following. Some sections of the US left have in the past been accused of an internationalism interested in anything but Europe - though a field of vision focused on Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and China can hardly be considered "global." Other sections of the US left follow dominant political culture in failing to recognize the persistence of anything beyond the borders of the US other than the "threat of the week."
Perhaps a touch of Europhilia is a welcome counterweight to all of this. I certainly don't want to fall into the Europhobia which hit the US shortly after 9-11. I'll have a side of white supremacy with my freedom fries, thank you.
The student movement (or defense of education, or anti-cuts, or anti-austerity movement, or whatever you want to call it - with significant strands that are mainly anti-capitalist) is pan-Euro-North-American in its outlook. Dense moments of activity have pinged from California to Greece to France to Ireland to Portugal to Spain to Italy to Britain. I don't mean to suggest that "California started it all" by putting it first on my list here - a fuller genealogy and exposition of the politics of this new student movement is long overdue.
I think that the student movement in the US has failed to imagine how it might engage in the national-popular political life of the US. Assuredly this is in part because this political life has become alternately rather dreary, frightening, and sometimes seemingly emptied of content. Yet engage we must; as much as student uprisings have been a global phenomenon, they also have only arisen in a series of national and state economic, political, and cultural contexts.
My "self loathing" comment is intended as a goad: we can all too easily lapse into a self-satisfied superiority and a real political quietism when we say things like the following: "Look at [England]; they know how to do it; why isn't that happening here? Must be because Americans are stupid / sheep / suburban / pawns of Fox News / hopelessly trapped in an individualist ethos / etc." The first half of this statement is also a useful goad, but we have to avoid kneejerk anti-Americanism which disengages us from the enacting a politics that could set in motion a trajectory of activity that leads to the changes we seek.
There is a need to catalog and mine the most redeemable traditions in US political culture and see if any bit of them still persists somewhere. I've been thinking a bit lately about Depression-era interdependence as a counterweight to atomistic individualism - one example of this sort of project. Of course, one can only get so far with speculative politics; one has to try them out. And here, I think pragmatism is one of those redeemable traditions, one which has been somewhat misunderstood as a legacy of moderation and compromise.
Finally, I may have lost my head making tongue-in-cheek proposals; I do not mean to suggest that royal decapitation should be a priority for the British student movement. One participant I read was probably right to suggest that Charles and Camilla were just another couple of posh knobs who didn't deserve to be the center of the media storm.