It's a European Thang....

[john_b_cannon]

.... but has anyone been following this controversy over this Danish newspaper that published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad and the response it has created, in terms of boycotts of Danish goods, etc.? Things got a little more interesting today, with several European newspapers reprinting the caricatures "in solidarity" with the Danes

Comments

[john_b_cannon]

I'm not sure that that's necessarily where we disagree.... I think what you suggest is potentially important. The three problems you mention are all real, but in addition to them, there's the fact that existing Marxist parties and organizations (I don't draw a hard and fast line around what constitutes a party, myself) don't have deep cultural roots in working class communities and communities of color. This makes the question of potential audience quite problematic. In other words, it would be easier for the revolutionary left to produce a press that related to the "common sense" of white left-liberalism than one that went beyond that. (Of course it's not necessarily *obvious* that working-class communities have distinct common sense; what's more clear to me is that white, middle-class left-liberalism has a distinct common sense which tends to permeate and overwhelm the ostensibly revolutionary left, to the point where we can't really separate ourselves from the kinds of questions that that worldview entails.)

If you had a party press or even a movement press that was grounded in the cultures of at least some working-class communities and/or communities of color, that would definitely create the conditions of possibility for relating to political common sense in a more productive way. Here the question of immanent critique could pose itself in a vital way. Unfortunately, the actually existing Marxist presses have tended to concern themselves more with finding the right slogan--which, again, may matter in a moment of crisis, but tends to get a little abstract and formalistic if those kinds of questions aren't being posed for masses of people.