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In seriousness, Twitter is a terrible medium for activism because it is primarily a means of careerist "burnishing" of a public image. In the era of blogs ignoramuses like me could try to wrap their heads and those of others around weighty topics previously confined to journals; there was a genuine learning process for anyone able to pay the extremely minimal entry cost. Twitter consolidates previously gained "social capital"; the premise is that everybody tweeting already was someone, and wants to engage in a relaxed game of Internet badminton with similar somebodies. Kind of like an world-wide electronic Studio 54; precisely the people one would want to get involved in mass agitation, "round the way dudes" and gals, are practically excluded. Sunkara is not an especially egregious example; his "New Wave" enthusiasm for instant nostalgia for "old" Nas records and suchlike is just the kind of conference-cred I was talking about. The Sawant nonsense is really a problem with Jacobin, a fantastically flattened perspective on the Democratic Party even congenital Democrats like me could not maintain in the face of the most minimal knowledge of the "Second American Revolution" of the Civil War and Reconstruction. (Sunkara is reading James Macpherson; will he follow it up with John R. Commons?) The "soft spot" Jacobin writers show for liberal Dixiecrats is just unhistorical; the precise point of already-existing American Socialism was to break the enthusiasm of American Girondins for cigars made by white men. Sunkara's own weaknesses show up in analyzing the "Militant Tendency" in Labour in textbook academic-pinko terms as "entryism", when it was really about as legitimate an expression of autochthonous British working-class consciousness as anything else in the 80s. Of course there is really no problem with people from the Trotskyist tradition vaulting into popular representation; there will be a little bit of a learning curve necessary to repeat the Sawant success, but the kind of pathetic "horse-trading" Jacobinites have learned is essential from their Clintonian mentors is precisely what a newly relevant socialist tradition must eschew. Jeff Rubard ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
