On Nov 4, 2006, at 2:02 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Male leftists in the West, various as they are, have more in common with one another than, say, "SUV drivers" in marketing research or "Americans" in Richard Hofstandter's work, to take two categories you are fond of using. If it is possible to speak of a predominant tendency in the latter, surely it's possible to speak of one in the former.
The market research comes from surveys and focus groups commissioned by auto companies who have an economic incentive to get it right. Hofstadter was a historian who named names and quoted texts; you may not like what he did with them (though I'm guessing you haven't actually read his work), but there's a body of evidence to respond to. You have yet to name or quote any of these bad western left boys, a category that would include, I presume, Slavoj Zizek, Ramsey Clark, Leo Panitch, Dennis Kucinich, Alex Callinicos, Antonio Negri, Robin Blackburn, Jim Robertson, Serge Halimi, "Angelus Novus" on lbo-talk, Jeff St Clair, Carrol Cox, Lou Proyect, Michael Perelman, and me. Who on that list embodies any of the positions you attribute to your phantasmic category? Doug
