On 12/12/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > > What do you think are stress points today?
me:
> > clearly one concerns the distribution of income and the distribution
> > of medical benefits. Class differences are getting worse.
Yoshie:
> Those are objectively stress points, so is the Iraq War, but
> subjectively none of them appears to be sending people up in arms at
> this moment, though certainly there are (overlapping) groups of people
> who are working on them as issues.
okay, let's forget the stress points metaphor for now. The point is,
for what issues is there a potential that we can get people to agree
with us (more importantly, with me ;-)) when they don't currently
agree with us.
On a lot of things, from the Iraq War to universal health care, short
of abortion on demand and expropriate the expropriators, there are
already a lot of people, a majority on a number of key issues, who
would agree with standard leftist views if they are polled.
The problem comes down to these:
total absence of the Left (leftists do not have a coherent world view
that unite them and many of them don't like other leftists all that
much :->);
people vote for politicians who don't share their views and don't vote
for politicians who share their views, mainly because those who don't
have more money and are seen to be credible and electable than those
who do;
people -- probably many leftists -- are pretty solidly stuck in
electoralism, having forgotten how to change things in the streets.
At this point, Carrol would say, yes, our enemy has been stronger than
the local enemies of other leftists in other countries. That's
probably true, but that has always been true for over the last 100
years, and it will probably be true until the US loses its global
hegemony. So, we need to figure out what can be done, even knowing
that our enemy is the baddest in the world, our social geography more
fragmented than in other countries due to suburbanization, our
politics more decentralized than in other countries due to federalism,
etc.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
