Greetings Economists, On Mar 19, 2007, at 10:40 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
Close to none, I'd guess. Grassroots activists in the U.S. scorn "intellectual masturbation," and often with the contemptuous dismissal embodied by your own choice of words. Most grassroots activists that I've known plunge into some struggle or other, without much reflection on how it fits into a larger picture - habit encouraged by foundation program officers, who like very narrow, targeted action, because it's compatible with the kinds of "metrics" they love, because it's more compatible with charity rather than self- organization, and because it doesn't threaten the Pig System.
Doyle; I think this is a good rejoinder to Michael's comment. If one is going to rejoin to Michael. Organizing experience on the grassroots level gives one some sense of what is on in the mind of folks. But what is to be done in the moment is a bit hard. I was out on the weekend helping set up a MAC laptop so the person could do school work and job stuff. Which was important to them. Or one could read in the SF Chronicle over the weekend about how a lot of IT people work at the coffee shop. Now that resonates for me as resembling what Sartre and de Beauvoir engaged in the Parisian coffee shops with their little workshop of a community of intellectuals. But my friend is not an intellectual, and her concern with getting online to watch movies, or listen to music is never going to align with Sartre's 'Words' knowledge work. I can take realistic digital photos of my world and share globally. I still have tremendous conceptual barriers to face to replicate Sartre sitting all day with collaborators on various text based philosophical or cultural projects. This process of collaboration where a lot of people interact is missing from how the left thinks about doing organizing. What's interesting about American Idol, or other reality programming is the mass scale movie and sound interaction people have with the subject matter. However, shallow it might be, this easily supplants the work on other networks of contrived collaboration shows, comedy, drama (police shows mainly). This lack of a network concept of what collaboration could offer in terms of producing knowledge is hanging the left up. The ideal is well known, the practice is foggy and a bit under appreciated in terms of the challenges to old media. Doyle
