if i come down to chicago for the platypus thing, can we skip the friday night session to do a shit ton of mdma and hang out at a loft party of some sort? i'm sure b. can find one. ;-)
haha i like that one
I like to comparison of the radical left to Wild E. Coyote. We ran off the cliff decades ago, but our legs keep running. What happens when we finally look down?
"Two people are seated at a restaurant table. One of them notices a lobster tank nearby and comments to the waiter, 'I see the lobster tank has no lid on it. Aren't you afraid they might get loose ?' The waiter replies,' Non monsieur, those are radical leftist and anarchist lobsters. If some of them try to climb out, the others will pull them back in.'"
nonetheless, I think politicization is on the upswing, though not so quickly as I'd like to see happen.
meh The SEIU played a huge role in organizing a campus march, and they were great in terms of providing logistical and organizational support, but there wasn't a whole lot of support from the undergrads. In total, the march was probably about 200 people, but there was definitely a problem in terms of publicity for the event. Also, one of the leaders of the SEIU workers at UIC is a crazy maoist. But apparently the SEIU local is considering striking soon. And it's looking evermore likely that the grad students will go on strike. I've made contacts with them and will be trying to organize some sort of undergraduate solidarity campaign soon. And also our university faculty are in the midst of organizing a union right now, though I don't know as much about their situation as I'd like to. what it's been coming down to is educating the undergrads as to what's going on and why they should get involved.
how was march 4th in your neck of the woods?
the anti-imperialists feel powerless in their own country, leading them to attack the working class there as fat, brainwashed, etc and attach themselves to whatever group of foreigners with guns. the anti-deutsch feel powerless in their own country, leading them to attack the working class there as racist, nationalist, authoritarian, etc and attach themselves to imperialist "enemies" of germany. i don't think there's much being offered from either camp and, in a way, they deserve each other.
i agree to an extent, but that position seems to be pretty central to their ideas and i find a lot of their "anti-nationalism" is just a warped form of nationalist exceptionalism. because of this i don't think their critique has much to offer in terms of conceiving how to build class power in our own countries, as even the moderate anti-deutsch believe (at least in their own country) that the working class are all genocidal maniacs in waiting. most of the writings i've read from them seem like they're going to put forth something interesting and new, but end up just being a negative image of the anti-imperialists they oppose.
I think what makes them so controversial essentially boils down to their position on 'anti-imperialism,' which only became a hot button issue for first-world leftists in the 60's, which was just after the collapse of the labor movement, and the 'death of the left', where essentially the extent of political action for first-world leftists was limited to support for third-world liberation movements. That this point remains such an important issue for people in the first world is a testament to how much the spectre of 60's New Left politics still lingers. What gets neglected in all of this is what could we do to rebuild a threat to capitalism in our own countries.
