David Lindorff in today’s Counterpunch:
Last fall, I and many progressives urged voters to elect Obama, not because we thought he was a progressive, but because we hoped that his background—community organizer, raised by a single mother, experience living in a third world country (Indonesia), multi-racial—would lead him to make at least some right decisions. We, or certainly I, hoped too that the energized young and working class electorate that came out for him in the fall would continue to press him aggressively to do the right thing on war, environment, civil liberties and the economy.
I was wrong on the first count: Obama has been a corporatist through and through on all the major issues that matter. And I was wrong on the second. Most of the left in the US, from the labor movement to the environmentalist movement to the anti-war movement, has to date remained glumly quiescent as Obama has sold them out on each of their key issues.
This reminds me of that guy.
Comment by littlehorn — August 20, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
Well, at least he’s better than Carl Davidson…or the CP, COC and DSA, who are already beating the drums for re-electing Obama in 2012!
Comment by MN Roy — August 20, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
Yo, littlehorn- at least Lindorff is somewhat teachable. Amiri has been so busy carrying the tablets down from the mountainside this last few years that it never occurs to him he may not actually have been talking to the lord.
Comment by Michael Hureaux — August 20, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
OK, too little, too late, but better than nothing. But what’s worse than nothing is seeing Tony Mazzocchi and his ridiculous Labor Party of America trotted out as a model for future political work–let’s remember that IT FAILED, okay? With its platform ratified in advance by the big internationals and presented to the convention for ratification only, its refusal to support reproductive rights and to reject capital punishment, and its achingly protracted movement toward actually fielding candidates, it offers another road to ignominious defeat.
Comment by Jim Holstun — August 20, 2009 @ 10:26 pm
Great point Jim Holstun.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people thought (and still think) like Lindorff. We may have to rethink Marx’s assertions about the idiocy of rural life insofar as these big city slickers could apparently mistake an onion for a union.
Most of these people actually lived through the Vietnam War era with their eyes open but they still fancy this clinically insane delusion that activists can somehow “pressure” Uncle Sam out of something he really wants? What? Say that again? Am I hard of hearing or are they hard of thinking?
The only “pressure” old child molester Uncle Sam has ever felt in the 65 years since WWII is when his troops in Indochina began murdering their commanders; and that only happenned thanks to the boots on the ground and helmets on the heads of anti-war protestors that took over the streets & barricades — utterly demoralizing the fighting morale of GI conscripts. Who doubts those were the lessons of Vietnam? (Of course both the Vietnamese people & the US protestors owe lots to Lenin & Mao as well but that’s another thankless task).
How’s that saying go? The proof that something’s truly nuts is if it repeatedly lunges at a wall forehead first while imagining a different outcome at the next lunge.
What fools we mortals be.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — August 21, 2009 @ 6:17 am
“Re-think” Marx’s thoughts on the idiocy of rural life? Never mind, gentlemen, a good many of us who grew up in the country know what Marx was talking about when he employed that phrase, and it didn’t have anything to do with a grower’s relationship with the soil, which he fully respected.
Comment by Michael Hureaux — August 21, 2009 @ 3:31 pm
Michael. I was being sarcastic in light of Lindorff’s Mea Culpa.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — August 21, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
It wasn’t very well-placed sarcasm, Karl F. Raymond Williams had some very cutting things to say about the “rural idiocy” trope, decades ago in the interviews in “Politics and Letters”, page 319:
“I should say that when I read the phrase ‘rural idiocy’, it stuck in my throat: yet I knew instantly what they were referring to even in this very different British rural experience. I can remember a time when I had felt like using the same phrase myself. The persistence of certain established mystifications, superstitions, deferences or political abdications, the lack of exposure to the liberating community of other kinds of settlement – when I was moving out of the countryside, I knew very strongly what these meant. But it still seems to me that Marx and Engels should not have used that phrase, because what they were pointing to was a process of deprivation – of ignorance and illiteracy. …
“If one invokes the classical cases of superstition and mystification among the rural peasantry, one must also remember the characteristic variants of urban and suburban idiocy, which are really quite marked. It is by no means the case that irrationalism in the 20th century has flourished in villages and been cleared by the clear light of reason from the suburbs or the towns. Indeed it might even be said that the most prolific generator of modern irrationalism is now a certain kind of urban agglomeration. No Marxist now has any warrant in historical experience for seeing rural settlement or rural labour as tied in any way to idiocy, or even some much softer term. This is not the way to look at the problem: the right way is through the Marxist categories of deprivation and exploitation.”
And again, on 322-23:
“A lot of the mobilization of rural opinion for reactionary policies draws on resentment at what I would call – since the phrase has got around – an urban idiocy: the idea that food grows in shops. The same problem is even more acute in international politics, where one can by no means rule out the industrial working class in a late capitalist country becoming quite objectively reactionary in its position towards a raw material producer country which is not its own, supporting all kinds of imperialist pressures to drive down the costs of primary products. I think this is going to become a major question in the rest of this century, because to an extent one couldn’t have foreseen in the fifties, when the imperialist order still held with more force, food and raw materials are really now at the centre of the world economic crisis. … The recent programme of the Italian Communist Party is one of the few in the West which takes up this issue – criticizing the concentration on industrial investment for the export market at the expense of agricultural development in Italy.”
The more I read Williams, the more I respect him, and the more I think other people should be reading him.
Comment by Duncan — August 23, 2009 @ 2:39 am
Well Duncan, you’ve raised some excellent points, however as somebody who worked for a couple years travelling as a door to door salesman in rural Indiana & Ohio for a Cable TV company while attending grad school at Bowling Green State University in the early 90’s I must insist some of the dumbest motherfuckers I’ve ever met lived in that area. All white, very religous, Republican as hell, and dumb as dirt. I even caught myself romanticising eugenics a time or two until I recalled the racist undercurrent behind that movement.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — August 23, 2009 @ 4:09 am