Re: [OPE] Rosa Lichtenstein

2009/9/10 GERALD LEVY <gerald_a_levy@msn.com>

>
> Then, there is a somewhat different social psychological question which
> would
> be worthwhile examining: how has the Internet changed behavior by Marxists
> and other radicals and why is it that we see so much bizarre behavior by
> radicals on the Net? Have their always been so many Leftist wing nuts and
> the Internet allowed us to see how many there are out there or has the
> Internet
> itself helped make many radicals (more) crazy?
>
>

I can only speculate here based on anecdotal evidence.

While any forms of anti-establishment, whether Left or Right, will always
attract some eccentric personalities I think the fraction of noise
generators of the whole population is fairly constant. The problem is rather
that, for various reasons, there has been a growing gap between active
leftists and mass movements in the advanced capitalist countries.

Alexander Cockburn summarizes the net result of this:

  "These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political
  economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules.
  Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse,
  peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling
  class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the
  falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale
  (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly
  "rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The
  9/11 "conspiracy", or "inside job", is the Summa of all this
  foolishness."

In contrast to the Left intellectuals of the past generation who were
actually involved in mass movements, the noise generators have tended to be
more active on the internet, thereby amplifying the noise. It is symptomatic
that a young student radical in the West today would be more likely to read
Alex Jones than Tariq Ali.

//Dave Z

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Received on Fri Sep 11 03:55:25 2009