[Dialogue] Cultural Studies 1 Last Course Date? AMERICANDREAMERS

[John Cock]

Good stuff. Thanks, Jim. 

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[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of James Wiegel
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2011 12:41 AM
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Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Cultural Studies 1 Last Course Date?
AMERICANDREAMERS


Found this book review a couple of days ago.  Seems to answer your question,
Steve,  there was a value and perspective shift, but putting structural and
lasting form -- we did not do that.  You can see signs of others taking this
on

What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR's New
Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the '60s, leftist
politics created a massive countercultural movement -- and sexual and
feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American
society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of
the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe,
its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political
and social impact.

At least, that's the main takeaway from "American Dreamers," a new book by
Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers
nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical
rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been
changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also
writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party
movement. From Michael Moore to "Wall-E," he argues that, although the left
has been successful at transforming American culture, when it comes to
practical change, it's been woefully unsuccessful.

Salon spoke to Kazin over the phone about the difference between Europe and
America, the rise of the professional left -- and why the Lorax is a
progressive icon.

In the book, you argue that the left has been very successful at changing
American culture -- but not at making real economic or political change.
Why?

It's easier to get people to think about things differently than it is to
construct institutions that alter the basic building blocks of society. When
leftists talk about having a vision of how things might be different, they
attract an audience and create a new way of perceiving things. It's a
different issue altogether to go up against entrenched structures of wealth
and political power. There are few obstacles to talking differently, singing
different kinds of songs, or making a different kind of art, but it takes a
sustained movement of millions of people to really change the structures,
and that is much harder to organize. Also, most Americans accept the basic
ground rules of capitalist society. The ideas are that if you work hard you
can get ahead and that it's better to be self-employed than employed by the
people. They believe that the basics of a capitalist society are just or can
be made just with small alterations. Americans want capitalism to work well
for everybody, which is somewhat of a contradiction in terms since
capitalism is about people competing with each other to get ahead, and
everyone's not going to be able to do well at the same time. That's simply
not possible.

Why has the left in Europe been so much more successful at making real
change?

The left in Europe arises out of a more traditional class structure, and the
left parties there were formed on the basis on those class divisions. Most
European countries had feudal societies before they transformed into
nation-states. When those societies became capitalist, they retained many of
the old divisions both in terms of people's consciousness and in terms of
the new social structure. Peasants and lords became workers and employers.
So, the parties there tended to fall along class lines much more than in the
United States, and people growing up on either side of the class boundary
fueled the movements on the left. Even though the differences between the
labor or socialist parties and the centrist or right-wing parties have
diminished over time, the vision of a socialist society is still alive in
many European countries. In America, however, socialism and communism were
never more than marginal beliefs.

You would think that the left would become more popular during a bad
economy, but that doesn't seem to be happening right now. Why?

That idea is based more on what happened in the Great Depression era than
anything that has happened since. The left's success in the 1930s was based
on a lot of preparation that went back to the Gilded Age and the Progressive
Era when corporations were seen as malefactors of great wealth. When the
Great Depression hit there was immediate support for ideas that people on
the left had been talking about, like that corporations are selfish and
exploit their workers or that the wealth should be more evenly spread out.
For the past 35 years, conservative notions about Big Government rather than
liberal ones about Big Business have been dominant. When the economic crisis
hit in the 2008, Americans were already primed to believe the government
couldn't do anything right because it hasn't been doing anything right for
years. Ironically, the conservatives were proved right when the stimulus
didn't do what the Obama administration hoped it would do, and clearly the
Tea Party has been able to grow on that policy mistake. The reaction depends
on what people think when an economic crisis hits, not what people say to
make their case after it has happened.

So what arguments does the left make well?

The ones regarding equality and rights. That's clear when you look at how
popular support is for gay marriage now, but Keynesian economics is not so
popular. It'd be nice if they were both popular, but to make political
change, you need sustained mobilization of social forces in your favor. You
need to make good arguments and also put pressure on people in power. For
all kinds of reasons, it's been more difficult to do that. The support
Americans have for what could be called "moral capitalism" goes very deep.
The myth of the self-made man that emerged in the 19th century wasn't
entirely a myth. There were people who came to America and did very well for
themselves. They had to do things like kill Native Americans and destroy the
land in the process, but they made better lives for their families.

Historically, a lot of leftist activism has been based in religion, but
these days, few people would make that connection. Why does that get lost in
the retelling?

The wide political divide we have now between people who go to church
regularly and people who don't tends to break down along liberal and
conservative lines. As a result, we tend to forget that evangelical
Protestants in the 19th and 20th centuries were attracted to a social gospel
that taught them to be their brother's keeper and that Christ called on them
to change the world. That belief system was true for the abolitionists, the
Populists, the labor movement, for many early socialists, and for black
radicals like Frederick Douglass and David Walker. We've lost that history
since the 1950s or so because this growing division frames the understanding
of religious politics for a lot of people. I think it's a real shame that we
allow the arguments about whether there is a God or not to obscure the
potential consequences of what people do with their beliefs.

So what influence has the left actually had on American ideals?

The left has promoted a lot of the important changes that have occurred in
American society, especially in expanding the meaning of "individual
freedoms" to include African-Americans, women and homosexuals. The United
States says it is committed to individual freedoms, but in practice those
freedoms have been either betrayed or not fully realized. The left in this
country has always been the vanguard of calling for complete equal rights
and social equality. A lot of the major movements for equal rights that we
celebrate -- the black freedom movement, the women's movement, the gay
liberation movement -- were all started by people who were considered to be
radicals in their time. The memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is being
unveiled this week in Washington, D.C., and most people don't realize how
daring and dangerous it was for him to talk about civil rights and take part
in that movement. The March on Washington was actually a protest for jobs
and freedom that was heavily financed by and mobilized by the labor
movement, even though people remember it as a march for African-Americans'
civil rights.

Is that because we revise our own history once it's no longer fashionable to
hold a particular point of view?

Once things are accepted, they become sanitized to a certain degree. Some
parts of what it means to be radical get accepted and other parts get
sheared off. Privately, King called himself a Democratic Socialist and
wanted a much more profound redistribution of wealth. Politicians like
Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader wouldn't dare advocate today for the things
King was struggling to change in the 1960s. Most Americans know King as a
charismatic leader who wanted the races to be nicer to each other and worked
for African-Americans to have legal equality, but that was only part of it.
He was after a much more radical dream. Of course, he wouldn't have a
monument or a national holiday if he were perceived to be a radical, so
there is good and bad in the revision. 

Well, if anything, the left knows how to capture the media's attention --
from burning bras in the 1968 Miss America protest to SlutWalks.

There are a lot of examples of leftists doing outlandish things that bring
attention to the issues they support. Americans have been attracted to mass
spectacles since the evangelical Great Awakening in the mid-18th century. We
like yelling and protesting in colorful ways. The United Auto Workers was
really established in the 1930s with the sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich.,
which is when the workers occupied the factories and kept the bosses out. It
was a very imaginative event that was organized by members of the Communist
Party. The workers weren't just staying inside the warm plants in the middle
of the winter in Michigan. They were saying the plants were as much theirs
as the employers because without the workers no cars would be made. So, they
slept on the upholstery of the cars they'd made until the union was
recognized.

These days, a surprising number of Americans actually make their living by
working in leftist activism. When did being a leftist become a career?

The professionalization of the left was inevitable in some ways because the
work of the 1960s was primarily anchored in colleges and college
communities. It's not surprising that people like me became liberals instead
of radicals after the revolution didn't happen. When we had to find a way to
make a living, it made sense to become professionals. That is essentially
what we were going to college to become, even though we took a detour for a
while. To some degree, you need professionals to organize. The people who
organized the labor movement in the 1930s were often skilled workers, but
there were also professionals like lawyers and journalists. The problem, of
course, is when the movement is perceived as a movement of the
better-educated, wealthy, privileged elite who are simply self-interested.
That image is a problem the left, including liberals, continues to have
because it has been cut off from a lot of ordinary working people.

How has the Internet changed the left in America?

The Internet makes it easier to mobilize if you already have a group that's
organizing around some issue. It's good for meet-ups more than movements.
Even the word "movement" has gotten away from the idea of making change. Now
it just means people are moving. As wonderful as the Internet is, it doesn't
obviate the need for some of the old things that movements need to grow --
like face-to-face organizing. That builds up a sense of trust among people
who work together. Some people tend to be wowed by a great new idea or
video, as if that is going to be enough. The Internet can quickly educate
people about issues, but it's not going to replace the need for a civil
society.

What lessons do you think contemporary leftists should learn from their own
history?

In order for the left to be successful, it needs to build institutions that
involve people who are not intellectuals and professionals, and ones that
aren't full of people who only talk to each other. The left should welcome
debate because it is healthiest when it argues with itself as well as with
other Americans who think differently. When people on the left talk, they
have to figure out ways of connecting their ideas to American ideals.
Liberty and equality for all are wonderful and utopian standards that most
Americans identify with, and this is a good thing for the left because it's
what we have been fighting for all along.

Looking back at the whole history of the left in the United States, who are
your favorite American leftists?

I have been made fun of recently for saying this, but I think Dr. Seuss has
been greatly overlooked as a leftist. He wasn't a propagandist, but many of
his best-selling books -- like "Yertle the Turtle," "The Lorax" and "The
Butter Battle Book" -- show that he had a leftist political message. Most
successful political messages come from people who aren't very closely
associated with a particular left-wing group. Also, although the Greenwich
Village artists and writers of the early 20th century aren't exactly
neglected, they are cast off as some sort of bohemian dilettantes. But Max
Eastman, the editor of the magazine the Masses who later became a
conservative, was a major voice of industrial labor unions, sexual
liberation, birth control and modernism. In a lot of ways, whether they know
it or not, the cultural left today has been inspired by the things the
Masses was doing a hundred years ago.


Jim Wiegel
Jfwiegel at yahoo.com

You do everything based on normal -- you build houses, you go on vacation --
now what you're seeing is it's almost as if anything can happen.  How do you
deal with the variability?  David Phillips


On Sep 2, 2011, at 21:30, steve har <stevehar11201 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Anyone know where, when the last ever CS1 course was taught, who was the
1st teacher and what the lectures, papers and workshops were?
> Curious to me that the cultural revolution paradigm seems to fallen out of
existence and there is a counter-revolution going on Ayn Rand style.
> 
> Was the last course date before or after Reagan/Thatcher were elected 
> Mandela was freed CNN's world The Berlin wall fell The Soviet Union 
> ended
> 9-11
> Fox News?
> 
> Secular, Scientific and Urban revolution was the point right?
> What if anything could be said in 2011 about this?
> Might CS1 still be a gem for the future? 
> 
> I saw the construct in the new Archives index along with some of 
> Charles Lingo's and Kaze Gadways original teaching charts: topical, 
> functional propositional of Sartre's paper on Revolution. Pretty 
> interesting. They talked a lot about finding a place to stand in the 
> world [before cable TV]
>  
> --
> Steve Harrington
> Richard Brautigan "Karma Repair Kit Items 1-4. 
> 1.Get enough food to eat, and eat it. 
> 2.Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there.
> 3.Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the 
> silence of yourself, and listen to it.
> _______________________________________________
> Dialogue mailing list
> Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/dialogue_wedgeblade.net


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