AUT: Chris re Reeves

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

lox@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Compa~neros,
>
>         Reeve's response didn't exactly knock my socks off. When I have more than
> a free moment from the work here I'll try to give it a more thorough
> response. What I don't get is why Katha Pollit is so ga-ga about Reeve
> et.al.'s critique. Why is it wrong for a schmuck like Todd Gitlin to attack
> feminism and black liberation for having divided the left but okay for
> Reeve to hammer away at the indigenous character of the Zapatistas in the
> name of the international proletarian struggle? Reeve strikes me as Gitlin
> in revolutionary libertarian drag on this question.
>
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Dear Chris --

   I don't follow your Reeve-Gitlin analogy. Gitlin, in my view, is not
a leftist -- he's some kind of nationalistic labor-liberal. His attacks
on feminists and black nationalists are in the service of "americanism,"
not socialism. Reeve is coming from a very different place -- the
ultraleftism that was (I thought) the tendency of Autopsy.
   But in any case, I wouldn't describe myself as ga-ga over Reeve. I
think he and Sylvie raised some interesting questions, and I wanted to
know what other people thought.  I brought him up as often as I did
because it seemed that people were simply ignoring the first article
("Behind the Balaclava"). I guess I feel in my old age that the US left
has a tendency to romanticize third-world revolutionaries and to support
them in an uncritical way. Think of the Sandinistas.There too
charismatic leaders had tons of uncritical support from guilt-ridden
First worlders. The nuts and bolts of the Sandinistas' policies were
often highly questionable, but (partly because our own govt was trying
so hard to overthrow them) an atmosphere existed on the US left in which
it was hard to ask, or even to conceive, those questions -- let alone
have a productive discussion. (Which left the job of critic to people
like Paul Berman!).
 I support the Zapatistas in their struggle against the mexican govt,
obviously. But  I thought Reeve and Sylvie were raising some useful
flags. I too find it hard to see how these isolated subsistence farmers
can have more than a symbolic  meaning in a modern industrialized world.
To me, they don't have much instruction value for , for example, the
French unemployed -- whose resistance, in turn, has much more relevance
to the US (or German, or British, or russian situation) than the Zaps
do.

Best, Katha


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