Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: US Consumer Confidence indexsurges

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> >
> Whilst I accept your position that we shouldn't predict things too narrowly
> (as to be wrong hurts the left a lot),

As far as the stock market goes I agree with Jim -- leftists have better
things to do than worry or enthuse about stocks -- but it simply isn't
true that "to be wrong hurts the left a lot." I still believe the
greatest mistake of my whole involvement in political activity took
place a year or two before I became a marxist: Starting with my very
earliest participation in the anti-war movement I should have begun
predicting loudly and without any face-saving hedges that the Vietnamese
were going to win. Had it turned out differently no one would have
remembered, and the early prediction would have been a useful reference
point in '68 & '69. I did predict large U.S. casualties in the Gulf War
-- everyone has forgotten it.

Fear of being wrong, of being intellectually embarassed is what hurts
the left a lot. Someone not willing to make a fool of him/herself is
pretty useless in left politics.
This kind of fear is endemic on university campuses and among
journalists -- that is, among those intellectuals whom think in terms of
truth in the abstract rather than in terms of political strategy.

Carrol

P.S. It is overwhelmingly clear that the actions of the Brown students
were and will continue to be a smashing success in terms of developing
the politics of reparations.