Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses: Replies
Berman, Marshall
Marshall Berman Replies ISN'T IT GREAT to hear all the birds still out there? Radicals of a certain age, we may have lost a couple of steps, but it's nice to see we can still bring the noise....
...I like to think I favor discontent, but Russell Jacoby is over the top—you could even say he defines the top...
...For years, he has been arguing that modern "identity politics" turns people hopelessly against each other, and throws us all into a melancholy "twilight of common dreams...
...But if he wants common dreams, shouldn't he explore one big thing nearly all of us have in common, our membership in the working class...
...He is nastily derisive about Marx, and my attachment to Marx, today: "the old guys are dead...the gold mines are played out...the old-time religions, including Marx and Freud, are what people hang onto when they're lost...
...However, Ellen impedes herself because she can't see how many people, in spite of everything, are doing well...
...But if jaytalking flourishes again, who knows what birds will migrate, or what songs will break out, or how well we will control our responses...
...Some have even died for them...
...Why shouldn't it also spring from the not-so-classy sites where American radicals move and live...
...It suggests powerfully that it's weird out there, and that American life does something to people, including some heroic and noble people, to turn them weird...
...Thirty years later, white-collar work and workers are at the center of our economy and society...
...Jacoby says "more radical endeavors" can thrive without a labor movement, but he never says what these are...
...Nice, too, to hear somebody under thirty lifting her voice to join in...
...Andrew Delbanco is also morose...
...I mean, we did what we had to do, some of it really helped, je ne regrette rien, but the crushing imperatives of the cold war are not a state I would wish on anyone I cared for...
...Or even about life in that world, which grows ever more dependent on a migratory, proletarian labor force of "assistants" who work without health benefits or job security...
...Are we sure the goddess is driving...
...And if he does, is he really sure it wouldn't help to have Marx at his side...
...If so, when do we start...
...Adler's Y2K story here is cryptic but scary...
...But in 1905 and 1917, when Russian workers went out in the streets, occupied factories and oil fields, and created soviets, Lenin and his party had the brains to rush and catch up with them...
...If we can't see it, we won't be able to help people breathe deeper or lay claim to more and better air...
...Marshall Berman Replies ISN'T IT GREAT to hear all the birds still out there...
...The cold war is over, the danger of mutual assured destruction has abated, but our country is full of people who are busier than ever, not only planning but yearning for the end of the world...
...I hope he'll write and let us know...
...Adler, who knows the need for protection, invokes Ms...
...The early SDS made use of Marx with unpretentious fluency...
...I don't share, or even understand, Delbanco's sense of guilt...
...Will our tree grow in Brooklyn...
...Not for being "fossilized" yesterday, but for trying to come back to life today...
...It was clear that this vision of complexity and contradiction was built on Marx, and on neo-Marxists like C. Wright Mills...
...Diggins digs it when it comes from Wall Street or Silicon Valley...
...But Marx has nourished his own thought at many points...
...My friend Todd Gitlin has been doing this for more than thirty years...
...But he's right about what intellectuals should do: not just rage against the machine, but explain how it works...
...These are good questions...
...it was no big deal...
...When did its obsolescence occur...
...She has spent most of her life closer to the edge of our critical culture than I've been willing to go...
...She entices the kids in her class to go as far as they can, but assures their parents she will bring them all back home...
...But he at least has a clear excuse...
...With verve and fresh energy as well as analytical power, she zeroes in on the downsized white-collar workers of the nineties, who are at once more educated and more degraded than their ancestors, the subjects of White Collar and The Organization Man...
...The American economy has created more breathing space for more people than most of us expected it could...
...Adler is a great reporter: she can let go of the boundaries between herself and her weird subjects, so as to help us enter their world, and know that sooner or later she can get back to who she is...
...Is he now saying that vision is out of date...
...The Weimar Republic was probably the most brilliant critical culture in history Oy...
...Today's "proletarianized professionals" need to find new ways to "confront the corporation," to fight for a "sense of entitlement to autonomy and respect...
...Now it is true Lenin said that, in What Is To Be Done...
...If Rachel and her children can look out at the bridge, the harbor, the city, and not instantly imagine them in flames, it sounds like real progress to me...
...The answer, my friend, is one of the prime forces in modern life: the drive to surpass ourselves, to overcome—"We shall overcome...
...He wants leftists to notice "the achievements made in civil rights, feminism, the environment, and the equalization of higher education...
...He doesn't seem to notice how many leftists have spent their whole lives fighting for these values...
...She has lot of ideas, but none of them is overpowering and irresistible, and "resistance isn't coalescing" as it used to...
...Now, I don't expect Jacoby to like me, but why does he dislike the American labor movement...
...Couldn't a seriously critical culture open up some pretty scary floodgates...
...Nothing she sees on the streets looks like a miracle, but she isn't giving up and going home to watch TV or go online...
...The mission statement in that piece is a lot like what I mean by "critical culture...
...Down the road she will find more people out there with her youthful energy and generosity of spirit and communication skills, and you know the left will live...
...Whoever expected doctors to form a union...
...Who will protect us from what we might want...
...Over the years, Todd has incorporated the SDS white-collar vision into his fine studies of mass media...
...When he denounces blue jays, at first you think it's a joke, but you may be wrong...
...Brute market values are riding so high today because the brutal market has so much real power...
...Delbanco in Dissent has much more of a Day-of-Atonement flavor: "we baby-boomers have not sufficiently resisted...we have not been adequate exemplars to our children," and it is because of us and our inadequacy that "brute marketplace values...now overwhelm every aspect of American life...
...But really, the horrors that evoked that resistance-war in Vietnam, nuclear Doomsday-had a fallout that twisted and poisoned resisters' souls...
...Is he auditioning for "A Hunger Artist" ("I just never found anything I liked"), or for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas...
...He teaches college English, surrounded by David Lodge characters who promote themselves as ultra-radicals, but couldn't care less about any life outside the academic world...
...Like Betty Smith's immortal hero, Francie Nolan, Rachel Neumann is covering the waterfront by the Williamsburg Bridge...
...That space could close tomorrow, but it's open today...
...On his way to where...
...He has written a brilliant jeremiad against this scene in the November 4, 1999 New York Review of Books...
...Why can't we just let it be...
...In Todd's youth, when he was part of the Students for a Democratic Society inner circle in its golden age, that dream team produced a powerful vision of what was then called "the new working class": workers who were educated and professional, who worked with their brains, often in creative ways, and who sometimes made money, yet who were deeply alienated from their own activity, and subjected to market values over which they had no control...
...Frizzle, star and comic hero of The Magic School Bus series...
...He says "reread Lenin" and see why political thinking is beyond workers' capacity...
...I wish I could have struck a chord that would have harmonized all the voices in our tree, but hey, at least I've made a mix...
...He wants to know, Why do we keep attacking a more-or-less liberal society instead of curling up with it...
...I've never met Margot Adler, but for years I've been enthralled with her radio voice...
...Jack Diggins makes it clear he is no leftist, he's just passing through...
...It seems to me the vision is more relevant than ever, and especially relevant for Todd himself...
...But then, it wasn't so long ago that people were amazed to see teachers do it...
...Most of us around her age know we have survived by bringing our inner weirdnesses under control...
...I think this gives "us" credit (and blame) for more agency than 44 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 SYMPOSIUM we have...
...In fact, members of every generation have to find new ways of seeing, so they not only can see that they are subject to the market's power, but also that they have the resources to fight the power...
...FI LLEN WILLIS, too, has spent half a life taking the machine apart...
...Ms.F., teacher, driver, guide to many underworlds, imagines us as children who want to grow...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
