Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement: Responds: Replies
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
LIZA FEATHERSTONE argues that United Students Against Sweatshops activists are active in other anticapitalist efforts symbolized by "Seattle," that their anticapitalist framework furnishes them...
...But she fails to note that the bulk of the book's analysis regarding the "decentering" of power does not bode well for her encomiums to "revolution...
...112 DISSENT / Fall 2001...
...Instead of analysis of these issues, Featherstone offers polemics...
...These are good points...
...This is not surprising, however, for it is rhetoric, and not analysis, that concerns her...
...Featherstone's comment that ''workers at Kuk Dong went on strike because they knew that they had powerful advocates in the WRC and USAS" is both conjectural and absurd...
...For her, support means boosterism...
...I commend USAS activism, share its opposition to sweatshop labor, and agree with it that sweatshop labor is not the only injustice of global capitalism (I held these convictions long before USAS or its leaders were born...
...They have not always liked what I have had to say, but I think they respect me and know that I am someone who is honest and politically responsible...
...Each of them is made in my essay...
...LIZA FEATHERSTONE argues that United Students Against Sweatshops activists are active in other anticapitalist efforts symbolized by "Seattle," that their anticapitalist framework furnishes them with inspiration and vision, and that their radicalism has thus empowered them...
...They went on strike because they had real grievances and a history of local organizing...
...The defensive tone of Featherstone's screed has been completely absent when I have voiced my skepticism with USAS activists...
...USAS activists are neither my friends nor my children, and they do not need my coddling...
...She eagerly cites Hardt and Negri's Empire, a book whose rhetoric in places matches her own...
...I provide two examples: the counterproductive fixation of many USAS activists with the evils of the Fair Labor Association and the difficulty of many USAS activists in coming to terms with the partial success achieved at Kuk Dong and the complex dynamics of that success, which required both "bad cops" and "good cops...
...Featherstone's most foolish comment is her insistence that I suggest "the impossibility of fighting corporations" and evince a "breathless awe of today's global economy...
...If only the same could be said for their self-appointed patrons of proletarian emancipation...
...She responds to my comments on Castells, Bauman, and Sennett by offering the "materialist" observations that workers have always felt unhappy and that "It's always been tough to fight those in power...
...What I have encountered are serious questions and serious arguments made, in a spirit of healthy disagreement, by people who are capable of distinguishing between sympathizers and enemies...
...The USAS students I have interacted with, at Indiana University and at the national level, are young adults, impressive and responsible, and they deserve honesty and serious engagement...
...My point is not to argue that USAS methods are in "contradiction" with their anticapitalist ideology and that therefore they should abandon their ideology in the name of some kind of Hegelian end of history...
...She is a publicist...
...This is another sign of the seriousness and maturity of these students...
...It's a good thing that the WRC and USAS were around, but I see no point in exaggerating their influence...
...Had Featherstone paid attention to my arguments, she would know that I do not disparage USAS, and that her own simple binary—those who laud USAS and those who dismiss it—fails...
...Featherstone is wrong to assert that I do "not provide a single example" of the limits of the anticapitalist ideology...
...But this does not mean that I share what Featherstone calls their "vision" or that I join them on the streets of Seattle...
...My point is that there is a serious tension between their anticapitalist ideology and the pragmatics of the Worker Rights Consortium, which is their principal achievement...
...The complexities of university life are reduced to her observation that what distinguishes the university is that "a small number of young people can greatly disrupt its daily operations...
...But I do intend to raise some hard questions about it...
...This tension is a productive one, and it is not my purpose to wish it away...
...That is not my role...
...At the deepest level, what separates Featherstone and me is our respective conceptions of our roles...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
