The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz

Author:Aaron Swartz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781620970768
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2015-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Toward a Larger Left

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/04/toward-a-larger-left/

August 4, 2009

Age 22

Stanford, like many universities, maintains full employment for humanities professors by requiring new students to take their seminars. My heart burning with the pain of societal injustice, I chose the one on “Freedom, Equality, Difference.”

Most of the other students had no particular interest in the topic—they were just meeting the requirement. But a significant minority did: like me, they cared passionately about it. They were the conservatives, armed with endless citations on how affirmative action was undermining American meritocracy. The only other political attitude I noticed was a moderate centrism, the view espoused by the teacher, whose day job was studying just-war theory.

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me. I remember us discussing a scene in Invisible Man where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

This is the reproduction of American intellectual culture: a large number of vocal and articulate conservatives, a handful of mushy moderately liberal centrists, and an audience that doesn’t much care. (Completing the picture, the teacher later shouted me down for bringing up inconvenient facts during a discussion of Vietnam.)

It’s a future that worries George Scialabba. He cares passionately about the humane left-wing tradition, but he’s forced to watch it shrivel. As he observes, the conservatives receive prominent places in industry (including industry-funded think tanks), the centrists are quarantined in hyperspecialized programs at universities, and the real leftists can barely get a toehold. (The Soviet Union fell, seems to be the dominant position. Why are you still here?)

The question is what to do about it. George hails the few exceptions (Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn—names presumably picked to provoke) who have managed to eke out a niche exposing the falsehoods and bucking the consensus, getting pushed to the cultural margins for their trouble. Henry proposes a more technical version, where left-wing critics don’t argue to the public (which in practice seems to mean the 20,000 readers of Z Magazine) but instead to elites, especially disciplinary experts, using a field’s flaws against itself (à la Doug Henwood). And Michael seems to make the usual retort that such extremism never gets an audience, let alone an accomplishment—only incrementalism and realist accommodation to power will make a difference in people’s lives (perhaps Ezra Klein could be the poster boy here).

This debate is not dispassionate. It’s a muddy mix of trying to work out what to do with our lives and how to justify what we’ve already done. Personally, I adore Chomsky, Henwood, and Klein—I find both their writing and their personalities incredibly inspirational.

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