Date: Fri, 01 May 1998 21:48:05 -0500
From: Katha Pollitt <kpollitt-AT-thenation.com>
Subject: Re: AUT:Louis on Reeves


Again, I did not "attach my name," as Louis Proyect writes, to Reeves'
articles. I merely proposed that people discuss them seriously. And I
still think that would be a good idea!
   As for that crack about "trust fund liberals running The Nation these
days," Louis: I don't have much in common with the dominant political
views of the magazine -- I just write my column and hope for the best.
Still, if you want to talk about the sociological and material basis of
the left, now or in the past,you'd find "trust fund liberals" fund a
great deal of it, including the uncritical third-worldist Latin American
solidarity work you yourself engage in.  When I visited Nicaragua during
the Sandinista years I met quite a few of them.  
 I appreciate that you exempt me personally from your scorn, but  these
insults still seem to me a substitute for real intellectual work.
Charles Reeve and Sylvie Deneuve , an electrician and a secretary, both
working class by birth and entirely self educated, both with many
decades of leftwing organizing and analysis to their credit, currently
involved in the movement of the unemployed in France, are exemplary
figures on the left. You may not agree with them, you may not think they
know enough Mexican history or whatever.  But to tar them with the brush
of wealth, dilettantism, liberalism -- it's really unfair. 

Katha


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---