FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY
31 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 449
New York University Review of Law and Social Change
2007
Teaching from the Left: A Conference at Harvard Law School
Part I: Legal Education
TEACHING FROM THE LEFT IN MY ANECDOTAGE
> it hadn't been stupid to spend it that way.
True.
> It was really different from antiwar demonstrations in the late sixties and the seventies.
Noted
> "How has the left reproduced itself during this long period of decline?" Answer: "Through sexual intercourse and adoption."
Fail. Read books.
> It was originally a Bolshevik slogan addressed by "the workers" to the enlisted men of the Imperial Army at the moment of the Russian Revolution.
Poor use of scare quotes. :(
> They were Trotskyists. Yes! They were Trotskyists. Somehow, this completed the day, fulfilled it.
omfglol
> (keep it at that level, please)
np. p.s. npincompletelolcrytpo
"the Russian Revolution killed ultimately through Stalinism maybe somewhere between forty and eighty million people all told."
This is the kind of pseudo left trash one should expect from trots.
Newsflash: Stalin doubled the average life expectancy in the USSR.
Newsflash: Hitler killed 20 million soviet citizens.
This irresponsible quotation by a tenured professor at Harvard law school didn't have so much as a footnote. Back it up -- or back down.
> The left is a thing of sects.
Yeah, a discussion of sectarianism and united front politics is worth having.
> The sects of the left are marginal in the current Unitedstatesean political situation, but we are not irrelevant
What party was screaming loud about united front politics, sectarianism and fighting as a permanent minority, a disloyal opposition since years?
> and we are institutionalized.
No, but so what. You do not even have to hold the illusion of state power to oppose state power.
> they can hear our voices through their headsets telling them they are sell-outs, that they shouldn't cower before Fox News.
Sell outs run about like the measles. No cure, so pop goes the weasel.
> That helps them do the right thing, even if they have nothing but contempt for us, or think we disappeared some time before they got to college.
Hawt. Hint: to be regard with contempt by the enemy is good.
> In the Harvard context--a little Harvard story just 'cause we are at Harvard--
Raz berry beret for u punk.
> Their initiative would have come to nothing if they hadn't acquired momentum with a much larger group,
This is why a certain nameless party argued for democratic centralism etc.
> So where is the left institutionalized? The sects are institutionalized in the United States in the universities, just as the right says.
omfglol no.
but again, so what.
> But the universities are the only place where, when the wave of mass mobilizations receded, there were left on the beach a whole flotsam of networks, larger or smaller sectarian groupuscules.
How can you work with the homeless, be exposed to the homeless and not be aware of left networks that are not in the university? Please, go hop a freight, now.
> We could also "revive critical legal studies."
LDO.
> it comes in part from the homogenizing power of the ideology of the right.
Ideologically the right is just as fragmented. You just have no clue where to apply teh split because of too much hair.
> The center from which we need to recruit
No. Watering down to get a mass of exploiters is not the way forward. Your centrist recruits would waver and break under any pressure.
> there are two kinds of left practice to focus on. One is producing polemical but tightly reasoned analysis and alternatives that are clearly to the left of what American liberals are now willing to contemplate.
Yes.
> The other is to help students resist and colleagues resist cooptation into the training machine of the American regime.
No. Grooming friendlies to seize enemy resources and then use them to serve the interests of the exploited would be a much better pedagogy.
> develop policy alternatives and classroom materials and teaching protocols that will reinforce the liberals, and also establish a presence on their flank to keep them honest.
qft
> I am not in favor of saying we are the servants of the masses.
someone explain what he already noticed -- there is no american proletariat.
> To survive in the belly of the hegemonic whale, we have to care for our movement internally through things like this meeting.
No and this is a typical trotskyite police front move.
> In this situation, it's not necessary to define the left at all. It's enough to recognize its sectarian structure, and there's no point in deciding who's part of it and who's not really part of it.
someone explain what he already noticed -- there is no american proletariat.
> We aren't at a movement stage today
Wir kommen...
