Reply #14: I think it's probably the second one, much as I wish otherwise. [View All]

[QC]

The 60s Left had some fine legacies, but one of the less admirable ones was the bizarre notion that the proles were the forces of reaction and the real revolutionary vanguard was affluent college kids.

The main effect of this bourgeois takeover of the Left is that very few Leftists have a personal sense of what class means. I'm sorry, but learning politics from one's Marxist comparative lit professor in a graduate seminar is not the same as growing up in a mining camp, as my father did, or in a factory worker's home, as I did, and seeing the class system up close. (I say this as a blue-collar kid who got to go to grad school and sit in lots of seminar rooms listening to Marxist professors who have never once had to worry about how they were going to pay the rent.)

Look around DU and you'll see plenty of snide commentary about the proles, how ignorant and silly and gauche they are. That sort of thing can only come from very comfortable people who have been insulated from the sort of hardships that are part of everyday life for most folks.