In response to the choleric Larry

Left must look inward to see what youth flock to anti-corporate demos but shun party politics

By Michele Landsberg

  My experiences in the feminist movement help me to understand and to respond to a couple of Lary's long-standing "irritants". First to the question of non-voting, apathetic youth.
  Whenever a large group of people is being criticized for "not joining", the burden of proof and understanding rests on the "already-joined". I remember how angry I used to be, 15 years ago, when feminism was accused of being too white and middle-class, and excluding women of colour. It took me years to get over my defensiveness and begin to see the hundreds of tiny, invisible ways in which the white, middle-class activists took up all the ground and all the air, commandeered all the committees (on the grounds of "experience"), spoke "on behalf of" those they had never listened to, and so on and on. Painful self-assessments were in order. The women's movement has come a long way since those early, oblivious years.
  Surely it's up to us on the left to look inward to learn why the young, in their thousands, are flocking to the anti-corporate, anti-globalization protests in the streets, while ignoring the established political parties. Young people today are more activist, engaged and political than they have been in two decades. They're just doing it in a new way that some of us don't recognize!
  It's up to the left to work on our issues and present them in as compelling a manner as, say, the Council of Canadians has done. The right-wing has successfully spread the propaganda that governments are useless, impotent and stupid. Activist youth can see that in part they are right : While governments and even left-wing parties flounder in confusion, corporations know just what they want and how to get it. Naked, narrow self-interest certainly sharpens their focus and techniques.
  Second irritant: those gol-darn ethnic minorities who run as candidates for the Reform Alliance Party, even though it has a shady past (Social Credit --- ugh!) and some creepy friends. Has Larry ever read and thought about Andrea Dworkin's book Right-Wing Women? Oppressed and excluded people very often flock to where the power is and identify with the very ones who oppress them. Servile wives married to bullying and affluent husbands are no more or less pitiable and obvious in their motives than these ethnic Alliance candidates. Those wives would say, and mean, that they love their husbands and are exercising complete free will in identifying with their husband's interests. We can't win them over by insulting their motives, but by showing, as best we can, how their interests can be better served by standing with those who share their experience. (Every wife is one husband away from welfare...etc...)
  It's amazing how many middle-aged women I hear from, who used to be married to wealthy doctors or lawyers, and who always despised feminism, and who are suddenly turning to feminists for help now that their husband has dumped them for someone younger and left them penniless .
  I do have to control my impulse to talk about "cupboard love", but on the other hand, such a crisis, however it came about, is a true teaching moment....
  In any case, we shouldn't get too flustered by the opportunists who run for the Alliance party. They do not represent large constituencies --- I'm sure their own ethnic groups view them with a jaundiced eye --- and, in any case, the Liberal and Tory parties have always sported a few of these "roses in their lapels". We, on the other hand, must talk directly and listen to the minorities who are unrepresented.

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