WHERE ARE THE WORKING-CLASS RADICALS? HAVE THEY ALL BEEN CO-OPTED INTO THE PETITE BOURGEOISE OF, SAY, LEGAL ACADEMIA?

Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, New Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2009) ("So it was not ideology that determined the political choices of ... tenant farmers. It was economic interest." Id. at xi. "My tentative answer to questions about the political choices of working people is . . . as follows: Poor and working people, unendingly pressed by economic necessity, will ordinarily focus on personal, short-run, material gains: owning the land that one's tills, protecting the market for the goods produced in one's shop. Extensive experience with other kinds of workers, common oppression (as in a prison or in war), or a dramatic disruption of shared expectations (such as a plant closing), may give rise to a broader class point of view. But it will always be more difficult for lower-class protagonists to rise about the interests of the moment than it is for upper-class historical actors, who, then and now, have more money, more leisure, and a smaller number of persons to organize into a cohesive force, and who instinctively gravitate to the preservation of the system as a whole." "This conclusion should not be understood to devalue the aspirations of poor and working-class persons, then or now. ..." Id. at xii-xiii. "One final aspect of [Thomas] Paine's thought deserves respectful attention. Paine, and other after him...transcended any form of nationalism with the words 'My country is the world.' This was an is an astonishingly radical idea. It is the thesis that dissenters in the United States cannot be content with any interpretation of the American experience confined within national boundaries. So long as we limit ourselves to that which has occurred within the framework of single nation, we will always arrive at a place that is parochial and chauvinistic. A merely American set of values will always be Athenian in the sense that whatever equality it extends to those who are considered 'citizens,' even if that designation is extended to, say, women, people of color, and Native Americans, there will always be those not included, whom the Greeks called 'barbarians.' A society that affirms anything less than the belief that every human being on the face of the earth is equally entitled to the goods things that the earth provides will in the end find some group of enemy combatants to hate." "I conclude that the American Revolution most deserving to be remembered is not a tradition associated with any of the better-known Founding Fathers. Rather, what is most enduring from this period is the set of ideas promulgated by Paine, and by other self-taught workingmen in the succeeding 125 years." Id. at xix. "The intellectual origins of the American radical tradition were rooted in men's efforts to make a way of life at once free and communal. What held together these dissenters from the capitalist consensus was more than ideology: it was also the daily practice of libertarian and fraternal attitudes in institutions of their own making. The clubs, the unorthodox congregations, the fledgling trade-unions were the tangible means, in theological language the 'works,' by which revolutionaries kept alive their faith that men could live together in a radically different way. In times of crisis resistance turned into revolution; the underground congregation burst forth as a model for the Kingdom of God on earth, and an organ of secular 'dual power'." "The revolutionary tradition is more than words and more than isolated acts. Men create, maintain, and rediscover a tradition of struggle by the crystallization of ideas and action into organisations which they make for themselves. Parallel to Leviathan, the Kingdom is dreamed, discussed, in minuscule form established. Within the womb of the old society--it is Marx's metaphor--the new society is born." Id. at 173. American society, American business, American educational institution, etc., have become so much managed from the top down, that meaningful innovation which is not simple repackaging of the old, is nearly impossible, Yes, there are notable exception, such as Apple where ideas seem to float up to senior management. However, if we are honest, our whole educational system is pretty much designed to train students to be followers, middle-class, entertained, noncritical thinking, consumers and nothing more. The complete aim of higher education, for most, is getting a job. The country is falling apart, but this may be good. For when things get really bad, the poor and working classes will have suffered deeply and, perhaps, a new wave of American Radicalism will emerge therefrom. We need a twenty-first-century Thomas Paine. Though I suspect he or she will not be an American, but rather a citizen of the world.).