Word: shapiros
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Martin M. Shapiro, professor of Government and constitutional expert, will leave Harvard this June to take a tenured faculty position at the University of California at San Diego...
...Shapiro goes so far with his rewrite-job he ends up enlisting Lenin (corrected by Peter Shapiro), quoting this poor, much-abused bolshevik to the effect that "the main virtues of a revolutionary are patience and irony." Proceeding from this quote, Shapiro criticizes the '69 activists for their lack of these traits. In defence of Lenin and the '69ers, I'd like to point out that...
...movement of all races, men and women, allied with other forces to smash the bourgeois state and set up workers rule. Therefore he did not pose patience and irony as substitutes for anger at oppression and building a revolutionary movement, as a political program to replace revolutionary work. Since Shapiro quotes Lenin so favorably, does this mean he endorses the overthrow of the U.S. government? Does he want to join with the Workers Power in the gargantuan task of building for socialist revolution...
...Aside from painting a smear of communist politics in "We," Shapiro attacks the '69 activists for having been too impatient, which is to say too anxious to destroy rotten institutions, or to put it more simply, too communistic. Thus Shapiro uses Lenin to attack "Lenin...
...actions (like the printers strike we're helping support at Harvard) and educating students to see through myths about workers so that the movement we build is consciously pro-worker, and so on. We are very "patient" because we've seen many people come through despite great obstacles. Unlike Shapiro's intentionally depressing article--his "student movement is dead forever" line comes through loud and clear--we have a lot of confidence in people based on a lot of good experience seeing people change for the better. This is what inspired me about '69, seeing people change so thoroughtly based...