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Richard Levin "Activist Politics" and/or the Job Crisis in the Humanities Tm taking up our editor's invitation in issue 47 to respond to the exchange between Michael Bérubé, and Jim Neilson and Gregory Meyerson that appeared there. I want to focus on their disagreement about ways to deal with the crisis in the job market, but before discussing this I'll look briefly at some more general issues related to it. And before looking at them I should warn prospective readers that I was recently accused ofbeing "a seU-confessed Uberal" (Drakakis, Rev. 406-7), which I self-confess is true. Left/Right Equivalence In their review of his book (45: 268) and again in their response to his response (47: 247), Neilson and Meyerson accuse Bérubé of using "the left/right extreme thesis" or "trope of left/right equivalence" that equates the far right and far left and that was "fundamental" in "legitimating" US support ofrightist dictatorships in CentralAmerica. I don't understand the connection, since this support (which I'm just as opposed to as he is) was legitimated by the claim that the far right was very different from the far left, for otherwise there would be no reason to favor it. In fact many people behind this support were on the far right and certainly didn't argue that they were equivalent to the left. Yet I think the equivalency thesis has some merit if it's properly qualified. We must recognize that neither the far right nor the far left is a single entity: there are three distinct groups on the far right— fiscal reactionaries, religious fundamentalists, and the militias. The far left is divided into several separate and often hostile factions. Clearly no group on the right is literally "equivalent" to any group on the left, yet it can be shown that many people at these two extremes, despite their important differences, share certainbasic tendencies, and to show this I can draw much of my evidence from Neilson and Meyerson. There is, to begin with, a marked tendency by partisans at both extremes to view life as-a Manichean conflict between the good forces and the forces ofevil, which are often personified and demonized as a vast malevolent monster seeking to enslave us all (see my "Polarization "). Stephen Greenblatt points out that most Marxists treat capitalism not "as a complex historical movement" but "as a unitary demonic principle" (151), and this is demonstrated by Neilson and 266 the minnesota review Meyerson's assertion that they "identify capitalism as the engine behind global suffering" (47: 242). Note that "capitalism" has become a monolithic super-agency that does things all by itself—of course only bad things—and that the assertion can be transformed into a credo of the far right by simply replacing "capitalism" with one of its favorite demons, like communism (no longer very useful), the Jews, the AntiChrist , the UN, feminism, secular humanism, or the Trilateral Commission (a Bircher target that's also attacked by Neilson and Meyerson—47: 244). The two extremes can even use the same terminology for this demon: the militias call it "the New World Order" (Bennet), which is now adopted by leftists Uke Baker (270), Ginsberg (215), and Giroux (312). Pat Robertson and the militias blame it on "international bankers," while leftists blame "global" or "transnational capitalism" (they don't refer to it as "international," which has positive connotations for them). As a result of this view of the world, many people on the far right and far left are single-causers; they believe not only that everything the demon does has bad effects in our society, but also that everything bad in our society is caused by this demon. Right-wing extremists hold feminism or secular humanism or ZOG responsible for drugs, crime, floridation, and the decline of "famUy values," and many leftists —including some appearing in mr—claim that capitalism is the cause of racism and sexism (Cotter 119-21, Lewis 97-98, Young 28891 ). This, in turn, leads to the belief that there's a single cure, and only this one cure, for all these social iUs: the complete extirpation of...

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