The New Left as Revolt, Decolonization, and the Port Huron Statement

 #Louis Menard, "Change Your Life," The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "The New Left was born in the early nineteen-sixties as a revolt against the modern university, and it died less than ten years later in the auto-da-fe of Vietnam." "People like [Sandra] Cason and [Tom] Hayden cared about injustice, but the fundamental appeal of politics for them was existential. 'We were alike... in our sense of moral adventure, our existential sensibility, our love of poetic action, and our feeling of romantic involvement,' Hayden wrote after meeting Cason.

"The Port Huron Statement echoes [C. Wright] Mills, [author of the 'The Power Elite']." It says that the Cold War had made the dominant power in what Hayden called (after Mills) 'the triangular of the business, military, and political arenas.' "Participatory 'democracy -- democracy in the streets' -- and authenticity were the core principles of Hayden's forty-nine-page draft." "The politics are progressive: regulate private enterprise, shift spending from arms to domestic needs, expand democratic participation in the workplace and public policy-making, support decolonization movements, and advance civil rights by ridding the Democratic Party of its Southern segregationists, the Dixicrats."

"The student didn't really want free speech, or only free speech. They wanted institutional and social change." 

#Argun Appadeerai, "Beyond Domination," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Their joint goal (collaborative work) is to make the case for decolonization, the idea that a different form of decolonization or anti-colonialism was, and continues to be, possible in the Global South -- one that does not rest in Western forms of knowledge, but instead on Indigenous epistemological styles and claims." "The fable of modernity uses the unifying arc of this aggressive universalism, and Miguolo's principal argument is that any variety of Marxist argument that focuses primarily on capitalism, class, and material exploitation misses the forms of power that came through this cultural and epistemological domination." Decoloniality: "a model of politics that seeks to replace extraction from nature with harmony with nature, and hierarchy among humans with conviviality." (These ideas are expressed by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, co-authors of 'On Decoloniality.' Duke University Press). 

"Instead, Achille Mbembe, author of 'Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization,' argues that Africa is a continent rich in resources, epistemologies, and new modes of political association, and that, in its openness to the global circulation of ideas, people, cultures, and goods, we can find an alternate modernity to the one we live in now." 

"Mbembe's Africa is where the newest technologies (digital mediatic, and fiscal) ), in concert with its new forms of language, art, and philosophy, are being experimented with and innovated upon in ways that prepare this emerging Africa to be a model for the decolonization of the planet, without having to abandon or forget the colonial encounters." Thus, the European West, and France in particular, in Mbembe's view, have engaged in a massive effort to place their colonial subjects outside the space where solidarity, humanity, and conviviality properly belong." 

#Letter writer John Mills, The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. - "As the A.C.L.U. and other groups have demonstrated through lawsuits on behalf of young children, it is absurd and immoral to force asylum    seekers to navigate these proceedings without legal counsel. In cases in which there is a credible    claim that deportation could result in death --as when immigrants invoke asylum protection or the Convention Against Torture -- due process requires access to an attorney. Prisoners facing the death penalty are afforded that right, along with many other procedural protections. Our legal system fails if  it does not provide analogous protections, including the right to counsel, to those facing death through immigration proceedings." 

ADDENDUMS:

*Dan McKay, "NM trapping ban passes by just 1 vote," The Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 2021. - "By the slimmest margin, New Mexico legislators granted final approval, Tuesday, [March 18], to a proposal to ban traps, snares, and wildlife poison on public land." "Since the most recent trapping season began, at least nine dogs have been caught in privately set traps and snares on public land, according to Animal Protection Voters and WildEarth Guardians." The state Senate had passed the bill on a 23-16 vote.

*Elise Young, 'People with disabilities left behind in push to defeat pandemic." The Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 2021. - "About 1 in 4 adult Americans, or 61 million people, have a disability that can affect mobility, a cognitive function, hearing and sight, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

*Letter writer Michele J. Gelfand, The New Yorker, March 15, 2021. - "In a study of fifty-seven countries published in 'The Lancet Planetary Health.' my co-authors and I found that in cultures with  looser social norms there were five times the number of COVID cases, and more than eight times the deaths as in cultures with stricter norms."