Hinrich, it would be presumptuous for me to make proposals for the US working class when I am not even inside it.
The main goal of my overview of political/economic crisis is to somehow wake people up to the reality of the seriousness of the situation. I find that it is helpful to place things in context. If the Marxist left had understood the pre-WWI impasse in the same manner as Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps history would have taken a different direction.
Speaking of Luxemberg, when I got home from work yesterday, I found the latest Monthly Review in my mailbox. In it, besides the excellent critique of Burbach and Kargalitsky new book, there is an article by Michael Lowy on the Communist Manifesto that makes almost the same point I was making yesterday--namely, that the Junius Pamphlet is the first major Marxist work to question the lingering optimism about capitalism that undialectical interpretations of the Communist Manifesto had bequeathed to the pre-WWI era revolutionary movement. Lowy is the best kind of Trotskyist, one who thinks creatively and intelligently.
In essence, I believe that the Marxist movement has to be rearmed theoretically with the kind of vision that appears in the Junius Pamphlet. We need to be rearmed for the same reasons: to prevent fascism and war.
Our biggest problem right now is that the intellectual vanguard has illusions in the capitalist system that are entirely unfounded. This includes people who I have deep respect for, from Doug Henwood to Boris Kargalitsky. What is required now is to look into the abyss and have the courage to state that the alternatives are barbarism or socialism. Doug tosses around the possibility of "market socialism" in the conclusion of "Wall Street" while Boris told me that "market socialism" made sense to him the last time I saw him up at the Brecht Forum.
Illusions of a different sort also exist in the two largest non-sectarian Marxist groups in the US. Committees of Correspondence, a group that split from the CPUSA, continues to provide logistical support for Democratic Party candidates, while Solidarity, rooted in the Trotskyist movement, runs what can only be described as anti-Soviet articles in their theoretical magazine Against the Current, edited by the execrable Richard Pipes wannabe Sam Farber.
The most hopeful sign is that journals like Sozialismus, Monthly Review and Socialist Register continue to hammer away at these sorts of illusions. Perhaps one day there can be a conference in Europe that would be co-sponsored by these three and other like-minded Marxists, most especially the PDS. Consolidating a "classical" Marxist current seems task number one. If the mass movement revives, as it certainly should over the next few years, it will be of utmost importance that the theoretical foundations for new revolutionary organizations be in place. This was not the case in the mid-1960s and we paid dearly for this.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)