The decline of the left is timed to the end of the Vietnam war and the Supreme Court decision on abortion. 2 major irritants were removed from American society. The problem is that the Marxist left became tremendously disoriented by the sudden change. Instead of dealing with objective conditions, it projected possibilities onto American society that did not exist. This meant that all the Maoists and Trotskyists began colonizing basic industry in expectation that a prerevolutionary situation was unfolding. In reality, the important arenas of struggle were Central American solidarity, ecology, gay rights, etc. In the one significant trade union struggle--Teamsters for a Democratic Union--the breakthrough came as a result of the efforts of Marxists who were able to put things into perspective, god bless them. Instead of talking about transforming the Teamsters Union into a revolutionary union, they simply spoke about getting rid of the gangsters and making it a more effective voice for workers wage and job security demands. This was in fact much more revolutionary than all of the "revolutionary" caucuses set up by pinhead vanguard groups.
>The 1930s seemed to have a different result with the combination of CIO
>militancy and overall political organization tied to Popular Front
mobilization.
>It left an integration of organization and political mobilization that,
despite
>the ravages of McCarthyism still blunted the drive by corporations for any
>pre-New Deal restoration and in fact pushed forward a number of expansions of
>the welfare state even in the 50s, from education to transportation (however
>cloaked in "defense" terms).
The 1930s was a working-class mobilization. Nothing like this happened in the 1960s. The misfortune of the US left was in not recognizing this reality and making the best of it. Instead it went chasing after chimera.
>The antiwar movement, like much of the New Left, seemed to emphasize the
purity
>of message over long-term organization tied to broad political power. The
>result was a flowering of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of
>separate organizations, but with no glue holding them together. It is that
>broader glue that was missing. Now, many of the "party building"
formations of
>the 1970s sought to supply that glue, but they in many ways in their own
purity
>of message merely duplicated the reasons for the lack of institutional glue.
The glue that held the antiwar organizations together was the mass demonstrations. Any attempt to do more than this would have resulted in failure. The Trotskyist fight to make the antiwar movement a "single issue" movement was quite correct.
>The antiwar movement seemed to combine the rigity of its single-issue message
>surrounded by a sea of party fanaticism - a combination lacking any real
>institutional glue that could carry the movement forward beyond the specific
>crisis of the war.
The 1960s and 70s could have resulted in the creation of a nonsectarian socialist party. Unfortunately, the "Marxist-Leninist" model still had some credibility at the time. In the event of a new radicalization, I personally will devote all my efforts to the creation of such an organization. There are thousands of others who will join in. Right now it is virtually an impossible task, because there seems to be no compelling need for one. I am going out on a limb and state that in the next ten years, there will be a need. You can bet the ranch on that.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)