Max, need I remind you again that LP has made no such compromise? Again as an LP member, you are suggesting the very mentality that led Cockburn astray.
mbs: You are quite right. The LP for the most part is following the standard practice of all-purpose left groups by putting forward a long menu of 'what we stand for' with much too limited an emphasis on what is most important.
>Or rejecting free distribution of needles to heroin
>addicts.
Which means health care for everyone but very poor people.
mbs: nonsense. universalization of health care would bring coverage previously lacking precisely to the poor, more than anyone else.
> Or failing to abolish patents for government-subsidized
>pharmaceutical research.
Which means needless death for a lot of brown and black non Americans; hey, who the fuck cares?
mbs: Such needless death is what we have now, along with our precious principles. At minimum, it means needless rents to owners of patents. The Gov could still finance medical aid or permit foreign licensing in special cases. I guess you never heard the saying, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
> Any number of things. An a priori
>purist approach is doomed.
You don't understand a word of Marxism. The labor movement, alone with the latent social power to change society, takes on broader concerns to demonstrate that its victory promises universal progress.
mbs: this is philosophy, not politics. to coin a phrase, the point is not to understand the world (e.g., by positing an alternative one), the point is to change it. pretty nifty phraseology, don't ya think?
As Marx wrote in 1866:
"Apart from their original purposes they must now learn to act deliberately as a organizing centers of the owrkign class in the broad interest of its *complete emancipation*. They must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction. Considering themselves and acting as the champions and representatives of the whole working class, they cannot fial to enlist the non society men into their ranks. They must look carefully after the interests of the worst paid trades, such as the agricultural labourers, rendered powerless by exceptional circumstances. They must convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions."
Quoted in Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities, p. 276.
mbs: I note the phrase "must aid every social and political movement tending in that direction . . . " and thank you for the citation.
regards,
mbs
(noticed this a.m. that 'rnb' depending on typeface resembes 'mb'. you might want to change your sig, lest a horrible misunderstanding ensue. You could use r.n.b., RNB, or rb.)