>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.
Au contraire, Max, the LP is foregrounding just the sorts of economic issues that should please you. While it's not true that they've avoided the abortion issue, they do keep most of the "social issues" in the background. And Mazzocchi never gives a public talk without pointing out that the members of his union love their guns.
For some of us, like me, there are few political issues more important than access to abortion without legal or economic impediment. And for some of us, like me, this whole prioritizing of the economic over the social is either coy or cowardly. Which is why I quoted that bit from Butler the other day about producing division in the name of unity - "Indeed, one way of producing this division becomes clear when we ask, which movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division between the material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of political activism?"
Doug