Did you read the exchange, or have you forgotten it? We were debating issues until Alex wrote, in avoidance to telling points, "Maybe you're one of those privileged radicals from the 60s who could afford to go where the struggle was. Not all of us are so fortunate." My personal remarks were solely and explicitly in reply to that provocation. That wasn't his only evasion. He also taunted me about Noam Chomsky, to which I replied in an aside, which switched on Bill Lear's recorded message. Those were the unprincipled elements of Alex's challenge; his refusal (still!) to address the substantive response to his initial affront. They are not material to the debate on activism.
Alex has taken Hitchens and Cockburn as his models, as he eventually acknowledged; I have taken the ones I listed, and spent 40 years doing my best to carry on their work. If you believe that all political involvements are equally valid, there really isn't much left to discuss. In my opinion, the task of activists is to set an example of involvement in mass struggle, and to call upon others to join, and that those choices do matter. No, I do not believe it is, or ought to be, every activist's full-time project, nor did I present such an argument. Nothing I wrote in any way criticized your personal life choices, or anyone's.
No, I did not say they are the only things that matter, but without them there is no struggle, no political growth, no progress. I now realize that I was mistaken in expecting to meet kindred souls on LBO-talk, and that much, perhaps most, of the dialogue here is explicitly or implicitly a cynical assault on those who seek to organize actions in solidarity with the oppressed, or avoidance of that responsibility through academic diversions. Alex's demand for a "Marxist" theoretical reason to support a straightforward demand for women's freedom from oppression is one example, as are most of the posted remarks in his defense. No one who has escorted a frightened woman past an angry and violent Operation Rescue gantlet into an abortion clinic would require a "Marxist" justification for that act of solidarity, and no Marxist would question its importance. Only a person who prefers contemplation to engagement would seek solace in such a discussion, as a substitute for engagement.
I do not agree with Doug that leftists are to blame for the lack of a mass constituency. Every time a social crisis erupts, the constituency materializes and thrusts leftists into positions of leadership. We cannot create the objective circumstance by force of will, but we can prepare ourselves and others to intervene as conditions develop. Today in the United States is very similar politically (by which I include the feebleness and fragmentation of class struggle) with the period of the mid-1920s, shortly before the TUUL-led wave of militancy that preceded and immediately followed the Crash. Those isolated but exemplary communist-led struggles -- especially at Lawrence, Massachusetts; Harlan, Kentucky; and Gastonia, North Carolina -- served two essential purposes. They created a group of experienced organizers who fanned out later to propagate labor militancy on a national scale during the Great Depression, and they set an example for the CIO to emulate later, at Flint, Toledo, Anderson, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and so forth. Yet the situation of the twenties was so bad that William Z. Foster's pamphlet, The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement, offered scant hope of major progress to those who joined the left unions in their infancy, while most other socialists and radicals of that day lurched even farther to the right, and the prevailing view on the left read like Doug Henwood's despair of today.
If Alex were subject to conscription to fight for the United States against oppressed people at home or abroad, I doubt he'd be so contemptuous of people who protest against war. His slur on activism is really naked national chauvinism. He regards protesting against the Clinton Pentagon's murder of Iraquis as "useless activism," caricatured as "waltzing around," while protesting the loss of jobs in his neighborhood is authentic "struggle," a despicable and reactionary distinction if ever there was one. If that is your idea of a comrade, you are welcome to him.
Ken Lawrence