>I could easily rewrite your last graf:
>"I've often thought that it is the self-deluded optimism of many on
>the left that, having given up on attaining socialism as a real goal,
>substitute endorsement of phantasmic candidates as a substitute. If
>you can't win, you can at least pretend to yourself you're winning."
And if you assume that always, everywhere, working class forces are powerless and thus any win is "phantasmic", then your statement could be accurate.
But then, if you assume that every lesser win is impossible, then that just echoes your larger message that any broader attainment of socialism is impossible.
Unless of course you have enlisted with the DeLeonists who argued that nothing could ever be achieved until the day the working class in one stroke took power, until then any reform was merely an illusion? But I hadn't heard you hawking THE PEOPLE, so I may have been unfair in not recognizing your DeLeonist millenialism, where we must suffer the Beast of capitalism unvarnished until the Second Coming as it is instantly destroyed with the socialist sword in one stroke.
-- Nathan Newman