Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> we could be organizing around their failure and
> opposing more power for the intelligence agencies that screwed up, rather
> than chasing phantoms and spreading fantastic stories that make the left
> look like idiots to most of our potential allies.
>
> It's frustrating.
>
I of course agree with your contempt for the conspiracists, but this summing up is incorrect.
(1) "The Left" does not exist -- I've been arguing this for about six years now, ever since on the old SPOONS marxism list some posters began making the old whines about the left lacking a sense of humor. Therefore "we" have no potential allies; rather, "we" are primarily involved in becoming "A Left" that can have allies, etc.
(2) You are making the same error that various self-hating leftists make in their endless whines about the "dogmatists," the "ultra-leftists," the "sectarians," etc. What they are describing is merely part of the weather in which leftists must operate. It is capitalism, not "the [non-existent] left" which generates such idiocies. I don't deny that they are idiocies; I just deny that we can expect to ever be in a situation in which they don't exist.
(3) No one now has any magic formula for generating "a left." But pending the emergence of such a roughly coherent set of forces with rough and ready modes of cooperation, and manifesting a mass base ("mass" is not defined by numbers alone or even primarily) it is pointless to complain about the weather.
Carrol