Uuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, what was the point you missed? What else was the point of origin for my initial radicalization except seeing billions of tax dollars spent from JFK-Ford, killing 2.8 million Vietnamese? marching under banners of CISPES to stop Contra Aid and cheering on the FMLN in El Salvador in the 80's. Being part of a huge crowd that destroyed railroad tracks at Concord Naval Weapons Station after Brian Willson had his legs severed by a train on the way to the dock to deliver US weapons and munitions to El Salvador to slaughter a hundred thousand or so. Going to NISGUA meetings to learn about and agitate against the US funded slaughter from '54 on of about 200,000.
What, y'all need to acquire is a more nuanced view of history that incorporates the unfortunate tragedy that, as much as the Kapitalist Empire structures every possible moment of our being on this planet, the record of the revolutionary left, esp. the Leninist sector of it, in the 20th century was, in many ways, a competing Class Society with Imperial mechanisms in which the ruling bureaucracies extracted privileges due to the fusion of political/ideological/economic power in a State/Party apparatus that was a Dictatorship Over the proletariat and peasantry. (See, a book with with a preface by Wallerstein or Chomsky, I forget which, "Revolution In The Third World, " by G. Chaliand, for starters.)
We, have to simultaneously, keep our eyes on the main enemy, but, the Left is damned again if in this century, it does engage in a thorough going ruthless critique of it's past practice and ideological bases. Why should anyone on the shopfloor or in an office cubical listen to anything a leftist spouting rhetoric like one sees on too many left fora or from a rally stage that has no concrete referent to any reality they know of? That excuses slaughter (of Communists and other left tendencies, by Stalinists, Kronstadt, GULAG, land reform in North Vietnam in the 50's, Ho Chi Minh killing Trotskyists, homosexuals being thrown off briges in Shanghai during the GPCR, queers quarinteened in Cuba in the 70's... ) Aaargh. Michael Pugliese