Lefty despair

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Sep 21 20:55:06 PDT 2002


Sometimes one loses because the enemy is stronger. These bellyachings about left weakness hallucinate that a handful of people just by being smart and witty could all by themselves overthrow capitalism regardless of what capital did.

In fact from any realistic viewpoint (realistic in recognizing the strength of capital) the achievements of the left in the last 150 have been simply awe-inspiring.

It awes me in retrospect to remember even what we accomplished in a petty little hole-in-the-wall like Bloomington-Normal back in the '60s.

We did pretty damn well through a long succession of defeats in the '70s and '80s too. My best guess is that the people who are complaining (with the exception of Jenny Brown) have probably never so much as written a leaflet: and I'm pretty sure they have never been faced with the problem of when and where to make 200 half-sheet leaflets distributed by two people do the most work on a campus of 6000.

Carrol



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