the high moral expectations of some guy
> in Berkeley. I may also pass by a few junkies infecting each other with
> HIV...
I live in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, and have an experience w/ H myself and know former junkies like my Vietnam Vet friend who fought in Khe Sanh in '67, where I routinely (last week w/ Larry, a wonderful, funny, empathic, gay male friend active in WRL, a founder of Nebraskans for Peace, on his way to visit his HIV+ Native American lover in a SRO, we saw two homeless junkies cooking up their smack in a spoon on the street) see junkies shot up. On a Sat. or Sunday morning esp. after the 1st and 15th I can see used needles in the gutter, sometimes next to used condoms.
As someone on the edge of poverty myself (make a few K less than Chuck Grimes, on average), for you to think I don't identify w/ those made homeless, and don't seeth w/ anger at the rich fucks in the financial district that I travel through walking to work at a job w/o health benefits, owned by two millionaires, one of whom was a member of SDS in the late 60's, for you to assume, again, I am some heartless, lefty intellectual in Berkeley living it up on some foundation grant funded job, is just more ugly bile.
Why, is the KPRF such an atavistic force? Because it takes the despair of folks driven into to poverty by the dissolution of the USSR, w/ it's paternalistic, authoritarian welfare state, and gives them the false hope that the power of Russia can be restored on the world stage w/o a thorough modernization and democratization of Russian political culture and political economy. Simply re-nationalizing the commanding heights of the economy, will lead to the same old pseudo-communist bureaucratic collectivist or, if others prefer from another Trot and Maoist pov, state capitalist social formation where the "owners" of the state that owns all the major means of production, distribution and exchange, are a new privileged, exploiting class. Workers saw through it in the fSU, with abundant jokes, sabotage, theft, and vodka swilling, that they didn't live in a socialist democracy or, "actually existing socialism."