<snip> Back when there was a USSR, and a Stalin or even a Mao, and Stalinism was a pole of attraction for revolutionary movements, I can seethere was a point in saying Not Us! But now, that's all over. There are no revolutionary movements --sorry Louis P! (Louis G, too) -- though there may be again someday. Stalinism is gone. The CPs that remain are old-folks' clubs. The self-styled Marxist-Leninists in the Trotskyist movement -- like Callinicos, for that matter -- but less the WWP people who have been attracting so much static here -- are just silly or quaint, and no one takes them seriously, even if they understand a tenth of what they are saying, when they start reciting the old formulae. So what is the point of the demarcation drawing?
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JC: I feel a bit like an outsider kibbutzing on a family quarrel, but if I may offer my two cents...
I have no long personal or family history of involvement with the "left," however one defines it. For most of my life I had no very strong political views other than vaguely "liberal" sentiments (leaving aside a best-forgotten youthful conservative phase). My academic training (in European history) was quite conservative, in a scholarly and intellectual, though not necessarily a political sense. My academic mentor used to boast of his direct line of descent from Leopold von Ranke (he was taught by Holborn, who studied under Mommsen, who was a student of etc. etc.) I had only the nodding familiarity with the Marxist tradition that any liberal arts student picks up. It was not until long after I had dropped out of grad school and spent a number of years working for large corporations, and later in the non-profit sector and government, that a light began to dawn... Marx and the socialist tradition were never theoretical toys for me, but a point of view and body of work that is still helping me make sense of my life and the society in which I live. I regard it as more akin to a political and cultural sensibility than a clockwork-like theory of everything. Nor is socialism and Marx the only source on which I draw. Liberalism is of at least equal importance to me, as is the distinctly American (and pragmatic) dissenting tradition, which runs from the iconoclastic and radical elements of the Puritan sensibility, through Tom Paine and the radical wing of the American revolution, through the abolitionists and suffragists of the 19th century. The attempted collaboration and frequent conflict between the American dissenting tradition and continental Marxism, which appears on these shores after the Civil War, is an old story in American life, and in my view one of the historical reasons why there is no strong socialist organization in the US today.
I am probably one of those people, then--an interested bystander, let's say--who the different left political tendencies would like to "convert." Given my pragmatic bent, only a social-democratic point of view makes much sense to me, although the more left-wing, though still democratic left tradition represented by New Politics exerts a considerable emotional appeal. Any socialism worth having, however, will not only preserve but extend the liberal tradition, which, to the vastly imperfect extent that it is expressed in law and social practice in the US and elsewhere, remains a precious and fragile human achievement worth defending at nearly any cost.
The sects merely seem pathological to me. It is hard for an outsider to take seriously their endless splits and overheated, quasi-academic disputes, and I have little doubt that I would not care to live in the society that these peculiar obsessives would organize if given the opportunity. I also agree with Justin that ardent anti-Stalinism in this day and age is beating a dead horse, and particularly in the American context. Michael Harrington is something of a political lodestar for me, and he certainly engaged in plenty of anti-Communist polemics during his career, but what was well worth doing 40 or 50 years ago seems pointless today.
Jacob Conrad