I though that this from Chavez looks like an important acknowledgement of where we are:
> I don't
>accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that
>must be revised.
Bit this sounds like a recipe for philistinism to me
>I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a
>very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing ... That position
>often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse ... Try and make your
>revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a
>millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias.'
This is caricature, but its effect is to be snooty about clarifying what is and what is not at issue. That, more than anything, seems to me to be the problem with the left in the US, Britain, and maybe in Venezuela and elsewhere, too.
I don't see a lack of activism as the problem, but a lack of clarity. Too often, on the left, old labels pretend a common interest or programme, but once you start talking you discover that your new found comrades think that it is self-evident that the international community should be sending troops into Darfur/Yugoslavia/Somalia; or that to them it is self-evident that living standards in the west need to be constrained (or - from the other point of view - that they shouldn't).
The recent Iraq war was an interesting forcing house for theories about 'imperialism' for example, but for the most part the big books that were written (by David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Michael Mann) were incoherent and contradictory. But there was precious little desire for theoretical clarification on the part of the anti-war movement, which, as Doug described at the time, had no strong desire for thinking beyond the immediate imperatives of the conflict.
It is that activist short-termism that is the greatest weakness of the left, in my view.