Leftists in the United States have neither a mass social democratic party nor any organization to the left of it that amounts to a "political party". Leftists in most of the nations that have mass social democratic parties built them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but American leftists, in part because they were repeatedly defeated by the white supremacist elite in the South, missed the boat. As an old saying goes, opportunity has to be seized by her forelock -- behind she is bald. Since American activists and organizers have neither a mass social democratic party nor any political party to the left of it, they are practically forced to go on their own, developing myriad associations focused on discrete issues and identities (many of which do not last very long); and since there are so many one-issue and one-identity associations that come and go, it's hard for them to get together and work out a common long-term political agenda and strategy and tactics to advance it. That's a vicious circle.
>I thought that's why there was an effort on this list to articulate
>a humane slogan for the left recently, in order to attract the
>attention of a popular audience - against the time when there's some
>news of revolutionary import to pass along to them.
If you add up audiences of all efforts of individuals and organizations on the left, from tiny to relatively big, they would probably add up to something like the size of "a popular audience," but the problem is that members of the audience are not all politically active, nor are the politically active among them consciously working together to advance the same political agenda. "Everybody just rolls their own," as you put it. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>