> The weakness of American leftists is that, more often than not, activism
> that addresses foreign policy (debt, war, etc.) is divorced from activism
> that tackles domestic concerns. Those who can't make demands for
> themselves can't and won't make demands for others.
Chuck0 wrote:
> The American left fucking annoys me with it's obsession with stuff
> happening elsewhere. Two hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, prompting some of
> our comrades to go there and help, while the rest of the left went to
> Washington to engage in a pointless, feel good Bush-bashing festival.
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Foreign policy issues are hardly "pointless", but you are both right to note
that the US far left, such as it is, mostly seems to be little more than a
solidarity movement with strong Third Worldist undertones which waxes and
wanes in accordance with the incidence of US armed intervention abroad.
"Necessary but not sufficient".
Partly this is true of the radical left in all of the advanced capitalist countries - the inevitable result of the historic failure of the Western working class to fulfil the revolutionary mission ascribed to it by classical Marxism, and the appearance instead of insurrectionary peasant armies on the less developed periphery as the source of left-wing inspiration.
At least, in Europe and other capitalist countries, the social democratic and Communist parties afforded the opportunity for left-wingers to engage in mass activity involving the immediate needs of the Western working class. Even in Canada, the NDP provided a more modest avenue to the organized working class and mass politics.
In the US, the working class gravitated towards the Democrats, so that in terms of its social composition and elements of its program, the party could arguably be seen as a proxy for the social democratic and labour parties abroad. But its leadership has been so integrated in the ruling class and in America's "bipartisan" imperialism that a large part of the US left was repelled (forcibly or voluntarily) from it.
The alternatives to involvement in the Democratic party currently on offer - episodic solidarity work or participation in innocuous Marxist and anarchist groups or even, to a lesser extent, in the still-marginal Green party - simply don't afford any significant contact with the mass of the population and its concerns. This is the material basis, you might say, of the US left's ideological "divorce from activism that tackles domestic concerns." As a consequence, such attachment as it has to the US working class has become mostly rhetorical and idealized and abstracted from any real engagement with its current consciousness and concerns.