I agree with you that "the first breakthrough is _always_ in practice." Agreeing with you on that, though, doesn't end discussion.
Chomsky and writers like him are great resources for people who are just beginning to think about the problem of capitalism/imperialism. But they do not suffice for those who have already come to agree with them that, yes, indeed capitalism/imperialism _is_ the enemy of human freedom, as it is a great problem in itself, causes new problems (like the international jihadists of the al-Qaeda tendency), and aggravates old ones (like patriarchy in developing nations and sexism in developed nations).
For instance, take the Iraq War. Our main business at this point is, or should be, not to convince people that it is bad -- a majority of Americans, not to mention the world, are already convinced of that. The questions are what might move people to action, what practical actions they might take, and so on.
If problems like the Iraq War, symptoms of capitalism/imperialism, raise the questions of practical actions, capitalism/imperialism, their cause, raises another: there are still people who believe that capitalism/imperialism is inimical to human flourishing, but there is no world view that functions an effective rival to it. My concern is not combating the ideology of capitalism/imperialism, but if we have any world view of our own aside from our criticism of it
The embryonic idea of 21st-century socialism rising in Venezuela is a partial exception. Its strength is that its idiom is very much rooted in the culture and history of Venezuela. What works in Venezuela won't work here, though. We need our own world view, too, rooted in the peculiar American conditions.
I think that the search for such a new world view, as well as learning and re-learning practical things to do from successful organizers (whether they are white evangelicals at home, populist Islamists in West Asia, Bolivarians in Venezuela, or Black reformers and revolutionaries of the American past), is one of the things that we can do, having read recent reflections of Stan Goff, Joaquin Bustelo, and M. Junaid Alam.
As Junaid says, "the American left is not currently able to mobilize large numbers of people for any given cause." We have to find productive things to do in _this_ context of inaction whose duration is indefinite, things which hopefully will create resources that would become useful should the context change in the future.
<blockquote>Dear readers, writers, and supporters, After 28 months of operation, (November 2003 - March 2006), and two months of idleness, the Left Hook journal is coming to a close. The decision to stop running the journal was not an easy one, and it would be dishonest for me to say that I do it without a sense of sadness and regret.
However, I feel that closing the journal now is the best available option. When the previous co-editors and I started the project, the idea was to create an organ to express the interests, ideas, and purpose of a youth movement; we would serve as a place to exchange and strengthen ideas reflected in action on the ground. But at the present historical juncture, there is no such movement; it requires no keen insight to see that the American left is not currently able to mobilize large numbers of people for any given cause. In lieu of action on the ground, the journal nonetheless thrived for a time, with hundreds of contributors submitting quality content, overwhelmingly produced by youth. But, with other excellent and larger leftist sites already established, and in the absence of a youth-specific movement, there appears little need for a niche journal for which only college-age people and younger can write.
On a more positive note, I strongly encourage all previous contributors to send new submissions to another excellent online journal, one which, I think, best combines serious analysis with up-to-date commentary, www.mrzine.org, the online offshoot of Monthly Review. For what it's worth, that is also where my own most recent piece and some of my future ones will appear.
Soon, hopefully within the next week and certainly within the next two, I will fill in the more recent material that was placed on the Left Hook front page but never in the topic archives, and then bundle the completed site in a downloadable little format so people can suck onto their hard drives a little slice of history. After that, I imagine the site will just stay online in the technical sense until its lease expires around November and the domain name expires.
I'd like to thank everyone who expresssed encouragement and gave support to the journal, making its existence possible and sustainable long enough for it to be appreciated by many others.
Finally, I would like to close with one request, that is, to ask people not to look upon the end of this journal as an end in itself. The journal was always one means to an end, one path among many that may or may not bring us to our destination, but at least help bring us closer to it. I look forward to seeing some of you on another path.
Sincerely,
M. Junaid Alam
<http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Y6W3Ub3e5MoJ:lefthook.org/closed.html+lefthook+closed+mrzine&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1></blockquote>
On 12/5/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Btw, unlike Ravi, I don't think that posting to lists
> is "pretending" to be part of a community. It's not
> the same as having a bunch of folks you can go out
> drinking with all the time and invite over to each
> other's houses, say high to on the brick & mortar
> street. But given the conditions of ours lives, I bet
> I am like most people these days in not having such a
> group of people, everyone I know around here in the
> flesh is too damn busy. So this virtual community is a
> real community. I've made real friends here, including
> people I know in person and see a few times a year,
> and have known now for more than a decade, and have
> made virtual friends with others I may never meet but
> to whom I feel as close if not closer than most people
> I see every day or moderately often in "meatspace."
>
> It's the real thing. It's just that we have to do it
> on line. Maybe it's the difference between cybersex
> and real physical contact sex, but haven't we helped
> each other in concrete ways when some us have needed
> help? Don't you feel you actually know at l;east some
> of the long-timers? Don't you miss them when you don't
> participate for a while? This is 21st century
> community, for better or worse.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>