Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> Not snide - it's a term of art among the hard left (of which I still
> consider myself a member). Among the defining characteristics are to
> dismiss the mainstream parties as indistinguishably bourgeois, and
> dismiss electoral politics as somewhere between a waste of time and a
> malignant diversion from the serious business of politics, which is
> bringing about the revolution, however that is supposed to happen.
This is why I myself no longer use the terms "ultra-left" or "opportunist" -- it's almost impossible to use them without incorporating a sneer against those so labelled. Hence I see their use as, on the whole, motivated by an attempt to show how superior the writer/speaker is to everyone else, as in "however that is supposed to happen." The content of that phrase, if it can be considered to have any content whatever, certainly has nothing to do with the ultra-left/opportunist distinction.
Ultra-lefts & opportunists aren't personality types or traitors or whatever, they differ in their experience and in their analysis. And moreover it distorts the question to bring up the old chestnuts about reform vs revolution. Revolutions, if they come, emerge from a capitalist attack on militant and strong reform movements, so the question is about how to mount a reform movement in the u.s. now, not on how to make a revolution.
And the argument against the DP (generally stated) is that it exists to absorb and blunt promising reform movements, not that it is counter-revolutionary or whatever.
Carrol