As everyone knows, American leftists are once again at one of those low points -- after a few seemingly promising eruptions of activist energy in the 2000 Green Party campaign, the global justice movement focused on international debt (before 2001), Palestinian solidarity (during the second Intifada), demonstrations against the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars (till 2004), immigrant rights demonstrations this spring -- despite the fact that a big majority of Americans are now largely in agreement -- for once! -- with American leftists on one of the major issues of the moment not only in the USA but also in the world. So, the initiative on Iraq gets seized by the James Baker wing of the US power elite. :-|
Why?
One of the reasons is that too many American leftists are still fighting the wars of the past and can't focus on the points of agreement that do exist among us.
It's really important for American leftists to get over the past divisions that do not have any practical consequence today. The merits and demerits of Herbert Aptheker's scholarship and political activism will continue to be debated among professional and amateur historians of slavery and the American Communist movement, but that is of historical interest only.
We have to bury "dead Stalinists" and live in the present, building a new American Left based on what exists today. If a new American Left is to emerge (which may or may not happen), it can't be like the old Communist Party or its competitors on the Left, nor will it be like the movements of the long Sixties. Culture and society today are not like those of their times.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>