> Hands up all who feel it is not a problem of the contemporary left that it
> is an isolated bubble apart from quote unquote quote ordinary people, in
> whatever their formulation.
> Hands up. Stand up and be counted.
=================
Everyone is standing, including Carrol, Yoshie, Doug, Miles et al. There is
no dispute that there are no longer any left socialist or Marxist movements
of any consequence.
The real question is: Who feels "incorrect ideas and tactics" of one sort or another are primarily to blame for the exhaustion of the organized far left, and who believes it is mainly owing to capitalism's enduring (and, for the left, altogether unexpected) capacity to provide the mass of the population with jobs, income, and access to credit?
For Marxists and others on the far left, there really is no good alternative: either huddle together in intellectual and activist ghettoes and hurl manifestoes into the void or mix in more mainstream milieus and progressively discover through practice that the mass of the population is simply unwilling - because it finds it unnecessary - to become involved in anything other than well-contained electoral struggles for incremental reform. There is little possibiilty to merge theory and practice, as there once was and could one day be again.
For now, I don't see that it matters much whether one lives in a college town or in the suburbs, or that some like Carrol enjoy the exhilarating struggle for "political clarity" in smaller intellectual circles and others like Jim prefer to broadly engage more politically conventional working people through the unions and the DP. It's really a question of what each finds more personally satisfying. There's no political obligation to struggle over the proper course because the far left is powerless to much influence the course of events one way or the other.
Something the ever ferocious Carrol and other promiscuous practicioners of polemics might usefully bear in mind.