>> 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.
And Jim Straub replied:
> This is very reasonable. But then what's the point of staying in the
> struggle? Why even be a leftist?
===========================
You're on the left by definition if you support the current demands with few
exceptions of the trade unions and the representative organizations of
women, national minorities, gays, environmentalists, civil libertarians,
etc. at home, and of those movements abroad which are fighting for national
sovereignty and improved living standards for their people against
repressive elites and foreign intervention. Broadly speaking, that's what
distinguishes us from most others on the political spectrum.
It seems to me you're carrying an unnecessary burden of angst about "staying in the struggle" or abandoning it. What struggle? Measured against the illegal and often violent mass eruptions of the past for the legalization of trade unions and collective bargaining and the extension of voting rights, contemporary left activism involves little or no struggle because there is little or no risk or sacrifice attached to it. This is the case whether such activism involves the expression of dissident views in print or on the internet, organizing and participating in demonstrations, engaging in union organizing and work stoppages, or even the formation of groups pledged to the overthrow of capitalism. At one time, any of these activities would have gotten you blacklisted, exiled, imprisoned, or shot. But now they are legal and tolerated, the product of authentic struggle by previous generations for the workplace and political rights through which all contemporary left activity - from Chuck's to Wojtek's - is currently channeled.
This is not to indict the the contemporary left or denigrate its necessary activities, but to place things in their proper context. The failure to see things in context is what underlies many of the exaggerated and self-destructive debates about which "sectarians" or "sellouts" are thwarting real possibilities of change, and prevents us from examining from where real change originates. I've suggested many times that the left's weakness is a reflection of current historical conditions rather than the political failings of different individuals and groups, as you and Carrol and Yoshie argue in your different ways, or of the ignorant masses, as Wojtek would have it.
If mass discontent were ever to swell and spill out of the channels in which it is presently contained and threaten existing power and property relations, it would provoke the authorities to rethink the utility of democratic institutions and to supress democratic rights, making mass activity in defence of those rights and institutions illegal and dangerous. In such times, it would become meaningful to talk of "struggle" and to judge individuals in terms of their relationship to it, but until then such talk - and the political "resoluteness" which is presumed to flow from it - is, IMO, mainly theatrical.