I could provide certain positions and outlooks, based on what passes for "purist"; but you're right, Woj. It's pointless. We are all fucked, including you.
[WS:] I am far for advocating the position "we are all fucked for whatever reasons, economic political, environmental, religious etc." I also understand the concept of venting, but after I am done with venting I generally like to know what it is exactly that "we" want to do - assuming that there is some commonality of interests among people on this list and fellow travelers.
When I read the Old Man and his contemporaries - know exactly what they wanted - public ownership of the means of production. They believed it was the key to a better society. For political reasons, public ownership of the means of production was virtually impossible to implement in a bourgeois social order at the turn of the century - but it was something definite and articulate, something that people uninitiated in the mumbo jumbo of underground sects could understand, and something that was not only implementable in the absence of political obstacles, but also operational after that. The abolition of the main obstacle, the bourgeois social order, was merely a means to implement the goal of public ownership of the means of production - not and end in itself.
Fast forward 100 years, and we now know that public ownership of the means of production did not work as expected. It solved some problems, but introduced other. What is more, societies that stopped short of implementing it achieved equal if not better social goals that the Old Man and his cohort were pushing for.
A rational person in that situation would return to the drawing board, examined the past experience, got rid of what did not work or became obsolete, retained what was still usable, develop a new goal, realistically asses the chances of its implementation, and on those grounds devise a new strategy. This is what engineers do when their design malfunctions or crashes*).
What I hear form the radical left in the US, however, is the fetishization of social unrest and "revolution" which in the Old Left was a mere means to a clearly articulated end, but today became an end in itself. There are no constructive goals - whether attainable under the current political regime or not - just constant kvetching, blaming and finger pointing.
Some time ago I posted a direct question to this list to spell out what it is that the left want. Instead, people posted for the most part a laundry list of what they wanted to get rid off - abolish this, end that, undo the past blah, blah, blah. A handful of POSITIVE proposals that were listed - universal health care, living wage, or stronger union representation were quite conventional and well within the bounds of mainstream discourse. Many EU social democracies are more radical than that.
So here we are. On the one end, ideological purists chronically unhappy about the current life, longing for a happy, non descriptive future and hoping that the revolutionary fire will end the status quo once and for all - just like the fundie x-tians waiting for their rapture (or is it rupture?). On the other end is a handful of realists, also seeking a change of the status quo, but each time they try to formulate some definite steps of that change - they are chastised by the purists as naïve fools or even traitors. This is simply frustrating.
*) This reminds me of an old joke: Q: What do Japanese car companies do when one of their models proves to have some faults? A: Call their engineering team to identify the problem and find a solution. Q: What do US car companies do when one of their models proves to have some faults? A: Call their legal team to blame someone else for the problem.
It seems that blaming and finger pointing in lieu of devising a solution is well entrenched in the US national character.
Wojtek