"Mr. WD" wrote:
>
> First, it will be far harder to take advantage of
> crises that threaten the system's ability to meet popular expectations
> without an intellectual, cultural, and organizational "infrastructure"
> (the Christofascists already have one).
This comes close to be a summary of everything I have written on this list for nearly 10 years. Long periods of left weakness are standard in capitalism, and the task of leftists during such periods is precisely to build and reproduce that "infrastructure." That's what radical caucuses in unions do. That's essentially what we achieved in CISPES during the '80s. One cannot _will_ a movement into existence, and the attempt to do so only leads to bitterness and burnout. But one can "keep something alive" until the next political punctuation. It would be foolish to expect the anti-war movement at this time to change u.s. policy visibly, but the left is in far healthier state now than it was in 1999, if you measure its health not against impossible goals but in terms of a wider and deeper "infrastructure."
> Second, such an
> infrastructure may be able to shift people's expectations over time so
> that eventually even comparatively minor crises for the system (by
> today's standards) could become major crises in the future.
I have always argued that as invisible as the anti-war efforts of the 1950s were, without them both the upsurge after 1955 might have been much weaker.
Carrol
>
> -WD
>
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