Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [popular opinion is a strange, labile, and protean thing...]
Yes. That is a major reason left organizing can't be grounded in assessments of current popular opinion -- why opinion polls are irrelevant to left organizing. And that is part of what Rosa Luxemberg meant when she said the final goal is everytyhing, the movement is nothing. It is part of what I meant in my post the other day in which I said left strategy has to be from the perspective of the future, not the present. The goal I have in mind, however, refers to a smaller whole than RL had in mind: I'm thinking not of the revolution but of a point in the future when it will be possible to say, A Left Exists. We try to describe that point as best as we can to describe what that point will look like (a provisional description to be corrected as we go along), and then ask the question: What can we do _now_ that will make sense when looked back on from that (hypothetical) future.
For example, in July 2003 we do NOT ask "What should the U.S. do?" We ask what should leftists demand. You and Andie were of course correct in respect to what the u.s. should do: it should repair the damage it had done and then withdraw. But that was stupid from the point of view of organizing a left movement. That orgaizing had to be grounded in the assusmption that in (say) two years (a) the u.s. would still be there, (b) the conditions would be horrible, and (c) there would be a larger minority of u.s. citizens who agreed with "Out Now!" So that was the _only_ appropriate slogan in July 2003, REGARDLESS of what either u.s. residents OR Iraq residents thought.
Carrol