But my argument was that the context you gave them was terribly wrong; that it was a context that distorted the history of the last 200 years, a context that made it impossible to understand that history or the place of current politics in it. My last sentence referred to a mythical past. If you want to disagree with my critique, you have to argue that the '30s etc were the norm, that they characterized decade after decade until at some point history changed. And that is false. Most of that history resembled not the great points but the present. The present is TYPICAL. It typifies not only most of the past but probably most of the future. And our task is to keep strugggling even when we know we can't win, because only that hopeless struggle offers hope, the hope that we are preparing (as others like us in the past have) for one of those periods, a result of contingency not planning, in which such fruiitless acts of resistance blossom again into an analogue of the glories of the past you listed.
Don't put the present in a false context. That leads to _real_ despair, the kind of despair that says all we can do is run in local elections and let some mysterious power add them up to whee, a socialist future.
The Greeks, fearing contingency, fearing the possiblity that human life was not coherent, not intelligible, posited a _moira_ which gave shape to life. The modern equivalent of Greek Fate is the Idea of Progress as pushed, on this list, by Doug and Michael Pollack. But the Idea of Progress is as much a myth as the Will of Zeus or of Moira in Greek thoght. We make our history, but only in conditions not of our own choosing, and those conditions are created by contingency, not by some mystic plan of history that guarabtees Progress.
Focus on all those who resisted in the past and failed, disappeared from the pages of history that focuses only on the Romantic, those Great moments of temporary success. It was that invisible work, that demonstrating and running and recruiting one younger person who carried on in the next decade or generation: that is what makes socialism not a pure myth but a real possibility though not a certainty or even perhaps a probability.
Why did Dennis choose a subject line of "Surrender!"? Why did you accept that subject line and just offer a "context" (false one) for understanding the surrender. It wasn't a surrender. It was one battle among thousands.
Carrol