I wonder if this way of putting it introduces too great a distinction between objective circumstance and subjective goal. If the phenomena in their own right (let's say the Union cause, for example) were not worthy, it would be eccentric to rally the support for it. Marx is not a pragmatist.
Chris develops the example:
'what made the U.S./union side in the American Civil War "progressive" was in large part a function of Marx's estimation of the European workers' willingness to support it, over and above their immediate "material" (socio-economic, within their national labor markets) interests. It was a political judgment, not an analytic one.'
Do you really think so? I think his extensive articles on the Civil War (drawing on his friend Wedemeyer's reports, and published in vol 19 of the collected works) seem to make the case that the Union cause was in its own right a positive, though certainly the rightness of the cause was illuminated for him by its adoption by the Manchester cotton workers (a campaign that he played some considerable part in). It was an analytic and a political judgement.
Further, Chris writes:
'one thing that speaks to the rationality of the positions taken by such types as Hitchens, Makiya, Glavin, et al. is their recognition that their is no effective Left politics, i.e., that there is no real potential progressive "anti-imperialist" politics that provides an actual emancipatory alternative to U.S. policy (not that I agree with the conclusions they draw from this observation, but this factor still needs to be faced and processed). '
I agree that it is important to face up to the collapse of the left as a factor in the shaping of contemporary history.
Certainly there are important critical points to be made about the self-loathing masochism that informs much of the lionisation of imaginary islamist insurgencies. But the other side of the equation is the way that the 'decent left' (as it is known in the UK) have traded in paranoid delusions about the vitality of Islamist terrorism - the mirror image of the 'we are all Hezbollah'-style cheerleading.