lbo83235 writes:
On Dec 21, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> It's showing in Fayeteville, Arkansas for fuck's sake.
God this kind of shit is tedious. No wonder we're getting our asses kicked.
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Don't read it then. I've only sampled a few posts & agree with you it's boring. But the list _is_ for entertainment as well as solving all the world's problems, and people do have the privilege, do they not, of choosing their own entertainment without excessive kibitzing.
The "no wonder the left...." cliché is pretty offensive. (I assume "we" refers to leftists or, worse, "the left.")
First, it is devoid of sense except on the principle, clearly false, that defeat is always due to the internal weakness of the defeated party. That assumption, applied to "the left," is pure voluntarism, reflecting a blithe indifference to the normal balance of forces in capitalist history. It is periods of left resurgence that ate the special case requiring explanation.
And at the present time, nothing that can reasonably be called "the left" even exists, despite what I believe to be a rather large number of radicals. But despite really rather heroic and intelligently carried out campaigns over the last 40 years (e.g. Cispes, the antii-apartheid movement, anti-war, living-wage struggles in many communities) no issue has arisen that can attract the amount of support necessary to fuel a serious resurgence of "the left." And there is no magic formula that can generate such support. Mao said a little spark can light a prairie fire -- but first the prairie has to be dry. And we don't know, it is not knowable.
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Some time ago you ended a response to one of my posts with the query: " But possibly the resolution lies in what's hinted at in the parenthetical. So I'll ask for elaboration: What in your view are those other reasons?"
1. Clarify one's own thinking
2. Maintain morale within a group united around a common purpose.
3. Attract those who already agree with you but have not recognized this agreement.
4.Give content to an action. I don't have a good label for this. But if (say) you call a march and ra. But if (say) you call a march and rally, you do have to have speeches. And those speeches have to be nominally aimed at persuading people to the purpose of the rally. (This is perhaps a variant of maintaining group morale).
5. Persuading those who share basic principles and goals with you but do not yet recognize all the implications of those shared opinions or goals.
6. Entertainment. One needs to go on living from day to day, which requires having fun once in a while.
7. While persuasion doesn't work on masses of people, even the mass gathered in an auditorium, one might once in a while persuade one person or two -- and that one person may turn out to be important. As in most left endeavors one simply has to keep plugging on with the consciousness that the odds are against us -- or as Luxemburg realized in the midst of the horror of The Great War, the odds were against humanity. Barbarism, depopulation, exhaustion of energy, wrecking of the environment are probably our future. But what the hell. One keeps trying.
Carrol