> For example, I am strongly against trying to provide any detail at all
> about how a socialist world would operate (how goods would be
> distributed, how production decisions will be made, work will be
> distributred, etc.) And I believe that such attempts are potentially not
> only futile but vicious and will frustrate efforts to establish and
> maintain democracy. In respect to a future socialism the intellect is
> simply totalitarian and anti-democratic. Such specifications can only
> become realunder an authoritarian regime.
>
When it comes to specific movement goals, I agree that a negative position is necessary in some situations - but it makes no sense in others. I have a feeling that you've deduced these propositions about how movements should operate by working backwards from a teleological first principle: that the ultimate (though initially latent) objective for the movement should be an eventual extra-constitutional seizure of power in the name of (an undefined) socialism.
Once that premise is accepted, all of your propositions - even the most stringent and extreme - make perfect sense. (Especially since I believe you don't see any of the possible "reforms" that might be won along the way as having any intrinsic value; they would only be valuable to the extent that they hastened the taking of power.) But for those of us who reject that first principle, who have other desiderata in mind, your propositions seem out of kilter.
Take the insistence on negative goals. In the anti-Vietnam War movement, that made sense. But it made sense because it corresponded with the basic motives of the vast majority of the movement participants. Most of them joined the movement because they thought the war was immoral, that the Hanoi regime had at least a few admirable qualities, that the NLF had earned the right to prevail by having won the allegiance of far more Vietnamese than the Saigon govt, etc. etc. With those motives, it was perfectly natural to demand "Out Now!" and leave the details and modalities to the diplomats.
In your case, I think it's fair to say the motive was somewhat different (at least in retrospect). Whatever other concerns you may have about the war, you're a believer in revolutionary defeatism. The most important reason why the US should be made to lose the war is *because it's the capitalist US* and its defeat might hasten the seizure of power - not because the NLF happen to be nicer than the GVN. That's *your* basis for an "Out Now" position. You have every right to take that line.
But when it's 2001 and the US invades Afghanistan after Sept. 11, naturally most potential anti-war supporters will feel very differently about Afghanistan than they did about Vietnam - again, because their motives are not revolutionary defeatism, they're ethical. So the internal nature of the Taliban regime and the illegality of its protecting international terrorists made a simple "Out Now" position, with no attempt to address what were perceived as legitimate issues about Al-Qaeda, untenable. It just did not correspond with the motives and worldview of the movement participants. (Or potential participants.)
And these disjunctures only get wider when the issue becomes something like health care or pensions.
On the socialism question, Lou Proyect takes a very similar position to yours and frankly I find it disingenuous, though maybe unwittingly. Let's be honest - virtually everyone who takes this line (about how it's totalitarian to talk about how socialism might work) is a proponent of an orthodox Marxist planned economy. Since planned economies are now widely seen as discredited, even on the left, it's best to just forbid all discussion about the workings of socialist economy, since it would inevitably invite all sorts of heretical talk of market socialism. It's remarkable to me that the Marxist tradition has managed to (selectively) maintain this stricture so long, even though *Marx himself* wrote a detailed cookshop recipe in Critique of the Gotha Program - complete with labor tokens, storehouses of consumption goods, and accounting deductions for social overhead and depreciation, and the rest of it.
In the absence of further specification 99% of people today understand the word "socialism" to refer to a planned economy, so forbidding any discussion of the subject means tacitly (and conveniently) ratifying that definition in the name of the movement. Also, most people view "socialism" (=planned economy) as a proven failure, and they have some very good reasons to think so. So you're not doing any favors to socialism by banning discussion of what it is and how it might work.
SA