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The weakness of "the left" (or rather the inability of leftists to form a coheent left that can legitimately be called "the left,") since the early 70s is due to conditons entirely beyond our control. And this has been the case in _all_ "Interims" (between periods of left growth) for the last200 years. Fundamentally, such interims are due not to anything the previous lef movement did or did not do but to the resiliency of capitalism as a syste, the resurgent power of capital after each period of left success.
But, such interim periods may well be lengthened and leftists further marginalized by the endless false dream of "prgress" through cooperation with the enemy, in this case the Democratic Party. I have mostly ceased arguing with advocates of this hopeless policy, only occasionally going on record, as in this instance, with the prediction that the next growth of the will (as in the past) ignore the electoral process completely, focusing rather on the type of mass struggle which from the abolitionists to the present has been the direct or indirecet source of needed social transformation. The DP is the graveyard of left movement, to which leftists retire when real left activity, for one reason or another, reaches its limits.
Carrol
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