Somebody Somebody wrote:
>
>
> Maybe the left should concern itself less with whether or not it's
> tainted by capital and more about achieving practical goals to improve
> people's lives. Less revolutionary rhetoric and more improved health
> and education, comrades.
O.K. Let's see what is wrong with this paragraph. My experience has been that anyone who can make any statement whatever about "The Left" on the basis of what a single pwerson (or even one particular left group) has said or done -- that such persons are beyond correction. But miracles do happen.
"The Left," at the present time, lacks any referent about which statments can be made. There are thousands, perhaps even 100s of thousands, of individual leftists. And (as the '60s demonstrated) there is no need for a single hegemonic Party for a coherent left, abut which statements can be made, exist. But since the mid-70s at least there has been no such entity.
Given that fact, the task of individual leftists or small local groups is to figure out ways in which they can contribute to the _possible_ emergence of some sort of coherent left movement. It is quite possible that nothing leftists might do now is meaningful, but that is no reason not to continue the effort. Moreover, it is important to recognize that this state of affairs, the absence of a left movment capable of affecting events, is not a rare or special state of affairs which calls for specific explanation but in fact normality over the last 200+ years. It is periiods of eft activity that call for explanation as violating the norm. Hence in _normal_ conditions, since has been the case since the subsidence of the '60s left, it is a form of sabotage, though probably unintentional, to proclaim the "falults" of "The Left"; it is sabotage because it is not leftist faults (let alone the faults of "A Left" that doesnt' exist) but the very real absence of a unifying and energizing issue (capable of exciting attention beyond the numbers of leftists activists) that maintains "the normal," the absence of a coherent left. What can/should leftists do in such a period when most efforts will seem/be utterly futile. In fact, squawks of the sort qutoed above merely encourage self-satisfied laziness.
But more. Suppose there were an active and growing left movement now. Your complaint would still be merely a personal squawk from the sideliees. I haven't read the post from Bhaskar you quote, but I tend to agree with you that the passage you quote is pretty silly. So? That means you or others can theeefore because of one silly leftists on a maillist can throw over the whole left movement., Such pompous nonsense.
There will ALWAYS be stupid individuals and stupid groups on "the left," even in the best of times. And a left that cannot flourish despite all such silliness is not a left that could do anything even were no one silly.
So your complaint, in addition to being a rather obtuse generalization from one instance is a silly complaint even if there were quite a few Bhaskars. That is just the terrain we operate on. It won't be free of obstacles (internal as well as external) even in the best of times -- quit bellyaching.
Carrol