1. you wrote an article that I apparently mistakenly interpreted as focusing mainly on liberalism and why *it* has a problem convincing.
2. focusing on that, i responded to the issue of why Liberalism has a problem. I linked to something I wrote awhile back reinforcing the same argument about Liberalism: it is technocratic and piece meal in nature - which is why you get the think tankery and policy wonkery.
3. for whatever reason, you happen to think I'm talking about Marxism. never was and never did. I was talking about the failure of Liberalism, today, to have a vision that inspires people. For the record, I don't happen to think that our central problem should be convincing people to be on our side. as I happened to suggest already, the issue is being on *their* side. Like so, and it's about the best summary of what Carrol's been saying I've ever read. It's from my heartthrob, the Coup's Boots Riley, for which I once named my pussy:
"A lot of times, the mistake of the movement is that we try to make the struggle nothing but a bunch of pie in the sky rhetoric. You know, "When the revolution comes in 50 years, this is how we'll change the world," and what this does is isolate the movement from the fact that the struggle for revolution is a material struggle. It's not something that's based on an emotion, an intangible freedom, or anything like that. The fact is that people need food, people need clothes, they need healthcare, they need shelter and those are material things and we need to struggle around those material things. We can't just struggle only around world trade policies and things like that because we need people involved in the struggle and many people are just trying to survive day to day. We need to get involved in those day to day struggles as well, so that means we need to get more money per hour. We need to keep people from being evicted from their homes. We need to show the people that there are victories coming from the movement and then people will connect it to, "Hey, these ideas about revolution do mean something," so when they hear a Coup song or a Dead Prez song or Public Enemy, they're not just hearing these nice ideas that don't mean anything to them. http://tintinrevolution.free.fr/en/boots.html
4. In general, Marxism as theory is mostly about critique of the existing order. there is an implicit vision, sure. now, as Postone argues, we have a subjects of history problem ever since Lukacs took up Kojeve's reading of Hegel. In which case, as I suggested in another post on another thread: Theory, desperately seeking Action. Action has become a floating signifier of an incipient revolutionary consciousness.