But that is water over the dam. The fact is that whatever anyone did, "the left" as a coherent force has retreated or dissipated worldwide: it's not a domestic problem only.
I don't know exactly how brad understands my arguments, but they aren't really even 'arguments': They are observations on what has in fact been capitalist history for 200 years: Periods of left resurgence, of serious challenge to bourgeois hegemony, have been scattered and brief, and they have been so for other reasons than any "failure" or "mistakes" on the part of left forces. Rosa Luxemburg, viewing the great war from her prison cell, was the first (after Marx himself) to put here finger on the main source of this record: Contingency! History has no pattern, no direction, no predictable events, and it cannot be forced. (Leftists really should, I think, read as much of Stephen Jay Gould as possible; they should live with and contemplate the fact that we (the species) are here only because a wandering asteroid hit the earth 60 million years ago!
Marx had said it too: What I think we should take as his substantive 'final wors,' in answer to a reporter's question, "What is? Old Whiskers paused long, and had one word: Struggle (with no prediction of victory in the struggle).
If I understand Brad here (I quite possibly do not), the perspective he pushes has a name: Voluntarism, that which there are few worse errors. (Dennis R's post is mostly acceptable, though I reject his "dying empire" as a misunderstanding of how contemporary "imperialism" works.
This is not quietism. Though I see Lenin as primarily an activist rather than a theorist, there was an implication in his life and thought that remains firm, and I thought my earlier posts implied it: We do keep struggling; we don't theorize "correct preconditions" (as the Mensheviks did in 1917), but neither do we assume (as Trotsky did and too many of his followers still do) that with the "right" leadership and the "right" strategy the contingency of history can be overcome. You might take a glance at an essay in Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 8, in which he reacts to a statement by Trotsky that there would never be another Father Gopin (sp?) and therefore the Marxists must do it themselves. We must keep up the struggle inways open to us but must recognize that only events neither predictable nor controllable can make that struggle meaningful.
Carrol
Brad: Faced with the recent events in Egypt and the outlook facing the US, I was wondering if those on the list (Carrol most famously and Doug to a lesser extent) who feel that the left will never advance during a crisis have been reconsidering. If we have to wait for things to get better in the US before the left can emerge as a real political force we are in deep shit.
Brad
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