"refoundation" - an acknowledgment that a reborn left could not come from an agglomeration of organizations as weak as ours or even weaker. And then, of course, Soli members are active in a wide range of social movements as individuals. So that's what we do: prioritize work within organized labor, try to find a path toward left refoundation, maintain real democracy within the organization, and act as individuals within a wide range of social movements.
I'm not sure where I would come down on "an organized left … which organizes itself … in unfavourable conditions, as a political tendency within a larger party supported by trade unions and working people" if I were Canadian. You could make a case for working as an organized tendency within the NDP. But our DP is not the NDP. The DP is a party of capital, pure and simple, whose trade union and working class support is the support of a captive constituency with nowhere else to go. The US, uniquely an advanced capitalist country that has never had a socialist or labor party with a mass base, is a place where conditions are uniquely unfavorable. And so what passes for an organized left here is not a partisan left.
________________________________ From: Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, July 5, 2011 11:08 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Response to MG -- Was Poll....
On 2011-07-05, at 4:41 PM, Dissenting Wren wrote:
>> We need not wait for a viable third party option to appear in order to build an organized left.
Maybe this is the crux of the matter: How would an "organized left", which you counterpose to a political party, actually be organized? How would you begin to build it, starting tomorrow? What would be it's goals and activities? Perhaps you can draw on Carrol's writings to assist you. I have found much angry moralizing and exhortation but little that is concrete and specific in them.
In fact, my sense is that yours and Carrol's idealized "organized left" would be no more organized than it is today: a loose collection of self-described socialists of varying hues who periodically come together at meetings or online to plaintively ask themselves "what is to be done?", who demonstrate from time to time on behalf of other people's causes and who, if they are really ambitious, come together for a short time to issue revolutionary manifestoes and other material circulated mostly within their own academic and professional milieus. This is not the kind of sustained and focused activity which historically characterized the organized left based in the working class.
As far as I can gather, Carrol also effectively rejects participation in electoral politics, considering this to be the antithesis of political action, rather than another expression of it, complimenting strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of action in the streets with the intention of converting demands into legislation.
I'm not an anarchist, and can't conceive of an organized left other than one which organizes itself as a political party or, in unfavourable conditions, as a political tendency within a larger party supported by trade unions and working people, in each case with a clearly defined program and engaging in political activity at all levels of the political process. The historic split between Marxism and anarchism has turned on this issue, which is why I consider Carrol and not a few other embittered former Democrats on the US left to be anarchists in spirit if not in theory, whatever their protestations to the contrary.
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