On 2011-07-06, at 3:04 AM, Dissenting Wren wrote:
> Fair enough. There's no mystery about the organization Carrol belongs to (as do I, for that matter). See it here: solidarity-us.org Since its founding, its key work has been within organized labor: Labor Notes, TDU, etc. God knows Solidarity is weak. But if you dip into the U.S. left looking for socialist organizations that are (a) really socialist and not just social democrats, and (b) not sectarian crazies, you find yourself looking at a short list. Solidarity, FRSO, the left wing of the Socialist Party, maybe LRNA and Left Turn, and a few collectives here and there. There are, I'm told, some people within ISO who would like to move it in this direction, but for now it remains mired in its "we're-the-vanguard" mentality. Within the left, Solidarity's original orientation was "regroupment": find the socialists who aren't sectarian crazies and "regroup" them in a non-line, non-Vanguardist formation. Now it talks more about
> "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.
We could have had a more productive discussion if I knew you in context to be a supporter of Solidarity. I'm somewhat familar from a distance with Soli, the FRSO, and the other organizations you describe. At least, it can be said that they're trying to organize and educate themselves and their student and working class peripheries in an ongoing way in very difficult historical circumstances, which is to their credit, although I've heard Soli is no longer very active. I'm not as persuaded as you are that the ISO and the variety of other Marxist groupuscules in the advanced capitalist countries are as qualitatively different from Solidarity, as you claim, or from each other in their Leninist roots, method of organization and what they are trying to accomplish. I doubt any of these very marginalized bands will in their present form will lead a revived working class movement in if one should reappear - it's far more likely new formations more deeply rooted in the class and its organizations will emerge in an upsurge - but individuals who have passed through these groups and have acquired organizing and speaking skills will have much to contribute.
You're labouring under a common misapprehension on the US left that the NDP and social democratic parties are somehow different creatures than the US Democratic party. Whatever they once were, they all now, without exception, parties "of capital, pure and simple" who talk one way in opposition and govern another way in power - the NDP included where it has won election at the provincial level in Canada. They comprise all the major liberal parties in two-party systems which are opposed by the conservative parties to their right, are supported as "lesser evils" by the trade unions and progressive social movements, are typically led by higher-income professionals, and have broadly similar programs. If the DP leadership appears to be to the right of its counterparts abroad, it is because it a) shares with the Republicans the responsibility of defending the empire, including by brute force and b) is subject to the pressures of a US political culture poisoned by a long legacy of racism and chauvinism. But Obama, Clinton, Biden, the NDP's Jack Layton, Germany's Gerhardt Schroeder and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, France's Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Martine Aubry, the Milibands in the UK, etc. are all cut from the same cloth and recognize their political affinity with one another. If you can justify radical left-wingers entering any one of these parties to influence its trade union and social movement activists, the same justification is valid for all, and vice-versa.