Dissenting Wren wrote:
> the game is not worth the candle? I won't say why the left's
> program has not found an echo in Britain or elsewhere in Europe
What is "the left" that James "Living Marxism" Heartfield is referring to here?
The only organization that I know of in either Western Europe or North America that answers to the name of "THE" Left happened to win 12% of the national vote in 2009 here in Deutschland.
Not a majority of the population to be sure, but we at least managed to put real socialists like Ulle Jelpke and Christine Buchholz in the Bundestag. So a former member of the best Maoist group in Germany, and a member of what once was one of the better Trotskyist contenders.
James likes to issue grandiose pronouncements about "the" working class while advocating for a tendency that thinks that anyone who might have concerns about the natural environment is some sort of Eco-Nazi. Fuck that.
Hats off to both Carrol and Wren for their membership in Solidarity. When Ernest Mandel passed away in 1995, Robert Kurz and Ernst Lohoff wrote in an issue of Krisis that "like Trotskyism as a whole", his theory "transcended the narrow-mindedness of Social Democracy and party-Communism" and contained "challenges" that await their own transcendence.
Walter Benjamin wrote that the revolution is like slamming the brakes on the train of history. Those of us who are in organizations like Die Linke, Solidarity, Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, we're like Benjamin's "chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones", acting "in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history."
At a moment when Wisconsin, Athens, and Madrid have all shown us a way forward, there's something pissy and self-satisfied about Heartfield's Hotel Abyss lamentations.