Brad wrote: But doesn't the far right pull, or more cynically give cover for, the liberals to do the nasty stuff?
MS: Yes. To paraphrase Candide: If the Teabaggers didn't exist, the Democrats would have to invent them.
Carrol: Yes. And the effect or non-effect of TeePees on the DP is a different topic. I was talking about the effect on radicals of paying attention to the "far right" as scuh. (Incidentally the normally quite sensible Ken Hanly fogged up a related thread by worrying about social democrats being considered the left: Come on Ken: are you calling me a social democrat? We are talking about how revolutionaries think and dragging in how social democrats think is obstruction. I was arguing that bad times fuck up the work of revolutionaries!!! That may be correct, it may be incorrect, but it inovolves how people respond to the political activity of radicals/revolutionaries, not what people may mistakingly call "left." In bad times radicals call for going out and picketing a bank that is foreclosing on workers; people are too busy surviving to een here the call and to frightened that they may lose their job. And as Doug replied to Eric, we are talking about an empirical tendency, not some Law of History.)
Last week brad posted the results of a recent poll on the attitudes of masses of people towards various issues. What the poll revealed was that at the level of passive opinion there was a huge mass of people out there on our side. Hey - if that's the case we ought to go out and collect some of our passive friends into our activity, hence incnrasing the presence of left activity among the mases and perhaps even beginning to scare the people in D.C. to toss people a few bones to deflect them from that growing left. This is relevant to the present because even though the 'recovery' is not much of a 'recorver' in relative terms the world is not quite so scary out there. So maybe more of these people who agree with us passively could be persuaded to join an action here or an action there. And some of those who joined those actions would also join the conversation around those actions, and would start to thinking about how they might be built on or whether yet a third action might be more profitable. (I think this sort of conversation in the 1760s was carried out by some Committes of Corespondence. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.)
Seeing on the one hand this good news brad communicated to the list, and having beenn seeing on theother hand the activity going on B/N as well as elsewhere (as reported a month or so ago in a meeting of Midwest activists) it seemed to me that we had both a promising terrain (lots of people with good thoughts) and even a growing number of small groups ready to reach out in that improved terrain. And so maybe ir would be worthwhile at this juncture to sort of list the TRUISMs (like the earth is round and days grow longer in autumen and photosynthesis is at the base of the food chain) - the truisms of the kind of leftist practice that looked to be growing and growing (as brad had shown) on fuertile ground. But LO, one of the ventriloquists who for a century have been spouting Kautsky through Stalin or Kautsky through Trotsky comes forth and roars. Where is THE PARTY? WHERE IS THE UNION? WHERE IS THE ONE TRUE THOERY OF REVOLUTION, BEYOND WHICH NO ONE CAN IMAGINE? Let us ignore this anarchist chatter in the air and worship at the altar of the one true god. Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
Now in my original Tea Party post I was rejecting the relevance to radical politics of one of those sad stories, the spectre of the far right! I was suggesting that we had work to do and that fussing about the crazies on the far right wasn't contributing to that work. I was saying in fact that worrying about the endless detail of fofficial politics, and this and that maneuver by this or that enemy of the people (Obama, Tea Party, etc.) we were accomplishing nothing and ignoring the real intellectual and practical problems which the current conjuncture set for us. The activity in B/N which Ir eviewed in my original post is data for leftists tought. We need to collect such data from all over. We need to begin (just begin) the process of theorizing that data (not of dictating the true theory but of raising to a theoretical level that practice. Theory comes from practice, never practice from theory.
Carrol
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