Yeah, because, like, you know, EVERYONE here on the left is ALWAYS arguing - you know, like the pantheon of our inextricably economistic and determinist political deities, Marx, Kropotkin, Lenin, Gramsci, Goldman and hundreds of others - that local, regional, and national conditions mean nothing. The Cold War, 1954, the Cuban Revolution, 1968, every struggle for national liberation across the global south, the end of apartheid, the rise of Solidarity, the end of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the World Social Forum, Seattle, Sept.11, the Arab Spring, Madison, Occupy Everywhere and the reactions to all these things are utterly and completely formally and structurally determined by the logic of capitalism - a logic that HAS to be put in scare quotes by critics to indicate its utterly farcical contribution to any analysis of anything. Heck, there's nothing generalizable - if not completely determinate - about the uneven (re)development of urban (once-)industrial inner cities that might help us understand the contraints and enablements government representatives might encounter and yet, nevertheless, consciously select options within. 'Cuz, you see - and you know I speak for EVERYONE here when I say this - I'd hate to imagine that I'd ever have to engage in a historical and material analysis of the dynamic and uneven scalar dynamics of diverse phenomena and struggle in any of the work I do because, you know, like that'd be hard and I'm just another one of those intellectually lazy economistic leftists who can imagine that anything but the global economic base determines all superstructural engagements everywhere. And it is SURELY the case that all of the posts on this list by folks who refer to categories of analysis traditionally tied to an understanding of the mandatory acceleration of the turnover time and expanded reproduction of capital and the dynamic complexity of instatiations of these categories have never once shown an ability to engage "local specificity and power relations." Perhaps you can stop tilting at non-existent historical windmills and deal with the local specificity of what folks here actually say... or would that get in the way of your own commitment to the inverted mirror image of the imagined "Left" you keep slashing at?