> Kidding aside, I get your point, but I think you fail to
> see how your own criticism applies to you. “Diversity
> of tactics” is itself an argument, which you are
> refusing to engage in by dismissing it as a “fetish”.
I believe I engaged the argument. But in case it wasn't clear, here's the idea in different words:
It is not possible to reorganize our social life consciously, on a new foundation, without the collective processing of one's individual information sets in the civic arena. (E.g., it is not possible to make political inroads without our some way of critically aggregating our tactical views and concerns.) We do this one way or the other, because we can only live through the mediation of the social structures we build, and those social structures are reproduced by action or omission. So we either do it via processing mechanisms that escape our control and weigh on us (e.g. markets, states), or we do it directly, controlling to the extent possible the processing mechanisms (e.g. civically with the assistance of things under our shared command). In any case, *processing* our individual perceptions, valuations, etc. we must.
This "diversity of tactics" approach is about rationalizing our inability to process our information sets directly, instead letting other uncontrolled mechanisms take that processing over by default, which only reinforces such mechanisms. We may get the illusion that by acting as a small individual group willing to take more "militant" actions than the crowd, we are making real progress. But that is not the case, because we're in fact withdrawing from the challenge of doing the heavy lifting of processing our stuff directly, civically -- including our tactics. We are yielding to the "marketplace" of tactics to do this -- whoever has more saliva eats more "pinole," as they say in Mexico -- as opposed to whoever makes more sense prevails via argument and persuasion. That is really what the "diversity of tactics" translates into. It's founded on the liberal myth of individuals as self sufficient -- as we used to say, a bourgeois or petit bourgeois myth.
I am fine with people overcoming, transcending Marxim, and leaving it behind. But that's going to take more than ignoring it.