The Silent Death of the American Left

[Questionable]

Is there a Left in America today?
There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?
Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or restrained by the Left? Is there a counterforce to the grinding machinery neoliberal capitalism and its political managers?
We can and do at CounterPunch and in similar publications, such as Monthly Review and the New Left Review, publish analyses of capitalism and its inherent vulnerabilities, catalogue its predations and wars of military conquest and imperial exploitation. But where is our capacity to confront the daily horrors of drone strikes, kill lists, mass layoffs, pension raids and the looming nightmare of climate change?
It is a bitter reality, brought into vivid focus by five years of Obama, that the Left is an immobilized and politically impotent force at the very moment when the economic inequalities engineered by our overlords at Goldman Sachs who manage the global economy, should have recharged a long-moribund resistance movement back to life.
Instead the Left seems powerless to coalesce, to translate critique into practice, to mobilize against wars, to resist incursions against basic civil liberties, powerless to confront rule by the bondholders and hedgefunders, unable to meaningfully obstruct the cutting edge of a parasitical economic system that glorifies greed while preying on the weakest and most destitute, and incapable of confronting the true legacy of the man they put their trust in.
This is the politics of exhaustion. We have become a generation of leftovers. We have reached a moment of historical failure that would make even Nietzsche shudder.
We stand on the margins, political exiles in our own country, in a kind of mute darkness, a political occlusion, increasingly obsessed, as the radical art historian Tim Clark put it a few years ago in a disturbing essay in New Left Review, with the tragedy of our own defeat.
Consider this. Two-thirds of the American electorate oppose the ongoing war in Afghanistan. An equal amount objected to intervention in Libya. Even more recoil at the grim prospect of entering the Syrian theater.
Yet there is no antiwar movement to translate that seething disillusionment into action. There are no mass demonstrations. No systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting. No nationwide strikes. No campus walkouts. No serious divestment campaigns against companies involved in drone technology.
Similar popular disgust is evident regarding the imposition of stern austerity measures during a prolonged and enervating recession. But once again this smoldering outrage has no political outlet in the current political climate, where both parties have fully embraced the savage bottom line math of neoliberalism.
Homelessness, rampant across America, is a verboten topic, unmentioned in the press, absent from political discourse. Hunger, a deepening crisis in rural and urban America, is a taboo subject, something left to religious pray-to-eat charities or the fickle whims of corporate write-offs.
What do they offer us, instead? Pious homilies about the work ethic, the sanctity of the family unit, the self-correcting laxative of market forces.
The economic immiseration of black America, brutal and unrelenting, is simply elided, erased from the political dialogue, even at jam sessions of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead, whenever

Obama mentions the plight of black Americans (about once every two years by my count), as he did in his patronizing commencement addresses this spring, it is to chide blacks about cleaning up their acts, admonishing them to stop complaining about their circumstances and work harder at adopting the flight plan of white corporate culture.
The self-evident need for large-scale public works projects to green the economy and put people to work goes unmentioned, while the press and the politicians engage in a faux debate over the minutia of sequestration and sharpen each others knives to begin slashing Social Security and Medicare. Where’s the collective outrage? Where are the marches on the Capitol? The sit-ins in congressional offices?
A few weeks ago I wrote an essay (http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-game-of-drones/) on the Obama administration’s infamous memo justifying drone strikes inside countries like Pakistan and Yemen that the US is not officially at war against. In one revealing paragraph, a Justice Department lawyer cited Richard Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War as a precedent for Obama’s killer drone strikes. Let’s recall that the bombing of Cambodia prompted several high-ranking officials in the Nixon cabinet to resign, including CounterPunch writer Roger Morris. It also sparked the student uprising at Kent State, which lead the Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes to declare a state of emergency, ordering the National Guard to rush the campus. The Guard troops promptly began firing at the protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The war had come home.
Where are those protests today?
The environment is unraveling, thread by thread, right before our eyes. Each day brings more dire news. Amphibians are in stark decline across North America. Storms of unimaginable ferocity are strafing the Great Plains week after week. The Arctic will soon be ice-free. The water table is plummeting in the world’s greatest aquifer. The air is carcinogenic in dozens of California cities. The spotted owl is still going extinct. Wolves are beginning gunned down by the hundreds across the Rocky Mountains. Bees, the great pollinators, are disappearing coast-to-coast, wiped out by chemical agriculture. Hurricane season now lasts from May to December. And about all the environmental movement can offer in resistance are a few designer protests against a pipeline which is already a fait accompli.
Our politics has gone sociopathic and liberals in America have been pliant to every abuse, marinated in the toxic silt of Obama’s mordant rhetoric. They eagerly swallow every placebo policy Obama serves them, dutifully defending every incursion against fundamental rights. And each betrayal only serves to make his adoring retinue crave his smile; his occasional glance and nod all the more urgently. Still others on the dogmatic Left circle endlessly, like characters consigned to their eternal roles by Dante, in the ideological cul-de-sac of identity politics.
How much will we stomach before rising up? A fabricated war, a looted economy, a scalded atmosphere, a despoiled gulf, the loss of habeas corpus, the assassination of American citizens…
One looks in vain across this vast landscape of despair for even the dimmest flickers of real rebellion and popular mutiny, as if surveying a nation of somnambulists.
We remain strangely impassive in the face of our own extinction.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/24/the-silent-death-of-the-american-left/

[Hexen]

Well first of all, I don't think Counterpunch is a reliable source since I heard some rather questionable things about it.

[Red Nightmare]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.

[Questionable]

Well first of all, I don't think Counterpunch is a reliable source since I heard some rather questionable things about it.

Like what?

Do you dispute the information they have relayed in this article? It seemed spot-on to me.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

Oh, there is definitely a Left here in America.

The problem is, we don't have a Left PARTY. We are shackled with the two party system of center-right Democrats and right-wing Republicans.

Because we don't have any possible way of getting a Left Wing party involved in Congress, leftism has become stale in the U.S.

(Yeah, I know that reformism and politics don't neccessarily help further the revolution, but it would AT LEAST give the American Left some confidence, if not some visibility).

[cyu]

This guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man was all the rage for a few months.

About the only people who take the idea seriously these days are demagogues ;)

[Hexen]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.

True special thanks for the Red Scare/McCarthyism/Cold War propaganda and moral panics till the point that even terms "socialism"/"communism" have become loaded language and now post-Soviet Union "End of History" mindset and hardcore liberalism ("Communism sounds nice on paper but in practice it failed because of human nature" and such).


Like what?

Do you dispute the information they have relayed in this article? It seemed spot-on to me.

I think I remember reading somewhere that Counterpunch is owned by conspiracy theorists/reactionaries/"progressives" Green party/etc people or whatever but I don't remember where (sort of like "Common Dreams" which all they post is doom & gloom and such).

[Red Nightmare]

True special thanks for the Red Scare/McCarthyism/Cold War propaganda and moral panics till the point that even terms "socialism"/"communism" have become loaded language and now post-Soviet Union "End of History" mindset and hardcore liberalism ("Communism sounds nice on paper but in practice it failed because of human nature" and such).

I fear that the Left has been so obfuscated by propaganda in America that many people are not even willing to learn more about leftism due to the negative association even though they might find that they actually agree with the underlying principles of communism if they only knew what it truly was. I basically blame cultural hegemony.

[Turinbaar]

The breakdown happened rather early because of red hunting. Jessica Mitford recounts in "A Fine Old Conflict" that at a certain point in the late fifties, the members of various local Parties and their central committees who were FBI infiltrators began outnumbering genuine socialists. The sixties brought about alternatives, but they suffered in similar fashion.

[ed miliband]

maybe "the left" is dead because the material conditions that produced it no and facilitated its existence longer exist?

[Let's Get Free]

Historically, 'the Left' has failed monumentally. What war, depression or ecocide did it ever prevent? The Left now exists mainly as a fading protest vehicle or annoying lifestylism. It hasn't been a source of inspiration in many decades. It is, in fact, silently dying out.

[Mytan Fadeseasy]

maybe "the left" is dead because the material conditions that produced it no and facilitated its existence longer exist?

I would think that the current capitalist crisis would create the material conditions that would encourage people to seek an alternative.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You have to understand that no one gives a shit about many of the things listed in that article. Well, not no one, but the average American really doesn't care that much about kids dying in Pakistan, sad but true. Nor do they care about the spotted owl 'still going extinct' or a whole slew of other things that The Left cares about and obsesses over.

That's not even to say that such issues shouldn't be issues of concern...I too am disgusted over what this country does overseas on pretty much a daily basis. But the opposition to the war in Afghanistan...yes, if you go up to Americans and say, "should we be at war in Afghanistan?" most will probably say "no". But are they actually willing to do anything about that other than give their opinion? Are they ready for "mass demonstrations", "nationwide strikes", "systematic efforts to obstruct military recruiting", etc, all presumably led by a non-impotent Left? No. The war simply doesn't affect a large enough percentage of the American population, not even close. People may not like the wars but they'll tolerate them.

And forget it when we talk about things like privacy and civil liberties. The lack of fucks given over those issues by Americans is awe-inspiring.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Basically the article makes it sound like there's a large discontented political opposition out there just waiting to be had, and I'm skeptical of this notion. Then there's a whole poor pitiful pearl, let-me-play-a-song-on-the-world's-tiniest-violin lament about how the Left isn't whipping this latent political opposition into shape.

[KurtFF8]

One would expect an article on the "death of" the American Left to actually talk about the American Left. But after reading the article, you wonder if the author even acknowledges an existing Left that can die in the first place.

The whole article is essentially talking about the disappointment in the failure for a major Left resurgence rather than any analysis of an existing Left "silently dying out."

It probably has to do with the fact that sites like Counterpunch tend to not want to discuss the "sectarian" groups for fear of looking biased or getting caught up in old battles. Although I could be wrong on this last point.

[Geiseric]

Well the fSUs collapse like it's creation kind of corresponded with the decay of the established marxist movements worldwide.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

It's hard for the left to die in America when there really was never any real left movement of any significance to begin with in America.
I think you need to read up on your history comrade. While at this time the left is miniscule, that has not always been the case -- it has been rather large at times within the past hundred years. There has always been an ebb and flow. Sadly, we are in the midst of a major ebb.

[Lynx]

Richard Wolff talks repeatedly about a powerful union movement in the 1930s that forced Roosevelt to institute the New Deal. Contrast those historical events to the sound of crickets we hear today.

[Crabbensmasher]

Eh, as Henry Ford always said, consumerism is the key to peace. People just aren't as restless anymore. This is, in my opinion, because they are either enjoying a higher standard of living, or being told that they are. Probably more so, but not completely the ladder.

The left, the radicals, are being made to feel irrelevant. I know nobody wants to hear it, but I think the collapse of the USSR changed a lot of peoples' mindsets. Even though it was grossly misinterpreted and so very flawed, the USSR was always seen as a viable alternative, even in America. Even the centre left; the moderates, reformers and social democrats. They knew that "socialism" existed out there, and some parts of it even worked.

And then it collapsed. Suddenly, the "socialism" they were so familiar with didn't work anymore. Capitalism had won. Any alternative was wrong, and so, they heaved themselves back home and never said a word again.

I'm not saying all of the left were Soviet worshippers, and they certainly weren't, but I'm willing to bet there was a big decline in the early 90s. I can't say I'm really informed about American politics, but the left certainly took a massive hit in other parts of the world.

So, now, as far as the average American is concerned, there are no alternative ways of running the world. If times get bad, you try to fix the system, not change it. And if you have your McDonalds and new Ford Sedan, why really care anyway?

[Paul Pott]

We are still in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, just as the era from 1919 to 1939 was the aftermath of the first world war, and then from 1929 on, capital's crisis as well. In 2013, the working class movement is still without direction and in disarray globally.

Up till now, conditions in the United States allowed the ruling class to maintain a fairly comfortable hegemony through ideological means and material means such as collaborationist unions, credit, and welfare, all backed up by the mightiest economic machine in the world where one generation on average got better paying employment than the last. (We still have a higher standard of living than people in the 50s and 60s, when capitalism was at its furthest from major crisis) That paradigm has already crumbled and the global economy is currently held together by the efforts of central banks.

Capital's crisis will deepen in the near future, and that's when the working class movement will rebuild itself.

[MarxArchist]

Well first of all, I don't think Counterpunch is a reliable source since I heard some rather questionable things about it.
I use to write Cockburn all the time and ask why they publish free market libertarian stuff,green party stuff and whatever is not "republican/Democrat" perspective. It's basically like that RT news network, trying to gain broad support- more viewers/readers in a sort of generic 'fuck everything' publication. Counterpunch is a confused mess but they do indeed sometimes post good articles. They should get rid of the 'free market' analysis though. RT should do the same, free market and conspiracy theory stuff cheapens their brand and makes the left look absurd when we're bunched up with that nonsense. This adds to our irrelevancy but the overall article in the OP, well, Obama's persona did the job of taking any steam the left had during the Bush years. If I remember correctly many of the so called leftist publications helped that process along by feeding this silly hope/change thing. Very few actual socialist publications/organizations called it from the beginning. That the goal of an Obama administration was to silence resistance which built under Bush. "We're all one nation, black white, gay, straight. We're all equal and American and everything is great." His inaugural speech went something like that. "Now look the other way while I help capital expand the wars and attack the working class in America" (and abroad). The fault lies in the lap of people on the left who operate from the erroneous position that we have an actual democracy. We do in matters of identity and unfortunately all too many socialists place all their eggs in that basket. thats the basket Obama had to offer and even his identity (politics) basket was quite empty.


Listen closely to Obama and Brad here.

5V6GHnxEJjg

[DaringMehring]

This article is just whining.

The author wishes he could simply write his way to the revolution or whatever his objective is. Guess what --- it's about ORGANIZING. When Joe Hill was about to be executed, he said, "don't mourn, organize," not -- "don't mourn, write an article."

You say the American left is dead? No, it's just unorganized. Do the real work of building the left and organize. Don't write articles and then whine when the masses don't rise up due to your brilliant prose.

The American left isn't dead. Please. Workers are exploited, the economy is choking, people are mad. They just aren't organized. Build unions, build a Party, seek to join forces with others, speak to the workers, develop propaganda circles, take action -- don't just whine.

[Comrade Samuel]

I find myself frowning and nodding at my screen more often than I should while reading this...

Still I cannot disagree more with this idea that "the left is fundamentally flawed and doomed to fail". America is not the way it is today because of magic- one thing has lead to another again and again countless times for decades slowly building up to the pitiful realility we are experiencing right now. The problem, in my mind, is that the American ruling class has mastered the art of worsening things in small incriminates and keeping the masses as ignorant as possible while doing so.

I prefer to think we are living on an island here, that the disgruntled masses throughout the rest of the world will kickstart everything again and that we will all be waving red banners and burning shit in the streets by 2050...perhaps it is wishful thinking but right now it's all we really have.

I completely agree with DaringMehring's post above my own- the problem is, in addition to what I said before, a failure on our part to organize and agitate; we'd much rather rant on the Internet or stare at the TV than do anything of importance these days. I know I'm guilty of it but we're all capable of changing and putting just a little bit more towards the cause.

[Revy]

I don't think the American left is dead, it's more politically disorganized. America probably has the world's strongest two-party system. There are no third parties in our legislature. So really the failure of left-wing parties to become popular is more a symptom of a problem we've had for a long time, the two-party system.

Polling has shown there is a significant percentage of Americans who hold positive views of socialism. If we didn't have such a strict two-party system to deal with, I think the left alternative would be stronger than it is.

[cyu]

http://beavercountyblue.org/2013/05/01/revival-of-may-day-rallies-reflect-urgency-of-pending-immigration-reform-workers-right-to-organize/

Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity originated in the US labor movement in the United States and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country. Since 2006, however, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest.

The original May Day was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth, and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.

In solidarity with the Pullman workers, railroad workers across the country boycotted the trains with Pullman cars, paralyzing the nation’s economy as well as its mail service. President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and called out 12,000 soldiers to break the strike. They crushed the walkout and killed at least two protesters. Six days later, Cleveland — facing worker protests for his repression of the Pullman strikers — signed a bill creating Labor Day as an official national holiday in September. He hoped that giving the working class a day off to celebrate one Monday a year might pacify them.

May 1 faded away as a day of protest. From the 1920s through the 1950s, radical groups, including the Communist Party, sought to keep the tradition alive with parades and other events, but the mainstream labor movement and most liberal organizations kept their distance, making May Day an increasingly marginal affair. In 1958, in the midst of the cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as Loyalty Day. Each subsequent president has issues a similar proclamation, although few Americans know about or celebrate the day.

In 2001, unions and immigrant rights groups in Los Angeles resurrected May Day as an occasion for protest. The first few years saw rallies with several hundred participants, but in 2006 the numbers skyrocketed. That year, millions of people in over 100 cities — including more than a million in Los Angeles, 200,000 in New York and 300,000 in Chicago — participated in May Day demonstrations.

The huge turnout was catalyzed by a bill, sponsored by Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wisconsin) and passed by the House the previous December, that would have classified as a felon anyone who helped undocumented immigrants enter or remain in the United States.

[Lucretia]

I really can't stomach these counterpunch rad-lib articles that use these terms like "elites" and "the left." They invariably come across as a laundry list of grievances, with no plan for moving forward, because they have no framework -- like say capitalism -- by which to connect these grievances into a coherent political project. And as others said, when you have nothing but grievances and no practical plan for advancing your political perspective, you end up sounding like a whiner. In its more virulent forms, this kind of liberalism shades into a smug elitism, with the rad-libbers attempting to explain why they aren't making any progress on their laundry list of grievances, why there isn't a sizable "left" (whatever they mean by that), by pointing to the the supposed incapacity of the exploited or oppressed to fight for themselves. This has a strong relationship to both social-democrats and Stalinists who cast their lot with alien class forces to advance their pet (reformist) political projects.

[Lucretia]

I use to write Cockburn all the time and ask why they publish free market libertarian stuff,green party stuff and whatever is not "republican/Democrat" perspective. It's basically like that RT news network, trying to gain broad support- more viewers/readers in a sort of generic 'fuck everything' publication. Counterpunch is a confused mess but they do indeed sometimes post good articles. They should get rid of the 'free market' analysis though. RT should do the same, free market and conspiracy theory stuff cheapens their brand and makes the left look absurd when we're bunched up with that nonsense. This adds to our irrelevancy but the overall article in the OP, well, Obama's persona did the job of taking any steam the left had during the Bush years. If I remember correctly many of the so called leftist publications helped that process along by feeding this silly hope/change thing. Very few actual socialist publications/organizations called it from the beginning. That the goal of an Obama administration was to silence resistance which built under Bush. "We're all one nation, black white, gay, straight. We're all equal and American and everything is great." His inaugural speech went something like that. "Now look the other way while I help capital expand the wars and attack the working class in America" (and abroad). The fault lies in the lap of people on the left who operate from the erroneous position that we have an actual democracy. We do in matters of identity and unfortunately all too many socialists place all their eggs in that basket. thats the basket Obama had to offer and even his identity (politics) basket was quite empty.


Listen closely to Obama and Brad here.

5V6GHnxEJjg

Cockburn is just following the formula of so many disenchanted activists who came of age in the late 60s and 70s. For them, there was a revolutionary potential squandered by not enough "unity," by an over-emphasis on political principle as opposed to coalition-building. Once these activists finished licking their wounds inflicted by the rightward shift known as the late 1970s and early 1980s, they decided that the way forward was to build regroupment projects that stressed coalitions over theorized programs espousing long-term political objectives (like, say, a socialist revolution). You see this in groups like Solidarity, where ex-SWPers have basically abandoned anything remotely resembling Leninist party-building practices. You see in publications like Counterpunch, which seem enthusiastically publish anything that ostensibly challenges the two-party electoral setup, with the predictable exception of Marxist analyses (I guess they're too "sectarian"). But you also see it, more subtly, in groups like the American ISO, which have as their primary political objective the development of a "broad left," which they attempt to build by publishing watered down articles in their publications that almost uniformly fail to mention the r-word (revolution) in any context, even as a long-term objective, for fear that doing so will alienate potential recruits to their broad left regroupment. (Interestingly, most of their newspaper articles even fail to mention the c-word: capitalism.) Their actual goal, if you press them in argument enough to get an answer, is a working class/labor party, which they view as a gain for workers. The problem, of course, is that there's no suggestion that the ISO is attempting to build a particular type of workers' party, so that it seems it is, by reifying and prioritizing working-class unity, taking the path of least resistance to building such a workers' party, and objectively helping to build a reformist labor party. Such a party does not represent political advancements for the working class, but instead are what Lenin and Trotsky sometimes referred to as "bourgeois workers' parties." If you counter this, and challenge them on using unity and "getting workers in motion" as an unwitting cover for reformism, you will be called a sectarian. So prepare yourself.

[Martin Blank]

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether or not there really is such this as "the left" (a concept with which I disagree), there is a great deal of truth in the comments made by many of those posting here, especially DaringMehring. Those of us who identify as communists have spent so much time under the threat or reality of repression that it is almost impossible for many of us to break with that mode of operation. There is a great commentary by Mansoor Hekmat about this kind of thinking and the effect it has had on self-described socialists and communists:

"What has happened to communism is that the bourgeoisie, by the defeats, repression and pressures that it has continuously inflicted on communists, has succeeded in turning communism — i.e., a force contending for political power, which 150 years ago was striving to seize power using these same mechanisms — into a marginal, quasi-religious sect; a cult which defines its political life in a corner of society, finds its identity there and basically doesn't want to leave the spot — just like micro-organisms which adapt themselves to, and survive in, the cold in an ice age, so that even when the weather has warmed and the ice age is over, they do not return to the sun and warmth; they get used to the ice and can only live in those conditions. The external compulsion that one day forced that micro-organism to adapt to the unfavourable conditions for the sake of survival, now, after several cycles, turns into the innate lifestyle of that organism; into part of its existence, tradition and identity; any other life becomes inconceivable. We communists have lived under repression. We have been told: you can't come out, freely and openly go on a footstool and speak to people. We have been told, you may whisper to your comrade in a corner, in some alleyway, secretly and quietly, where you are not overheard. You have to live and speak in that corner and say whatever you want and in whatever language you want; take as long as you like; it is your sect; you may say whatever you want in the language of your sect; but you are not allowed to open your mouths in front of people and society. In this margin, we, and those like us, learn to convert the communist party from an instrument of struggle into a corridor where we set camp and live, a repository to be in and to exist in; a tradition to live in. This tradition has its own symbols, goddesses, angels, icons and rituals; its own history, fairytales, language and vocabulary. It goes so far that it seems that for its members communism is not an instrument of struggle, but a faith invented by a group of people condemned to life in the margins of society, through massive repression and propaganda by the bourgeoisie, so as to retain their self-esteem, to make their life meaningful and to convince themselves that they are engaged in the act of changing the world. To these kinds of communists, once they step outside that tradition, society is an unfamiliar terrain. They find themselves clumsy, ineffective and easily deceived. As soon as they say they want to make a revolution, some guy who has had nothing to do with Marxism before, some right-wing lecturer of the University of London or a postgraduate student of Tehran Polytechnic or the devout son of a Bazaar merchant who is now a student in France, suddenly rushes up to him to say: 'Hey, this is contrary to Marxism! Are the objective and subjective conditions of your revolution ready?'! Bewildered, our communist wonders if that's the case; is it really contrary to Marxism?! He then returns to his shell. He goes back to his sect to debate about the objective and subjective conditions of workers' revolution and the prerequisites for the historical turn of socialism in the year 3000! As soon as a communist sets foot into the field of political power, 50 social prefects show up to tell her, 'Hey, it won't do; you are theoretical, you have tradition, you believe in historical laws, you have Marx; where is your class?' They remind us that we are of a different make; that we should not dirty our hands with the question of power. When we mention the word political power, they scream, 'Oh, despots and totalitarians have arrived!' Never mind that the prisons and the courts belong to them, that it is they who tie up and flog people, that it is they who have set up the concentration camps and launched the wars. Every day they throw tons of scum, threats and bullets at us so we would stay in the same corner, keep quiet and not think of intervening in society; not think of the social mechanisms of intervening in society and of changing society; so we would go and live our lives in our 'Left world'. And comrades, at least since Bolshevism till now, the major part of the radical Left and communist groups has lived in these corridors, in the margins of society.

"A large part of the methods and norms which we think are the realities and inherent features of our movement are in fact imposed and 'internalised' results of external pressures which over many years have been exerted on us and which do not belong to us at all. Our language is not an awkward, pompous language, although we must be smart and informed and able to follow the most complex theoretical issues. Our language is the language with which the people of today speak about their problems. Our concerns are not the concerns of our sect. They are the concerns of the human being today, even if we need to attend to ourselves too so as to have a strong rank. Our concern is not the repackaging of what our forbearers have said, but, rather, responding to the problems of contemporary society. I am for the strongest Marxism that there is. I think the strongest Marxism is a Marxism that is able to influence the external world. The essence of what Marx said was that society is the basis. It is society that shapes our spirits, thoughts, emotions, intellect, aesthetics and everything else. Yet precisely those people for whom society is supposed to have the most crucial place in their thinking have turned out to be the most indifferent people towards the laws of motion and mechanisms of society. When we were discussing the issue of 'communist agitators and workers' circles', we were making precisely this point. We were saying, let's see what is the minimal mechanism that society itself has created for the unification of workers; let's link ourselves with that and work with that. Let's say what we have to say there. There you will find people who are all ears. The discussion of 'workers' circles' was about recognising part of society's real mechanisms. It was a reminder that the working class is a social and socially-developed entity. It is not as if in the absence of Left groups, workers are isolated individuals, gazing at the sky, motionless and baffled, waiting for someone to come up and tell them that poverty is bad and unity is good. We said be sure that at any moment in time there are resistance circles among workers. We said that the condition of intervening in the fate of society is to recognise society's mechanisms and laws of motion. This is the basis of Marxism.

"Isolation from society, the inability to take hold of society's mechanisms so as to shift forces and to make political assertion, absence from the battle over power, indifference towards society's ongoing issues and settling into a craft-based, sect-like and marginal existence — these are not classical communist working traditions, but, rather, the legacy of repression, suppression and defeat. We should not accept the image that is portrayed of the political life and 'classical' method of communist activity. First of all, this so-called 'classical' was something else 20 years ago. Secondly, we ourselves have played a big role in altering this 'classical'. So I don't appreciate the claim that this is not classical communist work. It is we who define what communist work is. And if we realise, to the best of our understanding and according to our political needs and social ideals, that we should go in a particular direction, we should go and not be worried that nobody else has taken this route before and that it is bumpy and untrodden." (Party and Society: From a Pressure Group to a Political Party (http://hekmat.public-archive.net/en/1900en.html))


I know that's a long passage, but I had to put the whole thing up for it to be fully understood.

[Vostok17]

Nobody in the comfortable center or conservative right feel threatened by the Left. We will always be in the margins until we are feared! Face it!

[Lucretia]

Nobody in the comfortable center or conservative right feel threatened by the Left. We will always be in the margins until we are feared! Face it!

Yes, we will advance our cause by scaring the shit out of people, not by forging political links and helping to raise the consciousness with the working class.