"William C. Meecham" wrote:
>
> This is provokingly pessimistic.  Most of Europe is governed by Socialist
> parties, almost all of East Europe is as well as the largest nation in the
> world.
>
> At 09:26 PM 6/12/02 -0500, you wrote:
> >All statements, positive or negative, about "The Left" are false or,
> >more precisely, utterly vacuous -

You have heard I assume of Gramsci's "pessimism of the intellect,
optimism of the will"?

But I suspect it's not pessimism/optimism at issue here, I suspect, so
much as conflicting views of what "A left" would be like. It certainly
would not look anything like either the Socialist Parties of Europe or
even the extreme "left" wing of the Democratic Party in the U.S. Under
present conditions what is needed for even minor reforms of any
substance is a mass-movement (_not_ electoral to begin with, and _never_
electoral at its core), with the coherence provided by a coalition of
organized groups. (We're not going to have a single left party, but what
that means is subject to a great deal of discussion.) If "A Left"
existed in the U.S. its two central concerns  would be (a) providing
real resistance to u.s. foreign policy (ANY foreign policy -- it is
utopian to think that while capitalism survives there will ever be an
elected government in the u.s. which will follow a foreign policy that
could even be critically supported by a left) and (b) the discrediting
of the Democratic Party.

Carrol Cox