Reflections on coherence and comradeship

http://links.org.au/paul-le-blanc-reflections-coherence-comradeship
Date Written:  2019-03-26
Publisher:  Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23598

A lengthy personal meditation on strategic challenges facing left organizing.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In reaction, we see around the world the rise of an anti-humanist Right, fake-populist authoritarians, with even worse elements beginning to mobilize to offer their own horrific “solutions” (with the multiple bigotries – racism, misogyny, homophobia, and more) to the terrible problems that are shaping up. At the same time, a deep and long-term process of radicalization – in the best sense – is also becoming manifest in multiple ways. In the United States this has been reflected in the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the million-woman mobilization against Trump, the #MeToo movement, the growing strike-wave spearheaded by teachers, and the amazing impact of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the accompanying mushrooming of Democratic Socialists of America. Things are incredibly complex, fluid, horrible, hopeful … yet-to-be-determined. What we do and fail to do – each and every one of us – makes a difference. All the vibrant, interactive specks of humanity, all of us, are part of the amazing equation whose solution is not yet clear.

In order to help deal with such realities, we need to face, and move beyond, the long-term crises afflicting the Left – that segment of the political spectrum that is defined as favoring rule by the people, with liberty and justice (social justice, economic justice) for all. And we need to wrestle with the age-old question of what is to be done. For many on the revolutionary left, there is a need to move beyond the shambles in which we find ourselves in order to do what we need to do. There is much good, over time, that we have contributed to struggles for human liberation, but we must learn from limitations and recent failures if we are to do more.