Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Bolsheviks, Marxists, Stalinists, Trotskyites...

Those are just some of the names serious leftist types like to throw at one another.

These congregations are further sub-divided on the basis of a wide range of internecine rivalries. For example, within the Trotskyist sub-group there are a number of sub sub-groups, who at this remove from the actual living Trotsky appear forever doomed to spend far more of their energy, their political capital, such as it is, on denigrating other Trotskyists rather than bringing down the capitalist order.

That's kinda the way it's gone with the vanguard of the proletariat for the past 50 years. As a guy who came up through shops and factories, shop-floor level, from coast to coast, over the last three decades of the 20th century, that line of debate strikes me as an indulgence of the academic revolutionaries. The Ivory Tower crew who imagine themselves the vanguard of that proletariat.

There is a "greater good" hanging in the balance today. On one side of the balance hangs the greater good, where education and opportunity and a roof and a job are prized.

On the other side of the balance lie endless war, increasing accumulation of wealth among the finance class, more jobless, more homeless, more despair.

Surely all of you know on which side of the balance you stand.

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