Solidarity, 1917. Wikimedia Commons/Ralph Chaplin. Some rights reserved.The Left has always been prone to self-flagellation: what’s wrong with us? Why can’t we get our act together? Why can’t we convince the masses to join us? Such self-criticisms are understandable and, to some extent, justified. The history of the Left and the labour movement in the United States is nauseatingly full of the leadership's cowardice, opportunism, bureaucratism, and cooptation by the corporatist state. There is much to criticize.
But many activists seem genuinely puzzled by the Left's relative impotence. Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch, laments that as one surveys the Left in America, "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."
All of this demands subtle and strategic answers. Clearly many past strategies and tactics have failed, and new ones are necessary. It's likely, for instance, that more confrontational, though nonviolent, tactics are called for, since they often seem to work better than top-down, bureaucratic, concessionary approaches.
