My response to you is a hardy: “yes, but…” Even in Harrington’s time, building a left tendency in the national Democratic Party was the longest of long shots, and the debate among leftists (at least among sane leftists) centered on what constituted the possible for which a left wing could advocate and militate. At the same time that Harrington and DSOC were busy building the Democratic Agenda as an intra-party labor and civil rights alternative to Carter’s evolving neo-liberalism–soon killed by Carter’s consiglieri Hamilton Jordon–I was with likeminded people doing what we now call internal organizing among steelworkers. That was in the wake of an historic (if heartbreakingly unsuccessful) run by Ed Sadlowski, a remarkable young, indigenous former mill worker cum district director who posed a far more serious challenge to the steelworker union hierarchy than anything Mike Harrington could muster in his chosen arena. Eddie and we failed, in large part because of the collapse of the steel industry and the ensuing deindustrialization, and Mike’s hopes ended for at least a generation with the Kennedy campaign’s collapse in 1980 and the subsequent Reagan victory. So the issue isn’t debunking or replacing the left wing of the possible as a concept but of defining it and focusing on what can be done on any number of fronts. BTW, Mike Harrington was a firm and vocal Sadlowski supporter, and those contemporary movements needn’t have been juxtaposed in principle, even as individuals did pick and choose. Today, I wouldn’t rule out working to build a left current in the Democratic Party–the 60 House members ready to back HR 676 in the face of mind-numbing opposition from the president could indeed represent the beginning of an alternative electoral current–and I do think that third party efforts are nonstarters, but I don’t assume that electoral politics, especially absent fired up social movements, is the warp and woof of the politics of the possible. It wasn’t in Mike’s time, and it surely isn’t now.

I’m languishing here in my Democratic office job, not changing the world, but I still wonder how people aren’t out in the streets about, for instance, the prison system.

There are 12 million undocumented people who need amnesty and as Chris pointed an ecological crisis that capitalism seems unable to address. I’m still at a loss for what to do.

Thanks for putting your ideas out there Chris.