Groovy.

Judging from the vast majority of your articles you seem to be quite sharp so it would be a shame if you took honest, open engagement for a reason to “stop talking”. I do think that you misunderstood some of the points that I’ve and others have made.

But yes, I have broadly criticized a wide range of politics. Knee-jerk anti-imperialism that puts some in our movement in bed with mullahs is unacceptable in my view, but equally so is the type of politics that has illusions about the nature of imperial power. CCDS or CPUSA style relations with the Democratic Party is doing little to movement build, but neither is brick throwing and lifestylism on the otherside of the spectrum. Dependency theory hogwash that doesn’t acknowledge the role of market forces in lifting millions upon millions out of poverty in India and China doesn’t sit well with me either. I think the alternative I’ve posed is relatively pragmatic and would make for more effective politics. Am I expecting the majority of the working class to adopt a socialist program in my lifetime? No. I am sure that it is possible to build a relevant, minority pole of opposition. I also would also contest the idea that I (or whoever you were addressing) were just inspired by a bunch of different people My ideas are all cohesive and build on just a few basic principles, they aren’t unassailable of course and I reserve the right to be fundamentally wrong about the possibility of overcoming class society, but they are definitely not eclectic pluckings from interesting thinkers.

Example: as I recall you had nice things to say about Andy Stern. But the Stern approach to expanding unionism in the U.S. is an absolute disaster — it does nothing more than build a 21st century form of company unionism that does not even do the basic task of defending workers’ basic economic interests. To stand with Stern is to give up on the fight for a labor movement that does what a labor movement should do — fight for the interests of workers. It is to give up on the fight for serious, “social democratic” reform — which is what the SEIU did when it put unionizing HMOs above the need for single-payer health insurance in the U.S. It is to disavow the very real class struggle in favor of “Team U.S.A.,” workers and corporations working hand in hand against competitors around the world. It’s just not socialist.

Also, it is false to say that ideology alienates leftists from a mass base or somehow pushes us further into the fringe. If anything the broad politics of the contemporary liberal-left consists of knee jerk anti-imperialism that devolves into a mess of latent anti-semtism and crude anti-Americanism — rampant precisely because we are in a post-political epoch and don’t have any sort of broader context to put our actions and world events into.

A return to ideology and to the idea of mass politics if would be (at the very least — relatively) mainstreaming for the radical left. Turns to authoritarianism didn’t happen because of ideology. They happened because socialists all too often eschewed the idea of mass politics and building towards majoritarian support (what Harrington called “visionary gradualism”) and seized and held onto power anti-democratically (and lacked a democratic and materially efficient post-capitalist vision). Ironically, I think that the current “anti-authoritarian” left is closer to mimicking these follies.

Don’t want to “parrot the correct line”? Should we parrot the incorrect line instead? Should we not care whether we’re right or not, or treat our political perspectives as if they weren’t important? Shouldn’t avowed socialists care about whether or not the political positions we take are consistent with the cause we’re supposedly advancing?

On the brightside, I think DSA is a fine model for what an embryo of a good movement of opposition should look like. We do everything pretty well proportional to our size.