This question (and any answer given to it) is vicious nonsense.

For 200 years "the left" has been an entity which only exists for fairly 
brief periods of time -- for reasons quite beyond the controlof this 
mythical entity, "The Left." Any notion  contrary to this represents a 
serious and disastrous voluntarism.

Despite the apparent chaos of left forces in the 60s, and the many 
quarrels among them, a coherent left existed for five or six years 
beginning around 1965, a left having roots going back to the immeidate 
postwar period. By 1969 or so that left had achieved all that, 
essentially, _could_ be achieved at that time, and at the same time the 
corporate right and center bean a systematic assault on what they 
regarded as the "D Too Much Democracy" which that movement of movements 
threatened. (Attempts to blame this exhaustion on supposed errors of 
"The Left" are siply a continuation of the more vicious sectarianisms of 
the period. Leftists and left groups did make many errors, as all left 
movements of the future will do also, but those errors were 
inconsequential as 'causes' of the exhaustion of left forces, the 
systematic attack of capital, and the achievement or apparent 
achievement of the major goals which had empowered the movements of the 
period.

Major parts of this story are to be found in Edward P. Morgan, _What 
Really Happened To the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed* American 
Democracy_. (*This word, Ted has informed me, was at the pressure of the 
publisher and distorts the actual argument of the book.)

Carrol

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