Just ended a conference call with some clients, some nat'l DNC strategist types

[patrice]

109. I am suspicious of what appears to be divide and conquer for base-building factions at all costs.

Body count at higher priority than success on the issues looks very bourgeoisie to me. It appears to be about people's ambitions and that's generally middle-class ambitions, since most of the poor are pretty darned a-political because they're too busy dealing with being poor. I was raised in the Catholic social justice tradition and was a young adult during the '60s and have chaired a few social justice church committees (though I'm no longer a practicing Catholic) and my basic understandings are socialistic.

Those are some of the reasons why I often refer to "what calls itself 'the Left'". The internet is such a tricky place and most people are anonymous here, so it's easy to cause trouble for this or that faction, while pretending to be one of them, and insulting others is extremely poor issue advocacy, so I'm skeptical about what goes on here. If (rhetorical) you care about your issues, you don't put ridicule and anger ahead of them and you're more careful about making a real effort to get more and more truth & don't assume that you know it all, or even enough, already and that all that is needed is for others to conform to your agenda. Authentic Liberals, I think, would tend to be more inclusive for the simple sake of humanity and for the sake of step-wise progress toward economic and social justice. That's not betrayal; it's the opposite of betrayal; it's deeper more self-less commitment. In comparison to Liberal, maybe the difference is that a Left would have to be more political, hence more about building a base, numbers of persons attracted to what amounts to de facto demagoguery, whether they can deliver issue specificities is not that relevant, so I probably have some basic tactical differences with some folks here.

On DU 2.0 I went through a phase where I was sorting my thoughts about money out, how arbitrary and unjust it is and yet everyone is measured by it, some more so than others, and the poor the most judged of all and with the least power because they have the least money. I think we might discover some answers for them and for others in workers' co-operatives.