To be sure, in the rat race of daily politics they may also forget the way. When the conditions change, those who have remained in the daily fray may be able to show the way. Apart from any ends which are achieved, partial struggles keep alive an arena for political activity and commitment for many individuals this will be critical - and more: a renaissance of political activity is unthinkable without the participation of individuals.

As always the danger is in self-righteousness and self-mystification: the confusion of better garbage collection with revolution. If the strength of contemporary radicalism is its localism, this is also its weakness. Yet the struggles are fragmentary, local and transitory. A wildcat strike to preserve a coffee break which is being eroded away is surely justified. It would be arrogant to write any of this off. Groups will enter the political arena to do battle for separate rights and interests: rent control, health care, environment, and so on. The next years will be the era of partial struggles. Those who are sound in body and mind will not fight the revolution those who are mutilated beyond repair cannot: this is the curse which has bewitched the revolutionary project. It can be doubted that they will cross the line separating the struggle to eat from the struggle for emancipation. That various socioeconomic groups and minorities are in for a bad deal in the coming years, cannot be doubted. The specific conditions of the working class prompted the hope of revolution. Marx never argued that the working class suffered more than the peasantry. Yet it belongs to basic Marxism that there is no automatic link between suffering and revolutionary activity. The Left has often confused oppression with revolution the most oppressed were the most blessed. The struggle to survive cannot be criticized yet it has little to do with the fate of a political Left. Recent symposiums on the Left have stressed that the goals of the past decades have not been met: racism, poverty, discrimination, remain current realities the 80s will see groups trying to survive in the teeth of government retrenchment and recession. Academic Marxism is hardly the whole of the political Left.

Russell jacoby social amnesia pef