So antagonism between employees and corporations simmers or rages as they joust over their respective shares of the economic pie. And the clash between them is inseparable from a system of unplanned production for private profit, marked by the megarich struttin' their stuff in the faces of the abysmally deprived. This intractable conflict can be resolved only by Marxism, the sole political cuisine in town based on reality and a scientific reason for hope. The collapse of the USSR under the twin battering rams of Wall Street and the White House on one side, and its own internal contradictions on the other, flung open the floodgates to a gigantic tidal wave of reaction and counterrevolution that is engulfing the planet. Erstwhile radicals wither into liberals, past liberals atrophy into conservatives, former conservatives petrify into fascists.
Every mass movement grows increasingly rudderless.
Uncultured peasants turn into warriors, sullen proletarians into Communards, slaves into conductors of the Underground Railroad, Mrs.'s into Ms.'s. Reaction begets a revolutionary backlash, like in Australia right now, where protesters are slinging sledgehammers against the parliament doors of a ham-fisted new government. It is hard to grasp this ineradicable truth about things turning into their opposites and crisis morphing into opportunity without tutoring from a knowledgeable leadership. But the Left has largely abdicated responsibility for alerting and guiding the irate millions yearning to be free of endless strife and worry or penury. And the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again.