The majority of the so-called ‘left’ made itself irrelevant, if not completely criminal, by supporting the Assad dictatorship & justifying Syrian & Russian bombing of civilians to defend Assad’s right to self-determination. It was all over for them, no matter how well-versed they were in Marx & Engels quotes. But now they’re engaging in a gaseous dispute about Kautsky versus Lenin’s politics. Most of the leading figures in this dispute are people who haven’t gotten off their asses in decades to do something against injustice. So blither on boys since you’re living in an echo chamber.
If the Kautsky crowd want to join the Democratic Party (DP) & rally for Sanders & Warren, why stop them? Let them go & godspeed. This is still a free country. It’s their right to reproduce the mistakes & betrayals of the Communist Party who were among the most active members of the Democratic Party for decades. In my brief tenure attending DP meetings in the 1960s, the CP crowd voted at one meeting to oppose the Vietnam War & at the same meeting voted to endorse the 1968 presidential candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War. Me, I’m a hard-ass & couldn’t live with that kind of contradiction so I quit & never looked back.
The point is not to engage in pissing contests exchanging quotes from Marx & Engels but to understand what they would say today about Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, about Sudan, about sweatshops, about those US concentration camps for children, about refugee rights, about the Kashmiri, Palestinian, Uyghur, & Rohingya struggles. But about those issues, the so-called ‘left’ is either silent or on the wrong side. It really is all over for them.