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Good thread this from @SolHughesWriter. Having spent a lot of time on the soft left, there are some basic pathologies that constantly hamper soft left politics.... https://twitter.com/SolHughesWriter/status/1341410520604225536
One is failing to realise that what were ONCE just reasonable social-democratic politics are now radical demands that capital will ignore or suppress unless you come up with an actual political strategy than can defeat those efforts....
Another is the persistent belief that if a cause or project gets beaten, it must have been in some way Wrong. This view never accepts that sometimes you just got beaten by a stronger force. It allways assumes that some change of policy, presentation or theory is needed...
(Admittedly this is the mirror image of the hard left, who never accept they got anything wrong ever, even when it has been not-working for 150 years, and therefore assume that their failures are always Somebody Else's Fault), but still, it often leads to weak analysis...
All this manifests itself most directly in the constitutive fantasy of the soft left: the belief that there's some magical sweet-spotbetween radical militancy and Blairite triangulation, wherein capital and its agents won't try to destroy you, but you still get to be progressive.
The fact that this sweet spot existed for a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century but hasn't existed since the 70s is the basic fact that the soft left cannot bring themselves to face. The Blairites faced it, the Bennites faced it.The soft left remain in denial.
