Istanbul

I'm now in Istanbul, after a somewhat eventful trip involving an unexpected extra night in Rome and arriving in Turkey without my luggage. I've been doing some touristing (pictures to follow), and I just had the unexpectedly non-sucky experience of doing a paper sale in a language where I don't speak more than 6 words (I managed to sell about 10 papers, which I think is better than I ever did in the states).

I've been hanging out with Antikapitalist, the IS Tendency group in Turkey. They managed to broker an electoral arrangement between a bunch of Left parties (in particular ÖDP, EMEP, and SDP, for those keeping track) and the main Kurdish party (currently called DTP, formerly DEHAP) which has gotten a huge level of involvement: 15,000 people signed the statement Antikapitalist started things with, and there are nearly 100 campaign offices in the Asian side of Istanbul alone, mostly set up by groups that sprang up from nowhere. The election is tomorrow; it seems pretty much guaranteed that a lot of the Kurdish candidates will get elected, and we'll see about the others. In any case it is already a big development, and it's cool to be able to say that I had a little tiny part in it.

Unfortunately a neofascist party, the MHP, is almost certain to make a big breakthrough as well. Their street wing, the Grey Wolves, has recently shifted from sending groups of 50-100 people to start rumbles with campus leftists to sending groups of 5-10 people to ambush individduals on their way to/from school, which is much harder to counter and much less likely to get into the newspapers -- the latter is particularly important right now since they are trying to turn "respectable".

Some of the folks I was talking to were very worried about the situation after the elections: the elections were moved up by several months as a result of the army's attempts a little while ago to break the back of the ruling AK Party, but AK looks set to get an even higher proportion of the votes than in the last election, which raises the possibility that the army and the nationalist parties will try something more aggressive.

I've finally had the roots of the political situation here properly explained to me. It seems like Turkey is one of a few places in the world today where the different political parties are genuinely based on different economic strata of the ruling class. The Kemalists (CHP) are tied up with the army -- which is also owns the third biggest holding company in Turkey -- and other sections of the state, and along with that the big banks, the local affiliates of multinationals, and various hangers on. The Islamists (mainly AK Party) get their support from small manufacturing concerns as well as more "traditional" sectors. This isn't compradors vs "patriotic" capitalists: the small manufacturers are very export-oriented, hence AK Party's fixation on joining the EU (as well as friendliness towards Iran and Russia), but there is a difference. The Kemalists meanwhile use 'secularism' and ethnic chauvinism, as well as outright military force, to keep a near-monopoly on state support and patronage.

This depends a lot on US support, including US help through international institutions which lets Turkey sustain (so far) a ridiculously overvalued currency and a massive trade deficit, both mostly subsidizing the lifestyles of a few people (Turkish CEOs are apparently the 5th best paid in the world). At the same time the Turkish military is still not very comfortable within its present borders -- witness the constant interventions into Iraqi Kurdistan, which many seem to want to ramp up even further.

Anyhow. I'm still waiting for my luggage (32 hours and counting), and about ready to fall asleep, so I won't try for an elegant conclusion. Instead see if you can figure out what's wrong with this picture, taken of a market stall in the middle of Istanbul. First to post the correct answer gets a vague sense of satisfaction, at least if you're as easily amused as I am:

What I learned in London

I talked at great length in my last post about what I found so impressive about Marxism, and I had occasion a few `times to mention that I thought it helped to clarify what I had been thinking about the situation in the United States. I want to try to clarify that a bit now.

I came into politics starting with the sense that it was necessary to fundamentally transform the existing social order, and so I looked for a group that embodied some kind of overarching worldview and political project, and I found the ISO. I only got involved in "movement" activity afterwards. A lot of the people who make up the organized left in the US have a similar story, perhaps with a detour or two along the way.

There are only ever going to be so many people like that (and we tend to be a peculiar sort in some ways). One of the most exciting developments of the last few years is that there is a wave of people (most visible in the antiwar movement but also popping up elsewhere) who seem to be headed towards the same place from the opposite direction. If my own experiences and those of the people I know are anything to go by, there are thousands of people out there who have seen some of the crying injustices in the world around them and are trying to do something about them; who then see that what they are fighting against is one of a multitude of problems and that there are many unexpected pitfalls in overcoming it; and who are trying to come up with a way of understanding all this and a strategy to overcome it.

The role that radical (anarchist, socialist, communist, or what have you) political organizations generally aspire to is to give these people what they want, to give them a political home. Unfortunately none seem to be able to. Why is that?

As someone said, all happy families are alike in their happiness, but all unhappy families are unique in their misery. The american left has a myriad of shortcomings: some strands (most anarchists, or Democratic Party fringe groups like DSA, PDA, and Democracy for America) simply have little to offer in the way of ideas; others (most Maoists, Workers' World, PSL, the Communist Party, the SWP, and at least a dozen Trotskyist grouplets) have only ideas which are so detached from reality as to be worse than useless. Solidarity and the Socialist, Labor, and Green parties (together with their various factions) are so ideologically scattered and organizationally weak that in spite of the determination and acumen of many of the people who owe allegiance to one or another their organizational existence is almost irrelevant. The ISO, for me the most complicated case, is at the end of the day so organizationally and intellectually rigid that in spite of itself it is frequently reduced to the status of an alien body which has thrust itself into the various movements in which it projects itself. This has been the state of the American left for longer than I've been alive, and there are many who see it as an inevitable, natural part of the post-modern, post-industrial, post-whatever condition.

I don't think so, and this last week has given me a whole lot more confidence about that. The first point that was really driven home to me is that although things may be particularly bad in this respect in the US, the socialist movements in much if not most of the world (almost the entire developed world and a sizable portion of the rest) have been facing similar problems, but over the last 10 years or so have started to overcome them. This is actually the first key to overcoming the deadlock we face in the US -- if it can be done elsewhere, than that should give people a lot more hope that it can be done here.

The second thing we can get is an understanding of what it actually means to get beyond the current state of affairs. That means building structures that share a broad common understanding of the problems we face (war, neoliberalism, etc, to use the common shorthand) and a set of tactics to begin to fight against them. The latter vary from place to place; in Western Europe, the organizations in question are mostly new political parties of the radical left, which is to say that although their most important role is in social movements, trade unions, community organizations, and so on they often cohere around electoral activities of a kind which might be impractical in the US for some time to come.

This brings me to a rough point: even in, say, England there is a political culture so dramatically different from the US that it would be silly to try and directly copy the experience of RESPECT or some other group even if their success did come from some sort of written recipe and not a series of developments in reaction to a succession of complicated situations. I do think, however, that when a group of people comes together and makes a commitment to applying this project to the reality we find ourselves in we can draw any number of lessons from the details as well as the big picture of what our comrades in other countries are doing.

London - part 1

I've had a very exciting week-and-a-bit, so I've fallen a bit behind on writing anything here. London dramatically exceeded my expectations, and my head is still spinning from some of the discussions I had and the things I've seen and heard, but I'm going to try to get a little of it written down.

As I've mentioned before the main reason I went to London was to attend the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s Marxism 2007. I had some idea what to expect from listening to recordings from years past and from associated literature from the SWP and the International Socialist Tendency (which have been a staple part of my political diet for many years), but I think I'd picked so much negativity from various sources that I didn't really expect the event to be quite as fantastic as it was.

What I did expect was a lot of talks which were quite interesting in their own right. In particular I was happy to see a number of very good talks on Africa (including one on imperialism in Africa by Charlie Kimber and one on Nkrumah's political legacy by Mani Tanoh of the Ghanaian International Socialists). It seems (and I think this is increasingly accepted) that Africa is likely to keep getting more important over the next few years both as a focus of inter-imperialist rivalries and as a source of resistance, and besides learning more it was particularly heartening to hear about some of the exciting developments in the workers' movements in various countries.

This is not to say that there weren't a few disappointments in the talks and discussions, though the SWP was mostly not at fault. I suspect that the talk by Slawoj Žižek was a bit similar from the comments I heard about it afterward, and also because he's always a bit like that.The worst talk I attended was by the USFI's Michael Löwy on Walter Benjamin. Besides his talk being rather dull, Löwy's main point seemed to be importance of revolutionaries encouraging a general sense of impending disaster, which seems to me to be exactly the wrong lesson from the time Benjamin was living in. Just like the main result of these politics in the '30s was the popular front, the main result today (at least in the US) seems to a desperate attachment to liberalism and reformism. The various SWP cadres in the audience were very complimentary, perhaps out of politeness, but who knows?

This is of course a problem I'm very familiar with, and another one was a hair-trigger response to anything smacking of islamophobia. I should say that I absolutely agree that this is one of the biggest problems facing antiwar movements and the left generally, and I'm very glad that the SWP is pushing hard on this front. However when admittedly reactionary ideas like these are so widespread even among people who are very actively involved in the movement, it's important to differentiate between people who are spreading and taking advantage of these ideas for nefarious ends and honest leftists who are simply being misled. As important as it is to denounce the former, it's even more important to give a positive lead to the latter. One of the speakers at this meeting was Ghassan Makarem, who has an excellent short piece on the same theme here.A good example was in a meeting (introduced by two excellent talks) on the LGBT movement in the middle east where a young Gay British activist from the Stop the War Coalition said, more or less, that no matter what he'd rather live in the UK where he 'has rights' than in the middle east where he 'wouldn't'. Of course that's based on an oversimplification of the situation in both Britain and the Middle East (as the speakers had done a good job explaining), but besides pointing this out politely the best thing to do is to explain that that attitude is a big problem for people who are trying to improve the situation in both regions. Unfortunately it seems to me that the comrades who tried to reply to him didn't do that very well, and it seems like part of the problem could have been an assumption that he was not just honestly confused/mistaken/misinformed. All else aside, I think a too-aggressive response to such a situation gives an impression of a lack of real confidence in the ideas being put out.

I should say, of course, that these problems are nowhere as severe as what I'm used to. I may even be exaggerating because of having been a bit oversensitized by me previous experience. I also hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that all of the discussions had one or another of these problems. It was refreshing, for example, to see Billy Hayes of the CWU (postal workers' union) speak in one session, and then hear John Rees in the next session call him out for opposing united strike action with other public sector unions.

Although I was generally very impressed with the insights the folks I was talking to had about the state of the US left, it did seem to me that except for possibly Molyneux all of the people I was talking to had a very distorted understanding of the ISO, Left Turn, and the processes that left the IST without an organized presence in the US.So far this is more or less what I expected. What really surprised me was getting an impression of the work the SWP in Britain and its sister groups in other countries (especially Germany) are doing, which along with some conversations I had with Chris Nineham (also more briefly with John Molyneux, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German, and John Rees) and with comrades from the Canadian IS really helped me figure out some of the things that have been bouncing around in my head about the American left. This is something I'll be coming back to very soon, along with the results of some conversations I had with some other americans who came to the conference.

I, probably like a lot of socialists in the US, had a totally distorted picture of what the SWP is doing, particularly in the RESPECT coalition. The impression you get by reading the reports easily available on the internet is basically of a shabby attention-grabbing front group, which only gets votes by pandering to muslim communalism. To be sure some of the things George Galloway has done have been pretty unhelpful and it does seem to be true that (to a small extent) Muslim RESPECT candidates get higher votes than non-Muslim ones when both run in the same areas (if you want to go through the raw numbers, you can find some here). It may be that there have been tensions within RESPECT between the SWP and some more conservative elements in the coalition, as some have claimed.

The overall impression I got, though, is very different. Firstly, even at an SWP event you can see that the SWP is more than just SWP + Muslims + George Galloway. I think that with the SWP taking the lead RESPECT has been shifting form a two-issue group (war and islamophobia) to a more general militant antineoliberal formation. They have made a very serious turn in the last year or two towards building a connection to trade union militants (through the Organizing for Fighting Unions initiative, which has already attracted an imitation by the English CWI section) and fights against privatization of housing and medical services. This is going to be a long struggle, but in last year's local elections RESPECT was able to begin to go beyond what the Socialist Alliance was able to achieve both in non-Muslim immigrant communities and also in almost all-white areas in the British equivalent of the Rust Belt.

It's important not to see this as a 180º turn. My impression of the typical RESPECT local councilor is a socialist, leftist, or community activist (very often a young woman, it should be noted) who is also either a practicing Muslim or from a Muslim background; a good example was a councilor from Tower Hamlets, an older Bangladeshi woman, who made a comment at a meeting on the shape of the working class to the effect of "Insh'Allah (God willing), the working class around the world will unite to fight for justice". Even if a lot of these people got involved around civil rights issues or the war, it's not a big stretch for them or the people who voted for them to talk about public housing, pay cuts, etc.

The point is that RESPECT is being built up as an organization which is really part of the movements against war and neoliberalism in Britain, and gives a place to develop an overall set of political ideas and strategies. In more elevated terms, RESPECT is taking a first step out of what Stanley Aronowitz (in an otherwise largely incomprehensible book) calls "the Postmodern Left": the combination of a collection of single-issue movements with political organizations which oscillate between being loose collections of activists or which work inside the movements without really being part of them. It seems like there is a strong chance that Die Linke in Germany is headed in this direction from a very different starting point, and from what I have heard the LCR in France has just recently decided to move in a similar direction, and there is also reason to be hopeful about P-SoL in Brazil, although I think they have more problems than many people realize.

A digression but hardly an unimportant one: I have been led to understand that Rifondazione Comunista in Italy has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The sizable Trotskyist minority, mainly organized in AMR-Progetto Comunista and Sinsitra Critica, will probably have entirely left the party very soon, and the leadership under Bertinotti is steering clear of mass mobilizations and the anti-war movement and planning on a merger with the other post-Stalinist parties in Italy.This is not the first time something like this has happened, even recently. Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and the PT in Brazil certainly looked like this at one point but were lured away by the supposed virtues of "respectability" and being thought worthy to govern or be part of a coalition government. The Scottish Socialist Party seemed also to have substantial prospects, but then fall apart because of (depending on who you listen to) either personality conflicts, a fear of being part of movements it didn't control, or being blindsided by left-leaning Scottish nationalism.

What seems to set the IST apart in all this is a broad and deep historical understanding, which manages to integrate most of the experience of the socialist movement in the 20th century, and at least makes it possible to understand the process that is going on in these "new left parties" and the pitfalls in them. This doesn't mean that the efforts they are involved in are fated to be successful, but it does give them a fighting chance of coming out having accomplished something, and ready to take on bigger challenges in the future.

As I've said I think there is a lot in all this to learn from in the US; but that's something I'll have to come back to later.

CWI loses Dáil seat

The CWI's Joe Higgins lost about a fifth of his 2002 vote and missed getting reelected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) today.

I heard him speak a couple of years ago at a PSOL rally at the World Social Forum. He really epitomized the characteristic anglophone CWI speaking style, which is to say that he was boring, kept bragging about the CWI's dubious achievements and went on for about twice as long as he was supposed to. I'm surprised he managed to hold on to his seat as long as he did.

Some observations on the Left in the French elections

Glancing over the exit polls from the first round of the French presidential election, I noticed a few interesting comparisons with the results from last time around.

I'm including the Communist Party and the Greens as well as the Trots and José Bové in these counts.Perhaps not surprisingly given what happened in 2002, the far left (broadly defined) went down from 19% of the vote to 15%, and generally the centrist parties did significantly better. More interesting is the relative performance of the groups.

The LCR's Oliver Besancenot was the only one to hold steady, at about 4.3%; in 2002 that put him 8th, after the Greens and Arlette Laguilier of Lutte Ouvrière; this time 4th with as many votes as the Greens and Arlette put together.

The "Non collectives" were the main organization of the "Non de Gauche", the campaign against the proposed EU constitution of 2005. They later reinvented themselves as "antiliberal collectives" and subsequently as "the Popular and Anti-Liberal Left". Apparently the Communist Party managed to maneuver itself into a controlling position in the network over the last several months. José Bové did remarkably poorly, perhaps because of his decision to spurn the "antiliberal collectives". He came 3rd to last, ahead of only the Hunting and Fishing Party and the tiny Lambertiste Parti des Travailleurs. Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party - which from the'40s to the '70s could count on 20% of the vote - got only 2%. This was a third lower than in 2002, even though she was officially the candidate of the former Non de Gauche.

On the whole this seems to reflect rather favorably on the LCR, and particularly on the perspective the LCR majority adopted leading up to the election. I have to admit that I was rather skeptical, but events seem to have proven them right.

Ken Macleod, Science Fiction and politics

I was very pleased to hear today that Resistance MP3s has posted new files from Marxism 2006. I've already listened to Ken MacLeod's talk on science fiction which is very interesting, though unfortunately his wrap up is missing, and I hope I haven't said anything unfair as a result.

I always enjoy talks like this, partly because looking back I've realized that a lot of what got me started thinking about politics and was reading Scifi, both good and bad. Ken's written some of each; his Fall Revolution series is absolutely fantastic on a lot of different levels, but his other books are mainly good for in-jokes (for example who naming a starship after a book by Tony Cliff), although still better than some. I think my favorite book of his is The Cassini Division, which deals with a the common problem in political Scifi -- that utopia is boring -- by contrasting two "utopias": the socialist society on earth and a sort of cyberpunk-libertarian "utopia" on the other side of the wormhole. It's one of my favorite depictions of a possible socialist society that I've seen anywhere.

For me the most interesting point in his talk the was about the prominence of the idea of a "singularity" and post-humanism in recent Scifi which I think he's quite right to see the as reflecting how much difficulty people have nowadays of envisioning an attractive human future and a sense of powerlessness. He puts this mainly down to the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and so forth. I'm sure this is significant; there were no shortage of science fiction writers who had the same kinds of attitudes about "really existing socialism" as other left and soft-left intellectuals (it always struck me how much Isaac Asimov's more pleasant future societies reminded me of an idealized version of the Soviet Union). However I think you can already see that demoralization in Cyberpunk and a lot of the dystopian turn in the eighties. As with the the shifts in the academic "left", I bet it has a lot more to do with disappointment in the outcome social movements and upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The shift from that towards posthumanism I think reflects a shift from a sense that things are more or less just decaying to more prominent feeling (presumably down to a sense of the effects of globalization and all that) that something overpowering is happening, and many people can't sort out whether or not they are frightened of it.

All this, and some of the comments in the discussion, also got me wondering about why people think so highly of Iain M. Banks -- although he's a very skilled rider in a lot of ways I don't find any of his work all that interesting, I think because he's so wrapped up in post-humanism that he just doesn't have that much to say to me. His culture series also has the Star Trek problem of having a supposedly classless etc. society which has to "defend" itself in a way that sneaks in a lot of bits from defenses of contemporary imperialism.

A lot of the discussions didn't touch that much on what Ken was saying but it did bring up some good points about what China Miéville usually covers in these sorts of talks, the role of fantasy and imagination in politics. I was happy to hear a few people stick up for the politics of Firefly, although I think the comments actually didn't give it credit for being as subversive as it actually is. One intervention described the Alliance (the central government in Firefly) as totalitarian, but in fact it's a version of our contemporary government, admittedly viewed through a conspiratorial lens: a nominal democracy, actually dominated by big corporations, and perfectly willing to resort to all sorts of sinister means to maintain its power -- and the tremendous gap between the wealthy "core worlds" and the mostly impoverished periphery. It's a very good example of what I think another one of the participants was trying to get at, which is that Scifi can have a Brechtian effect (if you'll pardon me for being pretentious about it), of making a familiar thing more comprehensible by presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

This discussion took place in the summer, so there are two incredible examples to add since then. The first few episodes of the new season of Battlestar Galactica were one of the most incredible commentaries on the Iraq war I've seen anywhere near the mainstream media, and Children of Men (the film; I haven't had a chance to read the book yet) had more going on than I can hope to cover.

Second thoughts on the left in the Brazilian election

Coverage from various tendencies: the ISO (USA), SWP (Britain), the (USec) Fourth International, the CWI, and UITci/Revista Movimiento (some of these deal with some of the issues I raise here). A document I wrote in 2004 on the formation of P-SoL, which is still dated but does offer some useful background, is available here.

Lee Sustar of the ISO (USA) told me some time before the election about attending a very enthusiastic speech given by Ernest Mandel about the PT, probably in the '80s. Lee made an intervention to the effect that the PT was doomed to reformism, and speaking to me years letter expressed some surprise that he had actually been right.

A note on names in Brazil: most public figures in Brazil are universally referred to by their first names or by nicknames which sometimes seem ridiculous to American observers: for example Brazil's current president is almost invariable referred to as Lula ("Squid"). This even extends to many official contexts, such as ballots and election records. Heloísa Helena's full name is Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes Carvalho. The strong performance of Heloísa Helena in the recent Brazilian presidential election has been a cause for a fair amount of celebration on the part of the Trotskyist movement worldwide, both among those who are trying to salvage something from their (perhaps now embarrassing) enthusiasm for the Workers' Party and those who "saw it coming all along".

With 6.8 million votes (just under 7%), Comrade Heloísa in fact did quite well. Her party's other candidates did not. If her slate, the Left Front, had done as well in congressional elections then under Brazil's system of proportional representation her P-SoL party would have gone from 7 seats in the house of deputies to about 35, and its partners, the PSTU and the (refounded) PCB might have picked up a seat or two in their own rights for the first time in their history. Instead the Left Front got about 1.3 million votes (about 1.5%) in the House of Deputies, and P-SoL dropped from 6 seats to 3, on top of losing Heloísa Helena's seat in the senate. Their vote in other areas were even worse; just under a million for state legislatures (again winning only three seats) and about 600,000 for the senate.

This was not a small matter. P-SoL was established as a fairly loose agglomeration of modest-sized groups (tendencies), and hasn't been too successful at finding anything other than election campaigns to hold it together; as far as I know they haven't even been able to launch a common newsletter. It's been able to operate in the way it has largely because of the organizational resources that parliamentary office gives. A Congressmember in Brazil gets a salary of 17,000 Reals a month (by way of comparison, the monthly minimum wage is 350 Reals and a skilled blue-collar worker is lucky to get 1,500), and can hire a sizeable staff at public expense besides. If he or she forgoes the politician's usual practice of lining their pockets and hiring their relatives that gives a big boost to the war chest, a set of free full-time organizers, and various other goodies (when I visited the PSTU's headquarters in 2003, all of the notepads still had the letterhead of Lindberg Farias, a congressman who had jumped ship and joined the PT two years earlier). Winning more of these seats was a big enough deal to get P-SoL and PSTU to bury the hatchet in order to have a better shot at them, as the P-SoL's national executive made clear (see the section Metas eleitorais in this document).

So why the discrepancy in the votes?

First it's worth saying a few things about Heloísa and how she got that many votes. Although she's been a far-left activist basically her whole adult life, she has a very old-fashioned catholic way of looking at a lot of things. She's anti-abortion and had a tantrum and broke out in tears on the senate floor when a satirical website posted a cartoon depicting her on the front page of of Playboy. I don't mean this to take a potshot at her (if I wanted to do that I'd make fun of her voice); I just think it's important to understand how this fits into her image. One part of that is the way it adds to her just-folks charm, as does her habit of dressing in jeans and a t-shirt even in the Senate, but there are other effects as well.

Some of this shows up when you look closely at who supported Heloísa. Garotinho claimed that his not-quite-endorsement was reponsible for Heloísa's strong showing in Rio.

The relevant surveys are Datafolha, April 7 2006 and Vox Populi, July 11 2006. Anthony Garotinho, the populist former governor of Rio de Janeiro who has lead a campaign to bring creationism into public schools in Brazil and one of the main figures in the centrist PMDB announced he would vote for her. In surveys early in the election season, most of the people who intended to vote for her were urban, educated, fairly well off (at least by Brazilian standards), and were at least as likely to vote for center or center-right candidates as for Lula.

This is because Heloísa was able to project herself as an honest, tough-on-crime candidate, something that the other candidates had a hard time with (Lula because of the PT's corruption troubles, Serra because of his perceived inability to deal with a massive outbreak of gang violence in São Paulo). One also wonders whether her statement on national television that socialism was something for 30 or 40 years down the road might have been meant to solidify that image.

Heloísa's running mate, Cesar Benjamin, went even further, effectively disowning the Left Front's program in favor of a straightforwardly social-democratic "program for government".

Besides the P-SoL members elected to the lower house, José Nery Azevedo, had been elected as an alternate (suplente) for Ana Júlia Carepa in 2002, while still a member of the PT, and so became a Senator when she stepped down to become governor of Pará.

Babá was one of the "four radicals" who founded the P-SoL, of whom now only Luciana Genro is still both in Parliament and in the party. So Heloísa Helena's appeal was rather different from that of the rest of the P-SoL. On top of this is one of the party's most distinctive features, its lack of organizational and political coherence. Two of the three candidates successfully elected had strong organizations in their area to fall back on (Luciana Genro's Movement of the Socialist Left in Porto Alegre and Ivan Valente's Socialist Popular Action in São Paulo). Heloísa Helena's coattails were very short, and candidates without much else to rely on did very poorly. Babá for example left Pará, where he had a support base, for Rio de Janeiro, where Heloísa was expected to get the largest number of votes, and failed to get back into congress as a result. Even Heloísa's Enlace faction was unable to get its two congressmembers, Maninha and João Alfredo, reelected.

In the aftermath Cesar Benjamin left the P-SoL, describing its leadership as "a rare combination of ignorance, truculence, and arrogance". This was by no means the first high profile defection the party has suffered in its short existence. P-SoL is no closer than it was at its foundation to a unified perspective or any meaningful common actions.

The overarching lesson if there is one, is that there is no substitute for the left for the hard work of building a powerful organization with a coherent worldview and capable of common action. Not only is electoral success not a substitute for it, but without a strong organization it's extremely difficult to even take advantage of it,

In a different way, Venezuela is an example of this. Chavez's elections dealt was a blow Venezuela's bourgeois political parties haven't even started to recover from, but real social change has only come slowly as genuine popular organizations have grown in strength. I think this dynamic, and its possible outcomes, are still very important there and I intend to return to them later.