or mantra or dictum:

"If the campaign to create a better world - which is the left - wants to have support from huge numbers of otherwise jammed up and restricted folk, then that campaign has to incorporate the seeds of the future in the present. The left has to aid to people\'s lives now, adding color, compassion, creativity, and especially a sense of belonging and social joy, and it has to at the same time promise even more, much more, in the future. People must come to see and feel the left as being at the core of who they are, what they can enjoy today, and what inspires them to seek more tomorrow. Short of attaining that degree of centrality in people\'s lives, the left will not have sufficient membership that is sufficiently committed to win even major reforms, much less fundamentally new social relations."

I couldn\'t agree more with Michael\'s basic assertion:  we tend to think that if everyone would only read Chomsky and be a little angrier, all would be well.  So we often hand people Chomsky and ask them why they aren\'t angry.  That is not an organizing strategy.

But there are really two paths that an organizing left can take.  One is what Michael implies:  a left that builds its own rituals, joys, and (like Hezbullah now, the 1980s FMLN, etc.) service infrastructures.  That was one of the strategies of industrial unionism early in the prior century, complete with self-conscious religious analogues (bringing Brother Albert in the Church of Labor, etc.).  It\'s a good strategy.  In my over-enthusiastic moments I\'ve even said that we should indeed be starting a new religion, one not tied to theistic ideologies but to community and living what we mean to create.

Yet there is a second way that this might play out, and it might be one more congenial to the American psyche:  joyful participation of people with a left analysis in the regular community-binding rituals and structures that already exist in a nonideological form, with conscious transparency about our left beliefs but without the unfortunate proseltyzing that often accompanies more affirmative organizing.  Like what?  Like the PTA.  Like a block-party comm... (I almost said "committee", but that\'s not the spirit...).  Like good-natured cocktails with Republicans.  Like cohousing.  Even like American Idol.  So rather than try to create a new church with the 21st-century version of stained glass and an organ meant to entice new members in, we participate honestly and happily in the rituals of our time.  We\'re neighborly.  We\'re not eccentric wackos except in our intolerance (gentle but firm) towards war, racism, and inequity and our continual thoughtfulness about alternative economics and social structures.

Is there danger of dilution here?  Sure.  But that\'s where things like ZNet help; we\'ll always talk to one another in ways we might not talk with our neighbors.  But when we turn back outward it won\'t be with the idea of surreptitious infiltration or vigorous recruitment.

ParEcon shares some of the characteristics of both strategies--bringing new ideas about power and having a job to age-old activities like selling books or insurance.  But even more dispersed strategies can, I think, be effective.  Sure, let\'s keep incubating, building institutions, pushing for better analysis.  Let\'s build real communities that radically embody what we want to create more globally.  But let\'s also participate in the world of people who don\'t necessarily see it all like we do.  Some of them are potentially our strongest allies out of their own decency and need.  Be clear, but be open.