O Brave New World...

I think part of the problem here is that you and I are using similar words and phrases, but investing them with different meanings and contents. Unfortunately, I was up with an infant at 3:00 a.m., and I only have a few minutes left here at work, so I have neither the brain power nor the time to make myself much clearer. Just to take one example: When I refer to a "vanguard party", I refer to a mass party rooted in the working class and comprised of its most class-conscious elements, functioning in a manner similar to how the Bolsheviks actually functioned (not according to a model of how they "ought" to have functioned based on tendentious misreadings of What Is to Be Done?). You seem to have in mind something like the SWP of the 1970s and early 1980s, which is something very different.

Regroupment on the Soli model isn't going to get us there either. The socialist left in the U.S. is comprised of small groups of varying sizes with more or less tangential relations to the working class and, for the most part, confused or contradictory politics. Even if one managed to pull all those groups together, one would only end up with a slightly larger small group with a tangential relationship to the working class and confused or contradictory politics. The problem with both linear recruitment and left regroupment is that they persist in regarding the crisis of working-class leadership as an organizational problem ("if only we had more members" or "if only there weren't such a confusing welter of groups") rather than a political problem, of what the left's relationship to the working class is and how Marxist theory, such as it is presented by the left, has been rendered near useless as a guide to action.