THIS IS THE YEAR Ronald Ray-gun's Citizens for the Republic is the number one political fundraiser. This is the year a screaming came across the sky in the form of TurboProp 13. This is the year a number of Great Society liberals like Minnesota's Don Fraser unexpectedly found themselves trudging the gangplank. This is the year the "barren ground" liberals like Mike Dukakis and Jerry "Jarvis" Brown are discovering precious little sustenance from the earth they scorched in a vain attempt to hold off the advancing barbarians. This is the year the swell for labor law reform hit a crosswind; the year natural gas deregulation came in a gusher. This is the year of The Great Temptation to trumpet a Right-Wing Trend. Well, get thee behind me, Satan. Because this is a year like most years in American politics.

What about the '60s, you ask. Sure, we all remember "I have a dream" and the civil rights movement dragging a whole society kicking and screaming partway out of its cave. Sure, we puddle with nostalgia over the hundreds of thousands who massed in Washington for the moratoriums against the Vietnam War. But those were the clear-cut issues, glamorous in a strange way; they were drama. But where was the institutional depth to deal with the more complicated structural issues, the inbred capitalist priority system? Check out your own neighborhood to see how far we still have to go on race relations. Tremble a little in the night over visions of the fleets of C-147 transports--in the macho twinkling of a President's eye we could be marching the streets of Beirut, or Johannesburg.

Remember the '50s. Nuf said. Remember the '40s, when our fathers died to rid the world of Capitalism's Evil Mutant, while our economy entered the state capitalist stage, run by and for big businessmen. Remember the '30s, when our poliomyelitic system acquired the leg braces that allowed it to keep playing hardball--braces like unemployment compensation, Social Security, deposit insurance, to make sure it never bottomed out again. Remember the '20s--the corporations are much bigger now, and they've expanded from Peoria to Pretoria.

The dismal accoutrements go on and on: America's striking lack of an electoral labor party, and in its place, "business unionism," concerned only with wages hours, benefits; America's Horatio Alger myths of upward mobility, still pervasive despite the historical evidence that demonstrates much more rigidity than pluralists or consensus historians will admit. But spare us the hot tubs and razor blades. Leftists take showers.

Leftists are out there organizing communities, building coalitions, forming institutions to pool resources and provide the necessary staying power in the running battle with immortal corporations. We're not talking here about the ideological zealots--the Sparts and Trots and PLPers and ilk, who spend their time bickering and backstabbing over the various Internationals or how best to bring on the Revolution. Rather, the Cactus Leftists have involved themselves in presenting concrete alternatives to present policies. Their pragmatism, unfortunately, has often landed them in that sprawling massage parlor known as the Democratic Party: Instead of pushing radical alternatives, leftists end up dealing the tired liberal band-aids. (Flesh-colored, the ads say--make that Caucasian-colored.)

One such band-aid is the circuit-breaker for property tax relief--when the state runs a surplus it gives the money back to home-owners, scaled according to need. This is all well and good--we don't want the corporations to reap the windfalls as they did from Proposition 13. But circuit-breakers only divert time and attention from the real structural inequities in the tax system--the loopholes for the rich, the abatements for the corporations, the regressiveness of using tax incentives and credits to execute policy.

THERE ARE LEFTISTS, however, for whom band-aids won't do. There are leftists who maintain a radical perspective while proposing concrete, feasible alternatives. A random sample:

Institute for Policy Studies: Washington, D.C. radical think tank. Asked by 56 members of Congress to examine the federal budget for this year, rejected it, and wrote a new one. "The Federal Budget and Social Reconstruction," a landmark guide to what the government could do.

Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies: D.C.-based, does research and coordination for leftist public policy, tremendous resource publications and listings of left organizations; program emphasis on role of left public officials like Byron Dorgan, North Dakota tax commissioner, and Sam Brown, now head of ACTION and former Colorado state treasurer.

Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition: D.C.-based new coalition to encourage job creation through safe energy development, combines left unions such as the Machinists with public interest and community organizations--a breakthrough in this kind of cooperation.

Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy: Also in D.C., brings together 40 different national groups from the National Council of Churches and the ADA to the Longshoremen's union, to push for a peaceful, non-interventionist, humanitarian and open foreign policy.

Agribusiness Accountability Project: Now based in San Francisco, has produced consistently the best literature on the corporate takeover of American agriculture, and the middleman's gouging of the consumer.

New School for Democratic Management: The same people who bring you Mother Jones magazine (which uncovered the Ford Pinto gas tank scandal), San Francisco-based, the first alternative business school, for people in worker-controlled, collective and cooperative enterprises.

Center for the Study of Public Policy: Mt. Auburn St. in Cambridge, publishes Working Papers for a New Society, the best left policy journal in the country, the Fortune magazine of the Left.

The Midwest Academy: Chicago training school for organizers, run by Heather and Paul Booth, "two of the three organizing genuises in this country," (the other being Mike Ansara of Mass Fair Share, according to those who know).