******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
In the last couple of years, the unexpected, unprecedented campaign of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, the growth of DSA, and the election of democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Rashida Tlaib to the House of Representatives along with a number of like-minded leftists to lesser offices all as Democrats have helped to revive the effort to move the Democratic Party to places it has never been. Among those places where it once was under pressure of a massive labor upsurge now revived with a Green prefix, of course, was the other major source of social democratic nostalgia, the New Deal—the severe class and racial limits of which Dan La Botz and Mia White point out in their articles (New Politics No.66, Winter 2019). This recent resurrection of “boring within” the Democratic Party, without the anachronistic “realignment” branding to be sure, has been given even further encouragement by the apparent adoption of some left demands such a Medicare for All, Federal Job Guarantees, the Green New Deal, etc. by some of the candidates for Democratic presidential nomination besides Bernie. The genuine threat and practice of the Trump Administration adds fuel to this fire.
With this renewed hope has come a demotion of race as a subject of socio-economic analysis in the name of class that is, in reality, a return to America’s quintessential business-funded, neoliberal-dominated, undemocratic, cross-class social construction: the Democratic Party. As a Marxist who has put class at the center of my analyses over the years I naturally believe it will take more than the efforts of black Americans, or even blacks and Latinos combined to end economic and racial inequality. It will take a class-based movement and politics, with socialist politics at its center. But I also have seen both first hand through involvement in the civil rights and labor movements as well as through study and research that embedded racism requires the self-organization of the oppressed to shape or supplement the broader programs in such a way that that they do not simply reproduce racial inequality in new, sometimes less visible forms as they often have in the past; e.g., in the New Deal and the post-WWII GI Bill, etc.
full: https://newpol.org/cedric-johnson-and-the-other-sixties-nostalgia/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
