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On 2010-12-07, at 7:00 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: > ====================================================================== > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > ====================================================================== > > > On 12/7/10 6:59 PM, Lajany Otum wrote: > >> Or as Richard Greener wrote in the article to which Gary was referring: >> >> "If we start now there's time for a reliable, truthful, electable >> liberal-progressive Democrat to emerge." >> > > To which I wrote Richard: "I think the chances for a socialist > revolution are more auspicious." Both, of course, are equally inauspicious possibilities at the present time. The issue is whether going through the experience and inevitable frustration of trying to elect a liberal-progressive Democrat will lead your friend Richard and others like him to finally break with the party and start a new one to its left, or will drive him out of politics altogether. As we know, previous efforts of Marxists - including most famously, Lenin's advice in relation to the Labour Party - to "enter" bourgeois union-based reform parties in order to turn the base against the leadership as a prelude to a revolutionary split from it all ended in failure. But, so for that matter, have attempts to batter the DP and social democratic parties from the outside through the creation of Potemkin village "progressive" and "revolutionary socialist" parties which have also gone nowhere. All of these failures, however, took place in a period when capitalism was expanding and, despite periodic crises, providing its working classes with steadily improving living standards. The mistaken assumption of the radical left was that the period was revolutionary, that the working class would become increasingly immiserated, and that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. That long period of expansion and relative prosperity and job security has now ended in the advanced capitalist countries, and in the US is reflected in the inability of the Bush and Obama administration to resolve its mounting domestic and foreign policy crises. These have produced the tea party on the right and the growing disaffection within the Democratic party. Whether and how far these political developments will progress will depend on whether the bourgeoisie succeeds in containing these crises or whether they continue to deepen. Whether a future radicalization would begin inside the Democratic party, the seeds of which seem to me to be appearing, or outside of it, as most Marxmailers believe, is something we can only know in retrospect. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
