*White Supremacy and Labor’s Failure* Cody R. Melcher interviews *Michael Goldfield** Against the Current, March-April 2021 (ATC 211) https://againstthecurrent.org/atc211/white-supremacy-and-labors-failure/ . . . *MG*: "The enormous amount of energy spent by both the labor movement and many who consider themselves socialists to elect more liberal Democrats is, in my opinion, completely wasted, and could better have been spent elsewhere.
"This is not simply a question of being anti-electoral, which I am not. Even Lenin’s Bolsheviks had elected representatives in the Tsar’s Duma. Yet the goal of Socialists, certainly revolutionary socialists, has never been that winning elections was the key to substantial change. "As the pre-World War I German Social Democratic leader Karl Liebknecht argued, his role was to talk auf dem Fenster (out the window) using his elected position in the Reichstag as a megaphone to talk to the working class. Reforms in general, then and today, are a byproduct of struggle, not of parliamentary maneuvering. "So I would agree with the liberal iconoclast writer Gore Vidal, who said that America has one party, the party of business, and “it has two right wings.” Those of us who call ourselves socialists have no business, as the great Socialist leader Eugene Debs taught us long ago, in supporting either of the two capitalist parties. . . . *** *Michael Goldfield* is a former labor and civil rights activist, Professor Emeritus of political science and a Research Fellow at the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University. He has written numerous books and articles on labor, race, and the global economy, including The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics, and most recently, The Southern Key. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#6888): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6888 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81021723/21656 -=-=- 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. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
