>From what I wrote on the now defunct LBO-Talk list back in 2018. ------------------------------ - FDR started to back away from some of the more radical aspects of the New Deal after the US entered the Second World War because he wanted to ensure the wholehearted support of the business community. During the war, the unions in the defense industries were pressured into accepting "no strike pledges." The CPUSA, which had been a driving force behind organized labor's radical left, eagerly accepted those pledges too. FDR's shift to the right was signaled in 1944, when he dropped Henry Wallace as his running mate in favor of Harry Truman. Truman, unlike Wallace, was willing to embrace the anticommunist policies that the capitalist elites were pushing in the postwar era. Thus, Truman as president brought in loyalty oaths for Federal employees. That practice was then widely copied at the state and local levels too. The GOP's success at regaining control of Congress in 1946, ensured that Truman would continue to be pressured from the right. In 1948, Truman was successfully reelected as president. He ran on a Fair Deal platform which promised to continue and extend the gains of the New Deal. It had planks for such things as national health insurance and public housing. But in the end, only public housing was enacted into law. As Carrol points out, this period saw the passage of Taft-Harley which effectively rolled back many of the gains that the CIO had made. The unions were pressured into purging their left-wing as were also the universities and schools. That is why when the left revived in the 1960s. It did so without significant backing from organized labor and radical students also found there was a dearth of support for them from senior faculty, since most of the left-wing professors had been purged in the previous decade. http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/ pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of- Mon-20180326/000274.html ( http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20180326/000274.html )
----------------------------- I would argue that from the standpoint of the capitalist ruling classes, the fascism of the 1920s-1940s was a great success. The fascist regimes in Italy, Germany, Spain, etc. successfully neutralized the threats to capitalism that were coming out of the socialist and communist movements. Eventually, most of the fascist regimes would be eliminated with the Second World War, but by then, fascism had already done its job. Back in 1927, the right-wing economist Ludwig von Mises in his book Liberalism: The Classical Tradition , in a chapter, in which he critiqued fascism, nevertheless, ended that same chapter with the following tribute: " It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error. " If today's capitalist ideologues had von Mises's candor, they would say much the same thing about fascism. One consequence of the fascist interlude between the two world wars was to help to push the politics of the capitalist world permanently to the right. Before the rise of fascism, the major left-wing parties in Europe such as the SPD in Germany or the Socialist Party in France, were, at least officially, Marxist parties committed to the overthrow of capitalism. Following the Second World War, most of these parties dropped those commitments. The SPD officially dropped its allegiance to Marxism in the 1950s, for example. Nor was this phenomenon confined to the social democratic parties. Most of the Moscow-oriented Communist parties in Europe moved rightwards too. They basically morphed into left social democratic parties, basically, dropping their commitments to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and, instead, filling the roles that had previously been filled by the prewar social democratic parties. -- Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia. edu/JimFarmelant ( http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ) http://www.foxymath.com ( http://www.foxymath.com/ ) Learn or Review Basic Math -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29136): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29136 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104587061/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
