On 2013-09-23, at 1:01 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 9/23/13 12:43 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: >> The more liberal the Democrat, like de Blasio, the greater the need to >> expose him. > > So I should have been advocating a vote for Obama in 2008 like you and > Julio? I wouldn't expect someone treating McCain and Palin as the lesser of the two evils in the US's duopolistic political system to vote for the greater one. In my case, I was mistaken in expecting that the confluence of economic and political events in 2008 - the financial and economic crisis, the popular enthusiasm and expectations awakened by the Obama campaign, the massively discredited Republicans and Wall Street - would evoke a similar response by the liberal bourgeoisie represented in the Democratic Party to the biggest systemic crisis since the Great Depression. But neither the leadership nor the base of the DP undertook any bold initiatives resulting in the kind of New Deal reforms which restructured American capitalism under the Roosevelt administration - in large part under pressure from an international workers movement which was vying for power on a global scale, inspiring and helping to organize American workers and alarming the country's ruling class. That movement had long since disappeared by 2008. >> It is somewhat reminiscent of the German CP's stance that the >> social democrats or "social fascists" were the more effective evil >> than the Nazis and that the former had to be smashed in order for the >> working class to effectively wage war on the latter. > > No, it is more reminiscent of this: > > "The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the > Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class > struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such > differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles." > > --Eugene V. Debs, > http://www.marxists.org/archive/ Debs was correct, as was Lenin who described the social democrats of that period in similar fashion - as "bourgeois" parties supported by the trade unions, aiming at reform rather than the overthrow of the system. In attenuated fashion, that still serves as a description of the contemporary Democratic Party in the US, the British Labour Party, the French SP, and the German SPD, all of whom share the same liberal ideology and program, social composition at the base and leadership level, and political reflexes when they form governments. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
