Real Despair

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jan 3 19:06:02 PST 2001


Carrol posted:


>David Harvey has
>a magnificent account of the record of the Democratic Party:
>
>****
> I think it important to recognize the conditions which led the
>Democratic Party, a political party which from the New Deal onwards
>sought to absorb but never to represent, let alone become an active
>instrument of, working-class interests, to enact legislation of such an
>interventionist character. [He is referring to legislation passed by a
>Democratic Congress during Nixon's administration.] The legislation
>was not, in fact, an outcome of the class and sectional alliance policies
>which had created the New Deal, but came at the tail-end of a decade
>in which politics had shifted from universal programs (like social
>security) to specially targeted programs to help regenerate the inner
>cities (e.g., the Model Cities and federally funded housing programs),
>take care of the elderly or the particularly impoverished (e.g.,
>Medicare and Medicaid), and target particular disadvantaged groups
>in the population (Head Start and Affirmative action). This shift from
>universalism to targeting of particular groups inevitably created tensions
>between groups and helped fragment rather than consolidate any
>broader sense of a progressive class alliance. . . .
> (_Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference_ [1996], p. 339)

Also, I recommend Mike Davis, _Prisoners of the American Dream_ (NY: Verso, 1986). One might re-title the book _Prisoners of the Democratic Party_.....

Moreover, we ought to wake up to the fact that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union & the socialist challenge, organized labor in America has become even more dispensable to the Democrats than in 1986 when _Prisoners..._ got published. Decades of loyal anti-communist service on the part of the AFL-CIO have ironically resulted in its own relegation to the political margins.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list