CB ^^^^^^^^^ Yoshie said:
As for hegemony, what we have in the USA today is the hegemony-by-default of the Democratic Party over "the multitudes" on the broadly defined left.
***** Science and Society - Alan Wald review [of Max Elbaum's _Revolution in the Air_] A shortened version of this review will appear in the forthcoming issue of Science and Society by Alan Wald
. . . This need for a richer comparative assessment of the New Communist experience will be crucial for comprehending the remarkable patterns of continuity to be found with precursor movements, especially the CP-USA. Like the CP-USA, the New Communist Movement traveled through strikingly ultra-Left periods followed by reform-oriented ones. For the Communists it was the Third Period of "united fronts from below" and the call for "a Soviet America," followed by the Popular Front's demand that independent struggles in general and the socialist struggle in particular be subordinated to unity around a democratic capitalist program. For the Maoists it was the demand to create "anti-imperialist" coalitions followed by submersion into the Rainbow wing of the Democratic Party. . . .
<http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/sciencesociety.html> *****
For all their differences, both members of the CPUSA and activists of the New Communist Movement ended up supporting the Democratic Party.
Other activists do not consciously embrace the Democratic Party, and some of us counsel others against clinging to it, but the politics of serial protests of "the multitudes" -- which is what most social-movement activists get stuck with anyhow, with or without reading Negri -- ends up functioning just as Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward described, raising hell from time to time, in response to which the power elite at best propose mild reforms or at least moderate their most reactionary agenda only to reverse the course once the protests subside . . . in other words, functioning as ephemeral grassroots pressure groups, many of whose organizers eventually get coopted into the Democratic Party, because there is nowhere else to go politically. -- Yoshie