[lbo-talk] Third Party Solutions (was Re: Lieberman)

[Shane Taylor]

Carrol Cox wrote:
> This assumes that the only alternative to working
> in the two-party system is to build a third party (or
> "take over" one of the existing parties). This is not
> true.
>
> Social and political gains in the u.s. during the
> 20th century were _formalized_ by elected officials
> from one or the other of the two major parties, but
> this was _never_ primarily, if at all, the result of
> electoral activity by left movements. The Wagner
> Act (somewhat like the invasion of Haiti) formalized
> _some_ of the gains of the union struggle of the
> '30s but also circumscribed those gains sharply.
> (And gains that depend on legislative action -- i.e.,
> are gifts from the ruling class -- can be taken away
> as easily. The Taft-Hartley Act, only a decade later,
> eliminated the crucial weapon of the secondary
> boycott.) Dirksen was as important as, perhaps more
> important than, Lyndon Johnson in giving us the
> civil-rights act. Nixon was the president who gave us
> whatever we still have of the gains of the '60s. Carter
> began chipping away at those gains.
>
> Real gains can only come from mass movements --
> and if one can build such movements it becomes
> relatively inconsequential what the politics are of
> those in power.

But the Left doesn't exist.  So the only political reality is the "lesser
evil".  Aren't there no mass movements because all political activism of
recent decades has been an illusion?  Having allied myself with something
that doesn't exist, and the incantations necessary to conjure -- assuming
human agency has any place in the mater -- a mass movement being
unknowable to me (being so contingent on the ever mysterious right
conditions), I have no place left to go but the realm of fantasy...

-- Shane

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