> principled Marxists should never have supported the Democratic Party
> to begin with
I think it depends on which Marxists and which Marxist principles you are talking about. Marxists, after all, are not a single bloc with one set of principles.
> Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Kerry are all far to the
> right of Nixon
What evidence do you have for that? Are you thinking of Nixon's price controls, or his "opening to China"?
> It makes sense to try to explain the causes and consequences of the
> end of the post-WW2 boom theoretically to activists who have given up
> on the Democratic Party based on empirical evidence alone. Classical
> Marxism and the Monopoly Capital approach, I think, offer
> complementary theoretical perspectives on them, which may be of
> interest to activists tired of "activistism."
I agree that more study of Marxism is a great idea, and should be encouraged, but my experience is that you don't build a movement among non-intellectuals -- and most people are not intellectuals -- by trying to organize Marxism study circles.
The big problem is how to educate people who don't positively lap up discussions of political economy, and don't particularly think that they need education anyway -- they already know what they know. If Americans were more open to education in the sense that leftists mean it, we'd be a lot further along.
Meanwhile, the right is working very diligently on their brand of education.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/education/08HOME.html?hp>
"Only" two-thirds of home-schooling families are evangelical Christians, and they have set up a college, with generous help from the usual millionaires. They are busy infiltrating the Bush administration and have plans to take over the Supreme Court, and the government as a whole.
While the left is trying to scrape dimes and nickels together to fund various tiny projects, the right, I'm sorry to say, is rolling their juggernaut along very nicely, thank you, and 4 more years of Bush will put them a lot further ahead.
Rather than "giving up" on the Democratic Party, as you say leftists should have done in 1979, I would suggest taking it over and moving it to the left. The first step would be to push Kerry and his people to the left. Probably it's already too late for the scattered, disorganized left to do that during this campaign, but if Kerry wins (and I think that's a very long shot) we could make a start on it during his administration.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt