> > Folks like Carrol are so sure that building a
> > third party is the way, the one and only way ("I am the Way, the
> > Truth,
> > and the Light")
Light.....as in your own projection, perhaps?
> > I'm frankly
> > skeptical of every view that claims it is the only true view. I prefer
> > to call myself a "socialist realist" -- socialism (in some sense or
> > other) is the direction to go, but we have to be brutally realistic
> > about where we are now and what it would take to get from here to
> > there. But we have to start here and now, because that's where we are.
Maybe Carrol believes that is what he doing.
> I believe that every social movement has a window of
> opportunity available to it for a limited time, sometimes longer,
> sometimes shorter. The labor had its window of opportunity in the late
> 1800s and early 1990s - when the large scale industrialization and
> urbanization created geographical concentration of working class people.
> That geographical concentration was the critical mass needed to spurred
> a labor movement and then to institutionalize it. This was its window
> of opportunity, which started to close after the World War II.
Really? Marx recognised that N.America might offer greater potential than Europe for revolution, because of its superior communications technology. And I think you fail to recognise the "concentration" created by ever-improving communications technology. e.g. We couldn't even have these debates 20 years ago.
> In Europe, the labor took advantage of that window of opportunity by
> creating a set of political institutions (industry-wide unions, labor
> parties) that gave labor relatively permanent presence in the political
> power structure.
It's no coincidence that the most veloped parts of W.Europe were in economic decline (from waning empires, increased competition, etc.) when these forms of class coscoiusness started to emerge.
> In the United States, by contrast, that window of opportunity was
> largely wasted. True, labor movements emerged, but they did not create
> a permanent institutional structure that would allow it to last. Main
> reasons were social fragmentation (by race, ethnicity and gender), false
> perception of upward mobility, and the size and amount of crumbs that
> were falling from the bosses' tables. As a result, the labor movement
> in the US was like a shooting star that lights up and vanishes.
Speaking of "false perceptions", what about the standard of living and real wages in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
> With the suburbanization, de-industrialization, identity politics and
> relentless propaganda - the window of opportunity that the labor once
> had is lost in the US.
It takes a long time for imperial decline to sink in...as it did in the UK, but no-one would day there is an basence of class consciousness there now.
> Quite frankly, I do not see ANY political or
> economic force capable of sustaining whatever is left of the New Deal -
> let alone move the country toward socialism. The privatization of
> anything from Amtrak to social security is a matter of time - I think by
> 2010 it will be for the most part completed.
Assuming, of course, that state socialism (or state capitalism posing as "socialism") is a worthwhile objective in itself, and/or that a segue from that to something more worthwhile is possible...
> At this point, it does not really matter what "we" (whoever that is) do
> - "we" may slow that process a bit by throwing sand into the gears of
> the corporate machinery - which may derail things here and there - but
> will not stop the process. Even if by some odd chance the system
> becomes sufficiently derailed - it will most likely follow the
> trajectory of Weimar Germany rather than that of Russia.
Germany in the 1920s was a society humiliated in every possible way, with all the deficits of a failed empire and few of the advantages; I think something like post-imperial Britain is a more likely historical destination for the US.
> But there is a world outside the United States where the
> class struggle is raging and its outcome is anything but certain. That
> calls for an 'exit strategy' - salvage what is worth salvaging and move
> the struggle elsewhere.
This is where dialectical thought is most useful; if the class struggle in the US is dull at the moment, there may be good material, historical reasons for that. And is there any better recipe for class consciousness than the economic decline of a society with the most fully-developed capitalist relations of production in world history?
Grant.