> Wojtek said:
>
>>> 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.
Those are actually my words, not Wojtek's. I don't know what you mean by the "projection" comment, but as for starting with the here and now, I agree that that's what the third-party enthusiasts are doing. I just take the view that, given that the U.S. political system (on the national level especially) imposes almost impenetrable obstacles to the success of a third party, the only end results of their efforts are "spoiling" or getting some policy ideas adopted by one of the major parties. At this point, I haven't seen any such ideas being put forward, so I think spoiling will be the only likely result.
Now to comment on some of your comments on Wojtek's message.
> Really? Marx recognised that N.America might offer greater potential
> than
> Europe for revolution, because of its superior communications
> technology.
Where did he say that? I'm aware of his well-known 1872 Amsterdam speech in which he said that the U.S., England, and maybe Holland were countries in which workers could achieve their aims by peaceful means.
> 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.
We can have these debates, but unless they get translated into effective action by the people at large, there won't be any practical effect of them. I think it's the practical problems, which are very knotty, that need to be solved.
> 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.
Is there a class consciousness in the UK? Is the Labour Party going to turn into a real labor (using the Yankee spelling) party? Or will it be supplanted by one? It doesn't look like it from this distance.
> 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...
That of course is a crucial question for socialists to answer at this point, if we are to get any non-socialists interested in the whole subject of socialism. I confess I don't know what my answer is, but I'm working on it. Do you have any suggestions?
> 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.
I agree that Weimar Germany is about as far as you can get from a realistic model of the U.S. in the early 21st century, but what are you going to do? The whole Weimar-Nazi melodrama is so irresistible to the imagination that everyone seems to come back to it again and again.
> 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?
But will it go into economic decline -- not an occasional blip, but sustained, obvious decline? I am not at all convinced that it will.
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