>>But Social Democracy is surely as dead as a road to the future as is
>>Third-International Communism.
>
>Not true. It is very much alive in Latin America and other parts of the
>developing world seeking the contemporary equivalent of a more equitable
>distribution of the spoils with global capitalism such as marked the great
>battles of yesteryear in the advanced capitalist countries between the
>workers and the bosses. Social democracy or whatever other name it goes by
>is the ideological instrument of those reform efforts.
Exactly. Chavez has made this point quite explicitly - he knows that this is not a revolutionary era, so the best he can do right now is a spirited version of social democracy. And who knows where that could lead?
How about the counter-example of the American right? In the 1950s and early 1960s, right-wing thought seemed utterly dead, confined to a few lunatic ideologues and small business types who subsidied them. They persisted, organized, prosyletized, and won over considerable numbers of converts. They didn't sit around pulling their puds waiting for their Historical Moment.
Doug