> 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.
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The right has benefited from the enormous resources available to it from
wealthy individuals and foundations, but mostly from an Historical Moment:
the collapse of the left, whose fortunes were organically tied to the
unionized industrial proletariat. When the industrial unions went into
decline, so did the material base of the left, laying the society open to
privatization, deregulation, and other long-standing efforts by the right to
rollback a half-century of reforms won by labour and allied social
movements. Unfortunately, the reconstruction of the left and workers'
organizations is similarly tied to the movement of history. It's not
pud-pulling to suggest that in the interim, until a more "spirited" left is
again able to vie for power, there's little more it can do other than to
exchange views in cyberspace and other forums and support those parties and
movements at home and abroad which are defending against the right - just as
the right did in its dog days.
But the real dispute on the left is deciding which parties and movements are defending against the right - even very half-heartedly and imperfectly. Supporting "spirited versions" of social democracy like the Venezuelan Bolivar movement is easy. The harder question is whether to support the rank-and-file in the ossified social democratic parties against their conservative opponents or, in the US, the Democrats against the Republicans around the same issues. But please let's not have that debate again, at least not until the 2006 mid-term elections, when the issue will emerge again in the absence of a party to the left of the Democrats in the US.
MG