[lbo-talk] Illinois as model for Democratic agenda

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Mon Feb 13 14:11:19 PST 2006


Doug H:


> Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>>How many people on this list, for example, many of them aging
>>professionals - myself included - have an immediate need for government
>>support for pre-school education, children's health care, a ban on
>>compulsory overtime, leave to recover from household violence, unsafe day
>>labour, union lockout rights and wage rates, etc. Some do, but most don't.
>
> Yeah, and it'd be nice if the Democrats actually had such an agenda.
------------------------------- Well, according to NN, they do in Illinois, and I think you would find elements of these reforms scattered through all Democratic programs, wouldn't you? You won't find these proposals circulating among Republicans. I think that's fundamentally what distinguishes the two parties, and the explanation lies in their different social character and the politics which flow from that.

The Democrats and Republicans both have bourgeois leaderships tied to Wall Street. But the liberal parties - Democrats and social democrats - are contradictory formations in that they are also supported from below by the unions and social movements. Their leaderships are consequently subject to pressures for jobs, income support, and a range of collective rights and benefits, which vary in intensity depending on circumstances.

The conservative parties, on the other hand, face no such contradiction. They are unambiguously opposed to the unions and social movements and their goals. They don't need to respond these kinds of pressures from below. Their petty bourgeois and politically backward working class mass base is largely atomized, and it faithfully parrots the economic prescriptions of Wall Street, except for occasional protests by declining small propertyholders and pressures to move the party even further to the right than it already is on social and cultural issues.

The only other political grouping with some attraction for the American left which is attuned to the needs of the organized working class and the social movements is the Green party, but it is over the far horizon. If it should ever hove into view, it would have to make the same compromises as the DP and other mass parties have had to make to govern stable capitalist societies.

I don't know whether you are moving towards the Green party on the basis of your above comment and other recent ones. My view, obviously, is that American workers have a greater chance of having their immediate needs met by seeking out and working in concert with the greater number of union and social movement supporters who still see the Democratic party as their vehicle. I hope the party left which is organizing against the leadership for a change of direction continues to grow. The Progressive Democrats of America in which Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin are involved looks promising from a distance, but I don't follow them closely. I wouldn't disagree that the DP left faces a long uphill climb in the current political climate - every left grouping does -but the Greens have less to offer workers than the Democrats in the way of legislative relief, and as such looks like nothing so much as another disproportionately middle class third party exercise in futility.



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