[lbo-talk] Dems & the proletariat

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/6/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 6, 2006, at 4:38 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > I have a feeling that business alarmists say these things without
> > really believing them, just to make the proletariat think that
> > elections, no matter how sorry elections, are the most important
> > political activity, and at the same time to send a message to the
> > electoral party which has a larger working-class base than the
> > alternatives: don't you dare do any of these things.
>
> The second part may be true, but the first can't possibly be - how
> many proletarians read Merrill Lynch research?

Probably most of the proletariat don't, but some of the
college-educated segment (a pretty large segment by now) of the
proletariat do, as such research gets percolated into the mass media
indirectly.

Even without reading business alarmists, though, almost all
proletarians appear to radically overestimate the degree to which the
Democrats are friendly to them (and they even overestimate the degree
to which the US government in general is friendly to proletarians here
and in the rest of the world).


> As I've pointed out many times before, by almost any measure
> (employment, wages, GDP, stock market), the economy has done better
> under Dem presidents than Rep ones since WW2. The only exception is
> that Reps are better for disinflation and the bond market.

What if we compared them since the mid-1970s?  After all, 1945-1973
and 1974-Present belong to different eras of accumulation.  How do
Democrats and Republicans compare in the neoliberal era?
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>