Angelus Novus wrote:
>
> Wotjek wrote:
>
> > all major victories of the Left in the developed
> > countries have been accomplished through electoral
> > politics
>
> Nonsense. The existence of the modern welfare state
> in Germany was the result of defeat and occupation at
> the hands of the allies. Stalingrad was the best
> thing to happen to the German working class.
> Reunification was the worst.
I've given up debating W, but a point worth making here because more politically sophisticated leftists than W make it: W confuses _gaining_ major reforms with merely _ratifying_ such reforms. All the legislation which he has in mind partly confirmed and partly weakened reforms which mass action had made necessary. The sitdown s trikes of the 1930s were the victory; that victory was nominally confirmed even while it was weakened by the Wagner Act. (And of course a decade later even much the act had allowed was taken back by Taff-Hartley. It's the same always. People in the streets win a victory; the politicians celebrate that victory, claim it for themselves, and undercut it. It's true such victories _do_ need legislative ratification, but it is the height of political stupidity (or worse) to pretend that that ratification was the achievement itself. Conservative legislatures are as apt to grant it as any 'left' electoral party. It was the racist prick Senator Dirksen that 'gave' us the Civil-Rights legislation of the '60s -- victories which would NEVER have been achieved without _both_ Rosa Parks et al in the South and riots in the north.
Carrol