[lbo-talk] Will 'SNL' skit sink hopes for Obama?

[Somebody Somebody]

MG: Demonstrations, especially, when they turn violent or threaten to radicalize a segment of the population, are destabilizing - even when they are contained. I think the demos and marches made more of an impression on LBJ and the rest of the administration and congress than any particular committment he had to the civil rights movement, especially as they attracted increasing support from within his party's core black and liberal base. It was this powerful "public opinion" from below which influenced the administration and the rest of political and media establishment, rather than the other way round, as you have it.
Somebody: While not being a fan of hers, I have to say that comments like these make me agree with Hannah Arendt, who opined that Marxists weren't really interested in politics as such, but only in political epiphenomena. Even if you accept class conflict as an overarching framework, it's very abstract and unempirical to dismiss the *institutional* questions Wojtek has repeatedly raised. 
I mean, does anyone seriously believe that the strength of the military as an independent locus of power wasn't a major influence on the political trajectories of a myriad of post-colonial states in the Middle East (for instance, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt)? Or that the development of the civil service under the British Raj didn't have an enormous impact on the subsequent development of Indian politics? Or that path dependence doesn't play a constraining role on welfare state policy in Nordic states, versus Continental European, and Anglo-Saxon polities? 
If these institutional factors were as unimportant as you've suggested, then there should tend to be a pretty simple direct relationship between working class militancy (short of revolution) and social reforms. But, this is hardly the case. It's only *very* roughly true. The variations and exceptions include *entire* nations, and can scarcely be discounted so glibly.
A couple of examples: on the basis of historical working class consciousness and activity alone, France and Italy might have been expected to have the most expansive welfare states in Europe, but they're still significantly less developed than in the Scandinavian countries. On the other hand, the level of left quiescence in Taiwan is extraordinary, with no significant socialist movement whatsoever, yet somehow they created a single-payer health care system, as enviable as that of any European welfare state, in the mid 90's when neo-liberalism was at it's height.