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

Marv Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Sat Oct 10 16:55:15 PDT 2009


Others, of course, would argue it was a response to the demands of the nascent capitalist class and "improving" landlords who favoured the wage relationship and greater freedom of movement of peasants from the countryside to the city which it encouraged.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Doss" <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2009 7:36 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Will 'SNL' skit sink hopes for Obama?

I have no opinion about the US Civil Rights movement and its relationship to the US government of the time, but an obvious example of a social revolution in favor of the lower classes carried out by the government was the abolition of serfdom on the decree of the Tsar Liberator Alexander II.

--- On Sat, 10/10/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Nope. Sorry. There's nothing particularly "Marxist" in my
> disputing Wojtek's
> contention that "the civil rights movement (CRM) succeeded
> not because
> 'people were in the streets' ...but because the LBJ
> administration and the
> mainstream media establishment wanted it to succeed and
> gave it all the
> support they could to sway the public opinion in its
> favor." You'd get the
> same objection pretty much across the political spectrum.
> The notion that
> the Johnson administration somehow led rather than
> accommodated to the
> agitation for civil rights legislation is farcical, and,
> quite frankly, a
> slander against the the black community whose long struggle
> preceded LBJ and
> progressed in the face of his own previous opposition and
> that of other
> politicians and the "mainstream media establishment", until
> such pressures
> became intolerable.
>
> The same can be said of the Roosevelt administration which
> did not lead but
> accommodated to the earlier agitation for trade union
> rights, and of later
> Democratic party leaders' support for demands for equality
> by the
> representative organizations of women and gays. This isn't
> an indictment of
> those Democratic administrations which moved to satisfy
> these demands for
> reform, even if not fully and with the system's needs
> uppermost in mind, but
> recognition that it was the political struggle from below,
> not government,
> which was the catalyst for change - political struggles
> which Woj, with your
> approval, disparages.
>
> Hannah Arendt's authority notwithstanding, what a strange
> comment it is then
> that "The Marxists", presumed to include myself, are the
> ones who "aren't
> really interested in politics as such..."
>
>
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>

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