----- 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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