[WS:] You've hit the nail right on its, comrade. I agree 100% with you. I just have one question, where do you get the Party from?
Wojtek
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:
> Brad wrote:
>
> I have less faith that we will ever siphon off some of the 27% who
> oppose the TP. I would venture that they are mostly partisan
> Democrats who I doubt will ever move to the left of that party. These
> are the folks who think we can tinker with the problems of capitalism.
> They will follow Obama wherever he leads them. I am beginning to
> think that the 40% has more potential.
> -------------------
>
> I vigorously contest this. Self-described liberals with operative
> social democratic politics are just a structural critique away from
> democratic socialism. The point is to argue to these people that
> basic protections and the welfare state are good, but not good enough.
> "Progressive" forces are in the tent of the Democratic Party, but
> there's absolutely no reason to say they all reject a radical project,
> because there is hardly a visible socialist opposition movement around
> for them to reject. The unpoliticized, fine some of them can be "get
> at," but the base of any future democratic socialist movement will be
> liberals (students, etc). I for one am among the 27 percent and am a
> registered Democrat to boot.
>
> Brad wrote:
>
> You seem to be saying that socialist regroupment means that the left
> can't be growing. That we need a period of inward gazing. I don't
> think it should be an either or. An expanding left will regroup
> itself and I think the reason we are so fractured is because we are
> declining, not the other way round.
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> No need to be hypothetically about this, we're slowly recruiting and
> growing our individual little sects and grouplets, but I'm a firm
> believer in Lenin's old dicta that "without a Party the working class
> is nothing, with one it is everything." The left at the moment are
> duplicating each other's efforts and needs a new organizational
> framework to make its presence known. Not a halfway house or a
> petit-bourgeois front like a Labor Party or a Green Party, mind you
> and not an (for the near-term) electoral venture. Creating a
> counter-hegemonic project that rebels against the conservative
> "commonsense" and ingrained bourgeois ideology of Americans is going
> to be far more difficult than what the TPers are doing, but in the
> short/medium term we can lay some foundations for a small, visible,
> movement of the left.
>
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