> But what is so "fundamental" about it? It's rather obvious that all of the
> conservative and liberal/social democratic governing parties in the two
> party systems of the developed capitalist countries have bourgeois
> leaderships and programs. There is little that distinguishes the DP from the
> British LP, the French SP, the German SPD, etc. other that the Democrats
> have the dirty work of running an empire which the others no longer have to
> contend with. The socialist parties with organic ties to the trade unions
> and a mass working class following which even remotely posed a challenge to
> capitalism no longer exist or have been wholly transformed.
>
. Have parties like British Labour have become indistinguishable from social liberal parties? I'm with Macnair's analysis here: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker2/780/making.php . More important to US circumstances is the idea that we basically don't have a party system... at least not in the way it's understood anywhere else in the world. The comments to the Henwood interview on http://theactivist.org/blog/unconventional-wisdom-an-interview-with-doug-henwooddeal with the US and electoral questions almost exclusively.