On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 16:11:32 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
>
> On Mar 7, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>
> > You're asserting that
> > without October there is no Swedish social democracy?
>
> Sure didn't hurt.
I think that people forget that the great victory by the Swedish Social Democrats in the general election of 1932 came after a period of great civil unrest. The previous year had seen numerous strikes which the conservative government had attempted to break by using armed troops. For a while, the country seemed to be on the brink of civil war. That threat was ended by the electoral victory of the Social Democrats.
The top leaders of the Social Democrats were mostly moderate reformists, who sought, successfully, to forge a compromise with the capitalists. However, many of the rank and file militants in the party were admirers of the October Revolution and the Soviet Union, which, after all, was not too far away from Sweden. I think such facts made it easier for the country's capitalist class to accept the type of compromise that the Social Democrats were attempting to broker.
>
> You also have to wonder what the course of the civil rights movement
>
> in the U.S. would have been if the U.S. ruling class hadn't been
> afraid of competition with the USSR in the Third World.
There is a considerable literature on that subject. Certainly, during the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet propogandists were able to make considerable hay out of the persistence of Jim Crow in the US. And since the US ruling class believed that success in the cold war would require winning "hearts and minds" of people in non-white countries, this put pressure on them to do something about civil rights in the US.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
>
> Doug
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