On 2010-03-07, at 12:43 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>wrote:
>
>> 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.
===========================
I read MacNair's article, Bhaskar, and did not find anything to contradict that Democrats and Labour draw their support from the unions, people of colour, and various reform movements against Republicans and Conservatives based on small propertyholders outside the big cities who are deeply hostile to them. This conflict is what defines contemporary Western politics. Political struggles are no longer between socialist and bourgeois parties, but they are still struggles between opposing social forces, in which I'm not neutral. My movement(s), right or wrong, as it were, irrespective of it's current level of political consciousness.
Is there anything yourself or MacNair would substantially disagree with, or add to, here ?