On 2010-11-17, at 8:45 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> For the past 120 years or so, the DP has served as
> the graveyard for mass movements...
>
> Much the same story can be told in regards to the labor movement,
> the civil rights movement, the antiwar movements, the student
> movement, and the women's movement. Some of the more
> moderate demands of these movements eventually get enacted
> into law, while their more radical demands are studiously ignored.
> Then soo after that, the gains that these movements had made
> then soon begin to erode away, with the cooperation of
> BOTH major parties.
This may come as a surprise to some of my American friends, but the DP is not unique in this respect. The same can be, and has been, said of the social democratic, Eurocommunist and other mass union- and movement-based parties which governed or approached governing the capitalist system. They helped to ensure that "some of the more moderate demands of the unions and these movements were eventually enacted into law, while their more radical demands were studiously ignored."
But these parties are more expression than cause of the failure of the working class in bourgeois democracies to fundamentally alter capitalist power and property relations. The extension of the universal franchise and of trade union and other democratic rights, though granted in response to pressure from below, assured that the demands of the unions and other social movements would be channeled into and contained by the electoral system. The mass political parties of the working class were established for this purpose, however much they tried to persuade themselves they were engaging in the process either to capture power peacefully (the social democrats) or as a tactical manuever to expose the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and to thereby educate the workers, through their own experience rather than abstract theory, to take power by revolutionary means (the Leninists).
Fact is there has never been a social revolution in a bourgeois democracy. Ever.
That's no guarantee there will never be one since bourgeois democracy is ultimately dependent on capitalist expansion and rising, or at least tolerable, living standards. But if all social struggles take a reformist rather than revolutionary path, we need to recognize that has as much to do with the consent of their members as their leaders, and we only mislead ourselves by choosing to pretend otherwise. Of course, within these reformist parameters, the base and leadership of these parties are frequently divided over the pace and degree of the reforms being sought, but this too is not a phenomenon unique to the Democratic party.