On 2010-10-30, at 9:28 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:34 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Even had Fletcher neglected to make that point, he is - and has been for a long time - far more politically active, I am sure, than Beck and other cyber critics.
>
> Of course, you have little knowledge of what people do away from their
> computer screens. But it does beg the question: is it necessarily a
> good thing to be politically active if your activities' goals are to
> cinch tighter the knot that binds the working class to the Democratic
> party?
No, that is not a good thing. IMO, it is only good to be politically active if you think those activities can move the working class to the left of the DP or, as the case may be, of social democracy. Of course, the left has historically been deeply divided about what kind of activities can bring that about. Take it from someone who spent much of his adult life both burrowing from within and battering from without Canada's social democratic party that nothing works when the masses aren't moving.
> More generally, it might be worthwhile to question this soft-left
> belief in the automatic functioning of democracy that Marv adheres to:
> if the left is active and agitating, then the rulers will bend to our
> will.
Ha. I wish. Most of my adult life is a testement to the falsity of that proposition, as noted above.
> Or, in the negative way it gets phrased today, the reason there
> is no radical action from governments today is because there is no
> internal political mobilization and consciousness and no external
> pressure.
That's certainly an important factor. The New Deal was the product in part of a rising and militant trade union movement, many of its activists inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution. The Obama administration doesn't have to contend with such pressure. Nor has it been been faced with a depression of 30's magnitude, the other reason why there is less incentive for reform by the state.
> Besides making politics sound just like my lameass high
> school civics teacher used to, and besides taking a naturalized and
> unified view of who "the people" are and what they desire, the claim
> is empirically wrong, no? Yeah, 30s agitation led to accommodation,
> but late 60s and early 70s agitation led to just the opposite:
> reaction and repression. But similar conditions existed in both cases:
> internal political upheaval and outside socialist threats.
Similar conditions did not exist in both periods. Capitalism was threatened by economic collapse in the 30's. The 60s and 70s were a period of capitalist expansion. The 30s protests originated from within the industrial working class. The 60's and 70's protests hardly touched it, with the exception of blacks and other national minorities within it. But most of the protest was peripheral to the working class - among students, women, and gays. The protests in both periods were met, as they typically are, with a combination of reform and repression, but the working class radicals and trade unionists of the 30s, contrary to your assertion, were arguably subject to more repression than the student protesters of the 60s.
> Working-class action did not lead to beneficial state programs; there
> is no straight line from political activity to state response.
> Predicting capital's response is a fool's game.
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