On 2011-12-23, at 12:44 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Dec 23, 2011, at 12:20 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
>
>> On 2011-12-23, at 11:58 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>>> "Fascist" becomes a mere excuse for sticking with the fucking DP.
>>
>> Another sweeping pronunciamento.
>>
>> The Black Panthers, whom you hold up as your exemplar, routinely (and mistakenly) denounced the US as a "fascist" country.
>>
>> Were they also just shilling for the DP?
>
> In current usage, and not that of 40+ years ago, Carrol is about 90% right. It's not just the "fascist" - it's the whole obsession with The Right. It overlooks how awful the Dems are, and typically operates as a way of pushing the reluctant into the Donkey's arms. You see it in the CP press (represented here by Cde Brown), you see it in all the little foundation-funded orgs that obsess about the neo-Nazi threat, etc.
Maybe. But I don't think they need the spectre of fascism to propel liberals towards the DP, even reluctant ones. The spectre of the Republicans, even sans the tea party fanatics, more than suffices for those seeking reform and the defence of their social programs. Blaming the current state of consciousness of the masses on the pernicious influence of tiny groups like the CP or the Southern Poverty Law Centre is a way of avoiding that the problem is a more difficult objective one rather than a subjective one more amenable to change through propaganda and agitation. It's akin to the wider refusal of left-wing intellectuals in the West to accept that the failure of the socialist revolution to spread to the advanced industrialized countries was less, as they contended, the result of a "crisis of leadership" at the top - of the betrayal of Stalinism and social democracy - than that the latter were expressions rather than causes of the unexpected resilience of capitalism and the continued improvement in the material conditions of the masses in these societies.