"There has never been a socialist revolution in capitalist countries with parliamentary systems, the universal franchise, and other democratic rights. That's been the elephant in the room for Marxists and others on the revolutionary left; it's an awkward reality which has been mostly ignored."
What about Germany before WWII? Viet Nam? Chile? Argentina? Spain?
"There has been social protest aplenty, but in every case mass discontent has been peacefully channeled into electoral politics, popular demands have been partially met, and the trade union and other movements integrated into the regulatory framework of the capitalist state. The resilience of capitalist democracy has been mainly attributable to economic growth and a rising standard of living over generations."
I wouldn't say that Hitler's Germany was a peaceful channeling into electoral politics, etc. As for general progress, that was true 1955-`1975, but otherwise there was a little progress for some and general devastation for most.
"The attachment of the working class to capitalism and parliamentary democracy forced the mass social democratic and Communist parties by degrees to the right, abandoning whatever pretence they originally had of transforming the system by peaceful or revolutionary means. The Trotskyist movement never amounted to more than a tiny, fractious sect, with each of its many factions claiming to uniquely understood the Leninist strategy of party-building and the "crisis of leadership" afflicting all of the other political parties and groups and trade unions which collectively comprised the workers' movement."
The assertion that the working class was "attached to capitalism" makes no sense for any period before the second world war. But most of your previous paragraph doesn't really make sense to me.
"LP's contribution is simply the latest in a long tradition of seeing the absence of revolutionary politics in bourgeois democracies as owing to the wrong-headed ideas of the many thousands of past and present labour and socialist leaders rather than to much more deeply rooted historical and structural factors."
What would these historical and structural factors be?
Joanna