If it depends on (a) continued Democratic control of the federal government and (b) the policies pushed by DP leadership, THEN IT IS UNSUSTAINABLE BY DEFINTION.
FDR was closing down the WPA before either rising employment or the war made it "un-needed." That gives you the history of the DP in miniature. If That gives you the history of the DP in miniature.
^^^^^^^ CB: This is a dogmatic leftist, subjective "History of the DP in miniature", exaggerating the importance of a very minor event , ignoring the very major fact that but for the Democrats Wagner and Roosevelt there would not be an NLRA. Political reality is complex and contradictory, not simple, lol.
As to the current struggles for labor, they are obviously defensive in general. Labor is "on the defensive". "Victories" are not "exciting". Think of how the people in the movement felt in the 1920's after the Big Steel Strike had been lost, criminal syndicalist statutes were still the labor law of the land, etc. "Victories" were things like shooting at Pinkerton cops and getting away with it or something. Lenin never promised us a rose garden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_strike_of_1919
"The steel strike of 1919 had been a complete rout for the American labor movement. [edit] Impact
Almost no union organizing in the steel industry occurred in the next 15 years. Advances in technology, such as the development of the widestrip continuous sheet mill, made most of the skilled jobs in steelmaking obsolete.
When the AA considered calling a national strike in 1929 to demand that the new technology be rejected, nearly every AA affiliate returned its charter to the international rather than obey the strike order.
By 1930, the AA had only 8,600 members. Its leadership, burned by failed strikes in 1892, 1901 and 1919, turned accommodationist and submissive.[12]
The AA, which had only a minor role to play in the steel strike of 1919, remained moribund until the advent of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1936."
^^^^
If you enjoy diving 100 feet into 18 inches of water, then sure -- go and depend on the DP.
Carrol
^^^^^^^ CB: This the elevation of a tactical question to the level of strategy. Communists/Marxists' relations to bourgeois parties is a tactical , not strategic or principled issue.
For example, in the 1860's Marx and Engels directions to Wedeymeyer in the US were for Marxists to support the Bourgeois Republican Party and Lincoln in the elections.
In the 1960's, it would have been foolishly sectarian not to support the Democrat Johnson's Civil Rights Act , Civil Rights Constitutional Amendments, War on Poverty/Great Society program; while opposing the Viet Nam War, at the same time. Real practice takes place in a contradictory and "complex" reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargent_Shriver (Democrat)
After Kennedy's assassination, Shriver continued to serve as Director of the Peace Corps and served as Special Assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. Under Johnson, he created the Office of Economic Opportunity with William B. Mullins and served as its first Director.[12] He is known as the "architect" of the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty".[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
The War on Poverty is the name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty.
As a part of the Great Society, Johnson's belief in expanding the government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care was a continuation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, which ran from 1933 to 1935, and the Four Freedoms of 1941.