On 2011-07-24, at 9:59 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
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> On Jul 24, 2011, at 9:53 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
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>> And after you romp in this rhetoric for a while, start reading accounts of what FDR _did_ in 1937-8 after being overwhelmingly reelected. Boom! Up went the unemployment rate again. And FDR was soon on the phone urging Gov. Murphy of Michigan to call out the National Guard to suppress the sit-down strikes. And of course the New Deal was strictly for whites only. The DP hasn't really changed. It responds to great pressure -- if and ony if that pressure threatens serious public disorder.
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> Carrol, the DP sucks, but this is really overdone. Social Security and the WPA weren't nothing, and the American right has been at war with the New Deal ever since. Sometimes cows are different colors, even if they all look black at night.
That's true. And I'd add that the DP and social democratic parties deserve attention insofar as their efforts to reform capitalism when it is in crisis inherently have the potential to further raise the expectations and political consciousness of their working class supporters and to get them moving again, perhaps ultimately in an anticapitalist direction. Carrol believes it is necessary to tirelessly educate us that these parties have pro-capitalist leaders who will rarely if ever allow protest to spill over permissible legal boundries, which is only the beginning of political understanding. He is also focused on what some of us used to call the "molecular accumulation of cadre" (though not in backwaters like Bloomington, Illinois) rather than what the old working class left understood to be the essence of political action: organized intervention in, based on careful study of, the mass-based economic and political organizations and reform struggles of the period.