c b wrote:
> It is NeverNeverland notion that elections won't play a big role
> in any successful shift of the US to socialism or major left reforms.
I've been betting on economic collapse to do the job. 'Successful shift' though ?
^^^^^ CB: The economic collapse will only do the job ( what job do u want to do if not a successful shift to socialism or major left reforms ?) when it impacts politics, government, the state power. In America that will have to be impacting elections, initiatives, referenda, recalls, union elections, in a word, votes. How does an economic collapse, a crisis impact votes ? Behold ! the world financial collapse of 2008 and ongoing consequent economic collapse and crisis and its impact on voting in America.
On the economic collapse doing the job:
The financial collapse wherein AIG et al were bailed out from bankruptcy drummed dialectics into the heads of the mushroom upstarts on Wallstreet who are directing their fronts in Congress and state governments to force the loses of the financial crisis onto the working class through severe government austerity programs cutting services to the public health ,welfare and safety, government jobs ( which r real jobs). This has resulted in numerous struggles wherein firefighters and police unions (!) are the most militant sector of the working class fightback against the Wallstreet mushrooms.
"The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.
Karl Marx London January 24, 1873
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm