[lbo-talk] Fwd: Has the Left given up on Economics ? « The Disorder Of Things

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 4 12:51:03 PDT 2011


Jim Farmelant

rize.

And for Charles I would have a question. Would the CPUSA, especially back in the 1930s and 1940s, when in the name of Popular Front politics, it was very much supporting FDR and his New Deal, count as "Leftists in the essential sense"?

^^^^ CB; Yes, of course. Marxists, i.e. Leftists, support many reform (of capitalism) struggles in non-revolutionary situations as steps toward ending capitalism. That was the case of the CPUSA in that period. Lenin supported reforms in Russia in the years before 1917. Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois North over the bourgeois South in the US Civil War. The notion that partisans of the working class do not make alliances with sections of the ruling class in certain concrete struggles is ultra-leftism, not Leftism. We seek to divide and conquer the enemy class, too. The Soviet Union allied with imperialist countries, US and Britain, in the war against fascism. The SU was for ending capitalism, and this tactic was to that end in the long run , but , of course, fascism had to be defeated first.

^^^

I suppose they would have answered in the affirmative, but FDR's New Deal was intended to facilitate the preservation of capitalism at a time when that system was under challenge because of the Great Depression.

^^^ CB: The German Social Democratic Labor Party of the late 1800's ,with Engels' "blessings", fought for and won New Deal like _reforms_ of German capitalism, such as unemployment insurance. Marx and Engels did not counsel opposing those reforms because they might end up preserving capitalism. It's not correct that Marxists disdain the struggle for reforms in the mode of "the worse the better" .

^^^^^

Yes, FDR's purposes weren't the same as the CP, but the great exigency for the world Communist Movement in that concrete situation was to defeat fascism. Communism , the Left, is an International movement, proletarian _inter-nationalism, and the critical struggle for all anti-capitalists at that historical " conjuncture" was to defeat fascism. None of the Communist Parties gave up the goal of ending capitalism in focusing on defeating fascism.

^^^^

And in fact the New Deal seems to have been a great success in that regards. Despite fear on the right of "creeping socialism", that does not seem to be how things have turned out. The successes of the New Deal and later of the Great Society would seem, by helping to maintain capitalism's economic and political viability, made possible the later resurgence of neoliberalism and the new right, which have attempted to roll back the social gains made under FDR and Lyndon Johnson for the sake of the profits and greater glory of capital.

^^^^^^ CB: See above. Communists are concerned about the immediate suffering of the working class. Ask Carrol about the fact that working class upsurges are often after reforms are won and working class expectations are higher, not in "the worse the better" situations. Also, reforms that strengthen the working class' socio-economic circumstances better prepare people to think more clearly, allows them not to be obsessed with the struggles of everyday life and , thereby, have more time to think about politics.



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