On 2012-01-30, at 6:13 PM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
> Marvin says crises like the Greek depression engender mass confusion. Fine, but does that mean that periods of prosperity foster political clarity among the masses?
An extended crisis which the two parties rotating in government are unable to resolve could see the growth of a third party to the left. But the answer to your question is, no, there is no evidence that prosperity fosters political clarity. I wrote last month:
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> All of which is not to say, of course, that there could not be a rebirth of revolutionary politics should living standards decline precipitously as the advanced capitalist countries lose their economic leadership and exhaust their corresponding capacity for reform. Maybe we are now on the verge of a new historical epoch. But it's no more possible to foresee what form of organization (democratic or rigidly centralized) or what program would be adopted by a successful mass party in those conditions, than to foresee a terminal crisis of capitalism. I think the only safe speculation is that such a party will emerge from practice and give rise to theory, as Lenin's conception did, rather than the other way round.