Arguably, Syriza in Greece, is the sort of party that comes closest to what a contemporary revolutionary party should look like. It was formed from a merger of several different currents from the Greek radical left, and includes both avowedly revolutionary currents as well as committed reformists. In that respect, it resembles the German SPD of a century ago.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
---------- Original Message ---------- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: [lbo-talk] Revolutionary Movements & Parties was RE: Iraq war (was...) Date: Tue, 28 May 2013 07:12:49 -0500
shag carpet bomb
>
> right. but I still don't get how Carrol's claims about the democratic
party
> is where the potential for radicalism goes to die is an idealist position
> as you state.0
---------
It's an empirical generalization rather than an analytic abstraction, and might be idealist as much empiricism is. But it is also a position widely held. I picked up the exact phrase, "go to die," from an aside in an article in London Review of Books some years ago -- where it referred to the fate of the populist movement in the late 19th-c.
"Revolutionary" parties _can_, of course, play the same role. I have suggested that the Party we need will be much like the SPD of Kautsky, Luxemburg, Bernstein, et al. That was a revolutionary party, but it also was a place for the likes of Bernstein. Probably, as I've suggested before (following an argument of Andre Gorz) that a mass working-class movement has to achieve most of its goals within about a 5-year framework, and then (for reasons Charles Post has outlined) tends to subside.
Carrol
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