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Regarding what Lenin said and how he saw the British LP: Lenin was in the habit of phrasing things very sharply, maybe even too sharply at times. I suspect that was because he was guarding so strongly against any tendency to fall into reformism. In any case, is Jason trying to say that there's no difference between a working class party, or the British Labour Party, and the Democratic Party? Here's the difference: When the British coal miners were out on strike in the early 1980s, in one region after another they turned to the local LP branches and those branches mobilized support for them - both money and also mobilized people for the picket lines. That was a natural development. In 1999, 2,000 carpenters conducted a wildcat strike in the SF Bay area against a poor contract that the leadership was shoving down our throats. I was the chairman of the strike committee that organized that strike. It would have seemed absolutely weird, a total disconnect, if I or anybody else had even suggested going to the local Democratic Party or any local Democrats for help. The difference, then, is this: When workers rise up, what organizations do they tend to turn to? What organizations are in their traditions? Which were developed out of the struggle of workers of the past? In the US, it is not and never has been the Democratic Party. Yes, workers voted for FDR in the 1930s, but the most advanced sectors moved time and again to build a working class alternative - a labor party. It was only the role of the bureaucrats, starting with John L. Lewis, and of the Communist Party that prevented a Labor Party from developing at that point. And it is the mass working class parties that serve as the collective memory of the working class. It is through these parties that the traditions of the class struggle are best carried. In fact, it is exactly because of the betrayals of these parties' leaderships that they have been so weakened and, as a result, those traditions are so weak. And today in the US? Today the Democratic Party serves to obscure that collective memory. It serves to blur the class divisions. And the "progressive"/liberal wing of the Democratic Party plays a decisive role in that process. John Reimann _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
