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On 7/1/18 6:23 PM, Jason wrote:
I don't see how it's a "sleight of hand" and I do not equate them. You're however welcome to engage with Lenin's argument that was based on considering the BLP to be a bourgeois party and still engaging in it and voting for it.
So all parties except small radical parties in the world are bourgeois? Like the NDP and Trudeau's Liberal Party are both bourgeois? Allende's Popular Front and Pinochet? Mitterand's SP and Le Pen's National Front?
The British Labour Party came into existence because workers fought to bring it into existence to defend their wages and working conditions. The Democratic Party, one of the longest running capitalist parties in the world, came into existence as the political instrument of the agrarian gentry. There was a direct lineage between slave-owner Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to Jefferson Davis.
Not only did Andrew Jackson defend slavery, he also carried out a genocidal Indian removal in order to allow the cotton plantations to use tribal lands.
Lenin denounced British Labour because it was opportunist. He also used the same language to denounce Leon Trotsky and the Mensheviks. He also denounced the German social democracy whose governor in Saxony became a key ally in the misbegotten revolutionary bid of 1923. Inside the left, you have family quarrels like these all the time. That anybody can equate British Labour with the Democratic Party in the USA just shows a stubborn adherence to the sort of opportunism Lenin fought his entire life. Then again, we are again talking about just another family quarrel.
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