On Fri, Oct 4, 2024 at 04:25 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > I'm pretty sure there are differences between us. I was thinking of the > Second and Third International parties and their trade union wings that > funded them, historically, rather than contemporary. Today, these parties > have become bureaucratized administrators of their respective neoliberal > states. Nonetheless, I suspect that most have much more proletarian > content than the US Democratic Party even today.
There are no Communist parties originating from the Third International which administer neoliberal capitalist states. Precisely how "much more proletarian content" do you see in the parties which trace their origins to the Second International than in the Democrats? They are all equally labour-backed left-centre parties with the same social base of reform-minded trade unionists and supporters of the womens', gay, and other social movements. They all have the same pro-capitalist leadership and program. They all , as you acknowledge, have the same record in office as "bureaucratized administrators of their respective neoliberal states", and they are all members of the US-led NATO alliance. You may think there were meaningful differences between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair or between Barak Obama and Francois Hollande or now between Joe Biden and Keith Starmer and Olaf Scholz, but they would all laughingly deny that. So for that matter would their supporters. I know from my own experience in Canada and the US that supporters of the NDP view the Democrats as political kin and vice-versa. The same is true of the Labour and social democratic rank-and-file in western Europe who see their Democratic counterparts in the United States as composed of the same forces and fighting the same battle as themselves against the right-centre and increasingly far right parties. You either genuinely see these social democratic parties with literally rose-coloured glasses, or more likely are stretching to portray them without any evidence as still somehow more akin to "workers' parties" in order to justify your abhorence of the Democrats. IMO suupport for any left-centre party in an advanced capitalist country is pre-eminently and always a tactical question, and involves multiple considerations, among them: a) Is there a mass or even a small mass anticapitalist party which is drawing workers away from these parties? b) Does the other major party to their right represent a real threat to the historic democratic rights and social gains won by the working class? c) Is the party backed by the labour movement? d) Is there an organized left wing in the party opposed to the party leadership and direction? I think the differences you see between us are more imagined rather than real, but I'm happy to engage with you as someone with a history of trade union involvement and membership in a small vanguard organization with ties to the pre WWII workers' movement. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#32723): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/32723 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/108801645/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
