Carrol wrote:
Of Course. That is how a revolutionary movement is built. A reform struggle only turns overtly revolutionary under very special (and unpredictable) conditions, but there is no other source of revolutionary struggle. And revolutionaries almost always make the best reformists. And in the U.S. today significant reform depends on the destruction or neutralization of the DP.
====================== The conditions, however, which would make a reform struggle potentially revolutionary - depending on the depth of the crisis and the ability of the system to recover - are pretty much the same as those which would be necessary to replace the DP and social democratic parties whose tepid reformism is primarily a reflection of capitalist stability and the relatively low level of popular political consciousness.
So long as conditions remain as they are, you are dreaming if you believe that small parties like the Greens or the even smaller socialist ones to its left could displace the Democrats and implement the more "significant" reform you mention. The electoral system and the means of popular communication (propaganda apparatus) which surround it function to neuter all reform parties - no matter what their original program and intentions. They are only "allowed" entry into the mainstream of political life so long asthey are deemed not to represent any "significant" threat to property and power relations. This is quite evident from the historic electoral trajectory of the social-democratic and Communist parties and - in more recent times - of the only Green party of note in Germany. In other words, the "significant reform" and revolutionary processes you describe would, in effect, be telescoped in crisis conditions. Our friends and neighbours and workmates would start by demanding the first and, if this did not come about, might well be begin to demand the second. In these dire circumstances, a Green party could well rise to challenge the DP, and socialist parties would also likely grow to challenge the Greens from their left. In fact, if there were a crisis, it's entirely possible that the radicalizing Democratic rank-and-file and the previously apolitical would by-pass the Greens for socialist parties to its left which would, it seems to me, have a more coherent program and better organization to offer them in those circumstances. But under today's conditions, to repeat, even those Americans who desire "significant reform" don't seem impelled to abandon the Democrats for the Greens. Even frustrated DP'ers are more inclined to try to reform their own party, primarily because they see it as already being an established party with many safe legislative seats they could take over. That's the reason US third parties have floundered to date. And if, for argument's sake, the Greens did somehow manage to acquire a large following in present conditions, it wouldn't be long before it would be responding to the imperatives of the electoral system and moving closer to the positions of the DP it would be vying to replace. In fact, the Greens even at this stage are split between a smaller left wing led accusing a larger right wing of "accomodating" to the Democrats. All pure speculation, of course, but that is what these lists are about.
