Louis writes:
And you are misunderstanding the role of revolutionaries. Without communists, you never would have had sit-down strikes. Without communists, there never would have been an antiwar demo in 1965. These sorts of things don't fall from the skies, let alone from the Americans for Democratic Action.
Carrol writes:
And the fact is that those who are self-consciously revolutionary make better reformists, as Lou points out. Some reformists (a definite minority) make good reformists, but most waste their time and goof up the efforts of others in winning reforms.
If you're both saying that Marxists of all stripes played an outsized and often catalytic role in relation to their numbers and were frequently in and around the leadership of major struggles, I agree. But the consciousness of the masses involved in the trade union, civil rights, women's and antiwar movements was overwhelmingly liberal and social democratic, their leaders reflected that consciousness, and they led these movements in a direction which largely satisfied the demands which sparked the protests: the recognition of trade union rights, an end to segregation, legalized abortion, and the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. The mass of participants in these struggles did not regard their reformist leaders as having "goofed up". There have been two tendencies - not one - in protest movements, each vying for control. If the reformists won and the revolutionaries lost, it had less to do with the individual qualities of their leaders than with the capacity of the system to meet the fundamental democratic demands of these movements. You both pay too much attention, IMO, to the former (leadership) and not enough attention to the latter (conditions), which is the source of most of our disagreements. ========================================= Mark Lause wrote:
This level of overgeneralization is historically illiterate. For most of its history, the Democratic party was the party of slavery...
The influence of the slaveholders has been much diminished in the period we've been discussing. :) In any case, our disagreements don't turn on the history or leadership of the DP but on the contemporary social and political character of its base, and the left's relationship to it. The DP commands the allegiance of most labour and social movement activists in this period in the same way as the social democratic parties do elsewhere, and the left would have more influence with this key constituency for social change by seeking ways to collaborate with it, rather than displaying hostility or indifference to it. * * * How about a truce for now? We've all got other lives.
