[Marxism] In Defense of Harrington and American

[Jim Farmelant]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2009 11:34:35 -0500 "Mark Lause" <markalause at gmail.com>
writes:


> Let us take Harrington and his admirers at their word, though, in 
> that
> his Democratic Party strategy represented their version of 
> Menshevism
> applied to the US.   Let their strategy stand or fall on its own
> merits.  In the interests of a fair trial, let's start with the 
> heyday
> of Harrington's current and ask whether the self-dissolution of 
> that
> current of American socialism into the Democratic Party has moved 
> the
> Democrats farther left?

There is an even longer history to this and just Michael Harrington
and the DSA.  Back in the 1890s, the Populists, after having
formed, what was for a time, a quite successful third-party,
were largely absorbed into the Democratic Party with the
William Jennings Bryan campaign of 1896.  While some of
their more moderate demands (i.e. a progressive income
tax) were eventually adopted by the Democrats, their
more radicals demands such as the demands for the
nationalization of the railroads, and the telegraph and
telephone companies were certainly not.  And while
the Populists tended to emphasize the formation of
coalitions between poor whites and blacks, the
Democratic Party would remain the party of
segregationism for at least several more decades.
On balance, the absorption of the Populists into
the DP was not a very progressive move.

And for most of the past seventy years, the CPUSA
has emphasized working within the DP, and what
have they to show for this?  The DP, after the
Second World War eagerly took up red baiting.
It was the Truman Administration, after all, that
started the imposition of loyalty oaths on Federal
employees.  Then the Republicans began to red bait
the Democrats, who responded by trying to show
that they were more anticommunist then the Republicans.
Little gratitude was shown by the Democrats to the
Communists despite the work that they had done
in the 1930s and during the Second World War
for helping to build and maintain support for
FDR and his administration's policies.

And of course more recently, despite the efforts
of the DSA, the CPUSA, the Committees for
Correspondence, the remnants of the 
"new communist" movements from the 1970s
etc,. the Democratic Party has continued shifting
more and more to the right.  Of course the
Democrats have from time to time rewarded
some of these people with jobs, but that is
quite a different thing from these people
actually being able to make a difference
on matters of public policy.

> 
> This is at least the third time I've posed this question, but it's
> proponents have pretended that the question's not been asked and
> doesn't need to be addressed.
> 
> This is because, by any materialist measure, the most prevalent
> feature in the history of the Democratic Party since the 1970s has
> been its steady march to the right.
> 
> ML
> 
> 
 
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