alanjjohnstone
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AC, Mark Twain’s war prayer was much appreciated.
You may have missed our recent SOYMB blog reference to Mark Twain.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2022/01/a-word-from-wise.html
He had first-hand experience of American expansionism with the American-Spanish wars whipped up by the hysteria of the Hearst media empire.
I’ll later republish your link on the blog too, a reminder that we have been here before.
MS, what killed off the SLP, the IWW and the Debsian SPA?
They all were growing movements. They were real threats such as shown with the 1919 general strikes…then came State Repression.
First, the Palmer Raids, then the Red scare-mongering of the Bolshevik threat.
Later the final nails were put into the 1930s CIO union militancy with FDR’s New Deal.
Labourism and Leninism were the dead-end side-tracks for the working class.
Can we avoid repetition?
ALB The main reason will be the failure of democratic reformists to solve the problems capitalism creates, providing the opportunity for extremists to say that democracy not capitalism is the cause of these problems.
I think this is exactly the strategy of the Republicans, to ensure that even the mildest of reforms by Biden such as Build Back Better, are guaranteed not to be enacted, despite the many actual material benefits to their actual constituents with infrastructure investments.
Just as the Trotskyists look forward to economic collapse with another recession hoping to recruit, the same can be said about the Republicans hoping for the bubble to burst while Biden is in office.
We will see that in the Midterms, the lack of any substantive reforms by Biden will lose the Democratic votes and control of both houses will fall to the Republicans who will then begin to move their own reactionary agenda forward.
I have not even contemplated the 2024 possibility of Trump’s return.(or if not him, someone equally a demagogue and populist)
Biden will have to use his presidential executive powers to veto many of them and this will reinforce the conservative perception that he has assumed dictatorial authority.
Authentic grassroots working-class resistance similar to BLM protests will be described as mobs and rioters.
The unofficial militias will be deputized by Republican state governments.
Strikes to recover economic losses because of the pandemic will be treated as union intimidation and outlawed even more than now.
Thus, as you say the extremists will declare that democracy has failed them.
We will face a question on how we protect the limited bourgeois democracy that presently prevails in the United States. And our fellow workers will be expecting an analysis and strategy that involves more than the “socialism or barbarism” option. What it should be, is very much a work in process for myself, at least.
Sorry, ALB, but my pessimistic dark dystopian scenario has surfaced yet again. I think I read Jack London’s Iron Heel too early in my political development.
I haven’t even begun with existential threats to civilisation such as climate change or global war.
In addition to those anti-war quotes, AC, to relate it to the other topic thread on America’s dark future, Butler exposed a plot to overthrow Roosevelt by a coup.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
https://bigthink.com/the-present/fdr-coup/
https://portside.org/2022-01-13/why-so-little-known-about-1930s-coup-attempt-against-fdr
https://freepress.org/article/why-failed-fascist-coup-1933-could-succeed-2021
As been identified several times by the Party, we have a problem that Richard Wolff, is popularly declared as an anti-capitalist Marxist economist and he is a proliferate proponent of cooperatives or as he calls them Workers Self-Directed Enterprises
https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace
His message is widespread across the USA and is commonly interpreted as socialism and it is this misunderstanding AOC is reflecting.
We are not of any sufficient influence to combat Wolff and even those such as Andrew Kliman do not possess the weight to shift the leftist perception of Wolff as representing Marxist economics.
More than 100 far-right candidates are running for political office across the country as Republicans this year according to the Anti-Defamation League
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/02/republicans-100-far-right-candidates-2022
…they are also part of a wave within the Republican party that is no longer fringe but increasingly represents a powerful – even dominant – wing in the party.
“The real danger is not just the wave of extreme candidates, it’s their embrace, their mainstreaming by the Republican party,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and the co-author of How Democracies Die. “The United States has always had nutty, extremist, authoritarian politicians around the fringe. What is new and really dangerous for democracy is that they’re increasingly running as Republican candidates.”
MS – Russia could easily overrun most of Ukraine.
Then I thought of Finland
It too began with a false flag operation after a series of Soviet war games on the border.
Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, the founder and co-chief investor of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, with nearly $150 billion in assets under management, said that the US appears to be on the path to “some form of civil war”, arguing that the combination of financial burdens, such as large deficits, high taxes and inflation, and large wealth and value gaps in a nation “leads to some sort of fighting for control.”
He also argued that the country is witnessing greater amounts of populism and extremism, and outlined what he believes is a path to civil war through the lens of historical examples. A big divide, he said, is the gap between right-wing and left-wing politics, where both “sides” are “unwilling to compromise.”
First, he said, extremists become the majority and respecting the rule of law becomes secondary to winning at all costs. Them, he argued, both moderates and the ability to compromise become diluted, leading to civil wars… the current financial conditions and irreconcilable differences in desires and values are consistent with the ingredients leading to some form of civil war.”
Being a billionaire doesn’t give him any more credibility than either you or I, but he does bring into the debate economics rather than the pure identity politics that the media portrays as the problem.
Accumulate, accumulate, that is the Moses and the prophets.
I noted that the deal will be paid in Euros, not dollars, another blow for the US
Is it a repeat of the Bush-Blair propaganda strategy of confirming one another’s inconclusive intelligence on Iraq’s WMD.
Downing Street has said it has “high confidence” Russia is planning to fabricate a reason for incurring on Ukraine.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “We have high confidence Russia is planning to engineer a pretext blaming Ukraine for an attack in order to justify a Russian incursion into Ukraine.”
“The details in the specific reports today are credible and extremely concerning. We’ve conducted our own analysis on this intelligence and share the US’s conclusion.”
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/russia-ukraine-latest-emmanuel-macron-030739863.html
While we may understand the rationale behind this movement, many of our fellow-workers suffer quite the opposite – the lack of work.
This article by AWW on India’s youth reveals the difficulties they have in obtaining livelihoods
http://libcom.org/blog/recent-unemployed-youth-unrest-india-04022022
Does it really matter if we are correct in our analysis and all others wrong if nobody ever hears us much less listens to us?
Don’t we have to go to where there exists a potentially receptive audience?
Or do we continue to talk to the already converted and those are not in any great number?
We have to face a harsh reality. We are not growing. We are not recruiting. We are an organisation of ageing members. As things are going the WSM will disappear, exactly in the same way as the SLP.
It is not because we are doing things wrong. But a question of could we do it better?
Our case has always been that it will not be the proselytising by ourselves to convince workers of the merits of socialism although it is invaluable in hastening the transformation of society but that capitalist contradictions and the class struggle will educate working people to the necessity of revolution. And unfortunately, we have been waiting for over a century for that to occur. If the WSM does not exist, class conflict still continues regardless and the resolution remains the same – a new non-capitalist society, whatever it may be called or described as.
Sure, we have been handicapped by labourism and Bolshevism side-tracking but when those were on the rise, so was our listeners.
Do the environmental or anti-war or social justice movements offering a substitute that we can communicate effectively with?
I have no answer, i have no magic wand or silver bullet solution. I do have questions, though. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then we need to go to the mountain. It may mean entering the swamp of reformism to condemn it and accept the risk that we may sink deeper into it. We avoided that fate by ensuring we managed avoid getting stuck in the quagmire but we have failed to connect with the sentiments and emotions of our fellow worker and the socialist movement is a combination of both heart and head .
Apologies for the rambling response but our isolation frustrates me.
For myself, this is a difficult issue to address and relates to a wider problem we face, which is how to acquire a voice and an audience.
We can reflect in our own language and socialist perspective the need as seen by Chomsky and other progressives such as Andrew Kliman that we have to defend what limited liberty working people possess and be able to reach out to others because a real threat to democracy in present times across the USA resonates.
Some may consider it an imaginary threat, that it is scare-mongering, the in due course a more moderate position will be adopted by the American public and prevail. Such optimism may eventual turn out to be correct, but I think we need to organise ourselves in the worst-case scenario that such does not transpire but instead develops into further political extremism.
I don’t think it will be fruitful to stand aloof from the pressures upon working people.
But the danger is always that our position is subsumed by those who only desire to advance the Democratic Party agenda, however, that has always remained a risk when we critique capitalism and reformists cherry-pick the criticism we make and ignore the context.
Does it mean presenting the lesser evil case as policy? I don’t think so. But it does mean identifying distinctions between the conservatives and liberals in the USA and the seriousness of the polarisation between them in many US states.
Also, we must reference that it isn’t merely political democracy that faces a conservative onslaught but economic democracy being undermined also by attacks on unions.
