Subject: Re: M-I: "class consciousness in US"
From: jschulman-AT-juno.com (Jason A Schulman)
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 20:36:07 EST



On Sat, 09 Nov 1996 00:58:10 +1000 HISSGB-AT-lure.Latrobe.edu.au writes:

>Jason argued that the main reason that the social democrats drifted to 
>the right is that they don't have "a majority constituency". The history

>of the Australian Labor party both recently and throughout many periods
of 
>government this century I believe clearly shows this is not the case.
Labor was 
>in office here for 13 years and lost precisely because its right wing
policies
>disillusioned its working class supporters.

Okay, I'll provide counter-examples.

Again --  When the British Labour Party moved more to the left in the
early 1980s, its membership declined from over 660,000 to under 280,000. 
A 58% drop within five years. 

What would you do? How would you respond to that kind of massive decline
after what the public perceived as a move to the left? After the crushing
defeat in 1983 the main question was not so much whether Labour's
policies were "too centrist" or "too left", but whether the party itself
would continue to exist.

Then the party began "modernisation" under Kinnock, began to recover from
the
decline by 1990, and now is hardly more left wing than Harold McMillan's
Tories.  (I'd add that two-and-a-half party systems are inherently
conservatising -- as true for Australia's system as Britain's.)

Let's also look at why the Swedish Social Democrats were unable, to
mobilize for an all-out struggle for opinion on the issue of the
Rehn-Meidner plan.  (This plan was to shift economic control over
corporations to wage-earners collectively by requiring large companies to
give portions of their gross profits to wage-earner funds.  The funds,
based on branches of industry, would be used to buy shares of stock.  In
20 or 30 years the workers collectively would own a majority of shares in
Swedish corporations.)

The public was not interested.  Not in 1976, certainly not after the plan
was watered down in 1982 when the SAP claimed a small parliamentary
majority (the level of support for the Rehn-Meidner plan among Swedish
voters never exceeded 33%).  You could argue that the reason for this
collapse was that the party allowed the plan to be discussed and amended
in small, techinical details to the point where the workers lost
interest, but this doesn't explain why the party lost power just as the
plan was being introduced.

>That's why the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism
>matters why try to build slightly more left wing reformist parties 
>which in government will turn their backs on their working class
supporters. 
>Unless someone seriously wants to make the argument that a new period of

>capitalist prosperity is in sight and reformism will be able to deliver
again.

The era of Keynesian welfare-state "Croslandite" social democracy is
finished.  But I'm not convinced that the revolutionary left had any
winning alternative to it at the time -- and I admit I don't know, Mick,
what sort of Bolshevism you have in mind.  The types I have encountered
all involve never contradicting the Party Line in public.  Only recently
have I become aware of other sorts.

I'd like to hear Mick describe what sorts of revolutionary parties he
thinks are necessary and appropriate for struggle in bourgeois
democracies.

-- Jason
_______
"I wish you Americans would shut up about all the one-party states
in the world because America itself is a one party state. But with
typical American excess, you have two of them." (Tony Benn)


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