Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 10:00:01 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: 40 Years After Little Rock:Still Separate, Still  


Ralph Dumain wrote:

>What liberals think is secondary.  The real lesson of this federal
>intervention is that the capitalist state can be compelled by the
>pressure of mass movement to do things it would never do of its own free
>will, like legalize trade unions, institute collective bargaining, integrate
>schools, pay out unemployment insurance, provide health care,
>pass civil rights legislation and even enforce it.  The whole
>history of socialism in the bourgeois democracies is not to wait around for
>revolutionary change and ignore the struggle for reforms, like the
>Socialist Labor Party which has been dead as a doornail for ninety years,
>but to strongarm the capitalist state into making those reforms it otherwise
>resists.  Of course, the liberal solution is to make some concessions while
>tightening up their mechanism of domination at the same time.  But Eisenhower
>wouldn't have done shit were he not compelled to do so.

Ralph, you speak truth here. A contradiction that's always mystified me in
hyper-Trot thinking like the Sparts' is that they always call on us to
defend reforms within the bourgeois system - unions, the welfare state,
etc. - when they're under attack, but always seem to oppose the reforms in
the first place. So Eisenshower was sinister in the 1950s, but when some
cretin like Pete Wilson, Kirk Fordice, or Bill Clinton tries to undo the
gains of earlier periods, they're sinister too. Revolutionary purity,
whether it's the Robertson cult or Vlad Bilenkin's, is a particularly
self-righteous form of armchair politics.

Doug





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