cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21396125
Stephen Starr in Hamtramck, Michigan
Mon 14 Oct 2024 11.00 EDT
The New Deal was an attempt to save capitalism from the threat of socialist revolution. The Great Depression left the working class in grave financial straits, and socialism was a foreign & domestic threat. This was before the socialists were purged from labor unions, before the Cold War and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Democratic Party didn’t make concessions to the working class out of the kindness of its heart.
Over decades, those temporary concessions have eroded along with any threats to the capital order: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise the US’s neocolonial hegemony; the end of history. The Democratic party is to the right of Reagan now, and some in the Republican party are itching to remove even the trappings of democracy.
Yup, social democracy and unions were concessions capitalism stopped making once there was no competing ideology after the collapse of communism (current Chinese “Communism” isn’t even Fascism as that still had SOME social benefits). I do still think our best hope is do what we did with FDR which is “I don’t care about your shitty party, give us material long term policy concessions, and then we can talk”
(current Chinese “Communism” isn’t even Fascism as that still had SOME social benefits)
Not to imply that China is a utopia—as none can exist—but most of our understanding of it comes filtered through Cold War II propaganda, which, in the rear-view mirror, will look about as ham-fisted as the first Cold War’s propaganda does now.
