As some of you are aware, I spent a good deal of time in the
early nineties sorting through the trove of family papers I inherited at my father’s
death and writing two books from them, one about my grandparents and one about
my parents [neither of which, of course, I published.] I was especially fascinated by my father’s
father, Barnet Wolff, who devoted his life to the Socialist Party and was one
of its leaders in New York City during the first three decades of the 20th
century. As part of my research on his
political career, I dug up the platforms for several years of the Socialist
Party [the Norman Thomas organization, for those who are deep into this stuff]
and observed that save for the proposal to collectivize the ownership or
production, most of its planks had actually been enacted during the New Deal by
the Democratic Party under the leadership of FDR.
This morning, as I was turning over in my mind ways to
continue the discussion I started on this blog a few days ago, I checked in
with the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup on The Daily Kos and found this striking account. It details a number of revolutionary
proposals, now being advanced by the most progressive wing of the modern
Democratic Party, that were actually put forward by Roosevelt and in some cases
in some form written into law. Tears
came to my eyes [I cry easily] as I reflected on how much we have lost in the
course of my long life. Rather than
struggle to identify radical new themes to set the course of a resurgent
progressive movement, we could save ourselves a good deal of time by simply
resurrecting this seventy-four year old document.
2 comments:
Rick Wolff often makes the point that whatever progressive legislation that is enacted in our system, say Glass–Steagall legislation, capital will find ways to whittle it away and then we have to start over again, which is another version of this blog.
So the question arises, what freedom now that capital/party leaders have needs to be taken away? and how?
What I think we should ask is why has that occurred.
Obviously, as Jerry Fresia points out, capital will try to whittle away any progressive legislation, but why have the masses accepted this so passively?
Marcuse gives some answers to my questions as do Adorno and Fromm, but they were all writing
over 50 years ago, if not longer ago, and the level of mystification seems to have increased since their time.
Has and why has this increased mystification taken over the minds of most of us?
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