Re: book announcement

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What was ending was the century of the "progressive" state bureaucrat, who
> had entered the international workers' movement in the German SPD and its
> 1875 Gotha Program, and who for 100 years seemed, in "socialist" and
> "communist" guise, to represent something "beyond capitalism". Events
> since 1975 have shown that the "progressive state bureaucrat", everywhere
> from England to China, represented, rather, something BEFORE capitalism,
> throwing the old statist "left" into terminal crisis. .... Now that the
> statist illusion of the revolutionary workers' movement has been laid to
> rest once and for all, the Portuguese and Spanish worker revolts of the
> mid-1970's offer one benchmark from which to judge present and future
> struggles.

Is the statist illusion really dead? I still hear a lot of undertones of
pro-big government sentiments on the left. I also note that there are many
who saw Bill Clinton as the lesser of two evils -- and see Al Gore the same
way.

One of the problems is that when workers' movements like those of Spain and
Portugal are suppressed or demobilized, in many cases people don't learn
the right lessons. Such defeats encourage them to give up, to lower their
standards, to look for the closet social democrat in Clinton's soul, etc.

Another thing: it seems to me that the Portuguese and Spanish worker
revolts of the mid-1970's seem a model of what's likely in Newly
Industrialized Economies rather than in Europe or the U.S., since a lot of
the blue collar/heavy industry activity has shifted to the NIEs and is
shifting further down the global food-chain.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine