57 Comments

1. Legume Sam:

   The big question for this election is one of where are we with neoliberalism in its current phase of development.

   The American public still doesn’t see the hopelessness of its lot under neoliberalism. Perhaps this is because of the situation with dollar hegemony still. Once the dollar starts collapsing, things will really accelerate.

   In the meantime, it appears that, as capital consolidates further and further (though the actual numbers of the super-rich increase, inequality grows and grows), the real distinctions between Democrat and Republican policy evaporate, and everything becomes one big hard line Washington Consensus. Voting becomes less and less relevant. Dictatorship sets in.

   Now, as for “who to vote for,” you could vote for Democrats over Republicans, yes, in the hopes of “bringing up the tempo.” It’s hard to say whether or not it would make any difference at this point. I guess I imagine both parties eventually achieving complete ideological unpopularity regardless of who gets voted in. Maybe the Democrats need a turn at being hated this time around.

   I, myself, continue to support my friends in the Green Party, & especially in its socialist end, the Green Alliance. In this election, for instance, we have the candidacies of Howie Hawkins in New York and Todd Chretien in California.

   The need for a genuine third party in the US will become more and more relevant with time. Perhaps the Green Party is that party, perhaps not. It’s hard to say right now. Third parties don’t appear to be relevant today, but that, I believe, is because levels of despair about the Democrats and Republicans are still low. This, too, will eventually change.

   I believe that the dynamic animating neoliberalism was most elegantly described by Harry Shutt in The Trouble With Capitalism. Amidst a capital glut, global growth rates have slowed significantly since 1973. Yet the expectations promoted by investment banks have heightened since the ’70s. Capital, then, becomes more and more driven to remold governments as mere guarantors of corporate profit. The result is what you see with Bush hijo. A crash, as Shutt predicts, is inevitable.

   Unlike Shutt, however, I do not think of financial crash as really changing anything in itself. It might be a catalyst for a change in public opinion, however. Much remains to be done in the world of the theory that underlies political thought itself. The various arts and sciences each need to be grounded in visions of a global, ecologically sustainable, society if the world is to avoid the ecological collapse that capital is foisting upon it. This, it appears to me, is the immediate work to be done.

   21 October 2006, 2:15 pm

2. Linda Jansen:

   Thanks, Legume Sam. I’m supporting Green Party candidate for senate Aaron Dixon in Washington state.

   Stan, I was wondering which Dems have “put the war back on the table.” Pelosi has said she won’t go for impeachement. Conyers has also backed off.

   And you think the only people deserving subpoenas are repugs? I don’t think the Dems are going to want to start anything that might slop over on them too.

   Since so many Dems voted for the war and keep on voting to fund it, do you think they’ll be able to find a way out that doesn’t paint them as craven?

   The longest journey (to a real electoral choice) starts with a single step. Step away from the Dems.

   21 October 2006, 11:45 pm

3. AlanDownunder:

   Venezeula is coming very close to wining a seat on the Security Council, with all the implications of that

   Bearing in mind the US’ security council veto, what inplications?

   Bearing in mind that absolutism crippled US thinking about Iraq, is there danger of easy absolutism in US conventional wisdom about Venezuela?

   Which statement warrants more diplomatic discounting: Chavez’s that the US is the heart of evil exploitative capitalist imperialism or Bush’s that he was launching a crusade?

   22 October 2006, 2:07 am

4. Stan:

   Well, I knew I’d get myself into this, so now I have to be prepared to follow up. Very busy at my house today, so patience please.

   AlanDownunder is easy. Empricism about what the election of Venezuela can accomplish in the Security Council (what about the veto?) is pretty disingenuous, imo. This is the assertion of a rebellion by everyone who votes for Venezuela and a check before the restless populations of those countries for the leaders who collapse before US pressure. The old saw that politics is instrumental and not expressive is useful, but gendered and misleading, too. We all know that expression of things like anger and fear have sharp political teeth by and by. As to whether Chavez or Bush warrant diplomatic discounting, note that Chavez received a wild ovation, while Bush was met with something much stonier.

   My generalizaion to vote a straight Dem ticket definitely does NOT apply to local Green candidates. Heck, vote for ‘em. I would if I could, but I live in a sate where we have the magnified, high-speed, low-drag version of political monopoly by the Republicrats. Getting ballot access for a third party is on par with changing the orbits of the solar system. Libertarians got it one year, then the state (NC) made them go back next cycle and do the signature gathering (a very tough process) from scratch.

   The reason I support going Democratic for all Federal offices has absolutely nothing to do with what Democrats say, or with what they might do after they get in, aside from launching investigations (and they certainly will, no matter what Nancy Pelosi says before this election). It has nothing to do with their characters as individuals, or the fact that the DP is a capitalist party. It has everything to do with (1) their base, which is mobilized and that matters, and (2) the instrumental business (smile) of how an electoral defeat for the Republicans will affect facts on the ground related to issues ike the war, the recent Latin American tectonics, international programs for women (hundreds of thousands of women are dying because of changes in family planning assistance created by Bush administration policy, and this should matter to somebody), etc., and (3) the creation of higher levels of political disequilibrium (with unpredictable conwequences) at home with a hobbled executive branch.

   Bear in mind, this is a contingent analysis, not a principle. I left the CPUSA some years ago because of two things: (1) the overt sexism of many key leaders in my presence and its hostility to feminsm as expressed by its demand that I withdraw public writings that seemd to privilege the issue of gender over class, and (2) it devotion to the teleology of an industrial utopia, expressed in its identificaiton of the trade union movement as the highest expression of working class consciousness, which led it to tail the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party.

   What I am seeing now, as someone who pretty frequently critiques the Democratic Party (the difference between the institution and its base is critical here), is that in our anti-Dem polemical disputes with the pure, consistent lesser-evilism of the CP and others, we have often slipped into an reverse-absolutism that — along with lapses into plain dogma — prevents us from seeing new developments. Chavez provides a good example. Many on the left had to be dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing what was going on in Venezuela, because they had convinced themselves that this kind of transformation could not happen via an electoral process. I’m gonna puke if I hear one more person tell me that “correct” ideas are proven by history. This kind of dogma reminds me of oral formulaic poetry… when the early-born, rosy-fingered dawn appears…

   History does not *prove* a thing about what will happen in the future. Flipping Ecclesastes here, “there is nothing NOT new under the sun.” Just because something does or does not work today does not mean that it will or won’t work tomorrow.

   When I say “disequilibrium,” I mean to put the Republican Party out of absolute power, and the Democratic Party directly in the gunsights of popular forces. Has anyone seen the polls lately? In the same breath that people say they hate the war and Bush, they say the distrust Democrats, too. With the Dems sidelined by one-party rule, as they are now, they have been largely insulated from the malestrom created by the war. That is why the challenge to Lieberman in Connecticut was so signficant… not because Lamont was the messiah (his politics are largley awful), but because all of a sudden a very influential Democrat had to pay a political price.

   The moral characer of individual politicians is important, but not the priority. The consistency and interpretive value of our own ideas is important, but not the highest priority. In politics at this scale, the first question needs to be where are the masses… and NOT just ideologically. Where are they emotionally? What are the specific traumas that can create teachable moments in their lives? How do we best link the politics of revolutionaries with the masses (this is SO basic) when they are in some kind of motion? And what conditions will create the kinds of fracturing dissonance that will bring people to a direct understanding of the limitations of the establishment political system?

   The VAST majority of people who are suggested in these questions are now energized, by fear and loathing of Republicans, to express that new level of political energy in the 2006 elections. The left needs to take a non-dogmatic, non-moralistic, non-schematic look at this election (and not The Elections Question) with an open mind, and consider it TACTICALLY.

   As long as Republicans can be the public’s bete noir, the Dems will be a default lesser-evil. Things have gotten quite bad enough now, and the time has come to drop this shit straight in the Democratic Party’s lap. This is the only situation where those same masses will be confronted with the real system and the real character of the instituion of the DP, and what that means for those blocs that constitute its base. Moreover, when the DP begins opening embarrassing quesitons as committee chairs, they will not be able to contain all the worms that crawl out of those cans. We — the left, we — will be unlikely to create such a potential degitmaton crisis on our own.

   This is the seeming confluence that compelled me to make such a call (to the ten or twelve people who might care what I think).

   22 October 2006, 9:15 am

5. Linda Jansen:

   Hi, Stan.
   Gotcha, but I think your previous call for a push on impeachment makes more sense than your call to vote Democrat. It got me to thinking and I’m trying to get folks I know to start banging that drum.

   Let the hardcore Dems elect their people. Let the rest of us call the Dems to account by insisting they impeach Bush. That way we can speak to the reasonable folks who are able to see the problem with the corporate duopoly and ask them to help us build an alternative.

   22 October 2006, 10:45 am

6. Legume Sam:

   “Chavez provides a good example. Many on the left had to be dragged kicking and screaming into recognizing what was going on in Venezuela, because they had convinced themselves that this kind of transformation could not happen via an electoral process.”

   Yes, indeed, Chavez provides a good example — an example of the things that need to come together if the “left” (itself an ambiguous term in this era) is to win elections. Some peculiarities of the Venezuelan situation:

   1) Venezuela is a net oil exporter.

   2) Chavez had firm ties to the military command before being elected, thus making a military coup difficult.

   3) The Venezuelan elites are politically divided.

   Contrast that with the US situation: net oil importer, right-wing military, politically-united elites.

   One of the main factors demobilizing the “left” in this country, moreover, is its step-in-line conformity behind elite candidates such as John Kerry, the Senate’s richest member. It was annoying to see households displaying the UFPJ sign “War Is Not The Answer” while at the same time negating the sentiment with a “Kerry for President” sign. If any factor took the war against Iraq off the table, it has to be Kerry. Kerry also took election fraud off the table by refusing to contest Ohio.

   Thus I’ve concluded that the Democrats, themselves, are a force for equilibrium. This explains why they spend all this time and money kicking Green candidates off the ballot (like my good friend Carl Romanelli).

   As for ballot access laws in NC, sometimes the fight for ballot access is the biggest upsurge of activism a party can muster. I’m sure that was the case here in California, where the GPCA is securely on the ballot but in internal disarray. That, however, is an issue for a non-election year.

   22 October 2006, 12:14 pm

7. Required:

   “One of the main factors demobilizing the “left” in this country, moreover, is its step-in-line conformity behind elite candidates such as John Kerry”

   I think the point is, partially at least, that you are right in this respect. The left is demobilised by looking towards the Democrats for leadership. The point is how do you break that? I think what Stan is trying to say is that the left will no longer be able to look towards the Dem’s with that “if only” look in their eyes, if the Democrats are actually elected. Then the democrats have to take real political losses because they’re in charge.

   It’s also abbout the fact that a lot of good progressive people, with much better politics than the Dems, will get a large morale boost out of the victory. Do you stop their? No. But that morale can be channeled into more radical campaigns post election, when the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot.

   I’m not American, so it’s hard to tell exactly, but when I look at some of the most radical times in recent US history, it has been the anti-globalisation movement. Which happened under Clinton. And the rise of the Greens party. Which happened under Clinton.

   And it’s not because Clinton wanted any of these things to happen, but because people wanted to go “left” and they could see in practice that the Dems weren’t going to lead so they left them behind.

   22 October 2006, 10:46 pm

8. Jon Flanders:

   “This year, however, I will work a polling site for the Democrats.” Stan G.

   While I agree that if the Democrats are in power it will expose them to their base, I disagree that socialists should therefore go out and support them, even in Lenin’s terms “like a rope supporting a hanged man.”

   I still think we need to make a class distinction in politics, and not cross that line at election time. Supporting Democrats “just this critical time” is a slippery slope.

   Not to mention that fact that to think that the turnout will be changed by the actions of a few socialist activists will amount to anything anyway. Now is the time to send out a clear message to the people who we can influence. “You are voting for the Democrats to stop the war. But they will not do that. They may even escalate it as Johnson did. We can’t join you in supporting them. But we will help you mobilize to hold them accountable if they get power, help you make them do what you wanted them to do.”

   Having said that, I do agree that if the predictions of a tidal wave turning out Republicans happen, then there will be a big opportunity on the left, as the Democrats disappoint. We need to be ready to take full advantage of the situation. One of the best ways to do that is to build massive street actions demanding an end to the war, putting the newly empowered Democrats feet to the fire.

   22 October 2006, 10:48 pm

9. RedDan:

   Good stuff Stan, and I thank you for it.

   Here’s my take, as a long-time leftist, long-time vocal critic and activist against both Democrats and Republicans, and long-time advocate of the opinion that there are very few major differences between the major parties…that the Democrats are the bosses’ “B team” designed to act as a buffer/shock-absorber against the various reform movements and activist alignments that have arisen throughout the recent past….

   1) Reform, change, revolution, whatever…these do not happen in an atmosphere of hopelessness or despair, they happen in an atmosphere of victory and progress.

   2) The vast majority of the US population is NOT in a revolutionary mood, and has not been for a long time. The vast majority of the US population sees, rightly or wrongly, large differences between the Dems and the Reps. We on the Left owe it to ourselves, to the causes we advocate, and to the people we purport to advocate for, to act accordingly. WE ARE NOT THEIR LEADERS!!! Our job is to push for, facilitate, coordinate, and provide expertise in organization and etc to movements that the people build. We are not the brain, nor are we the brawn, we are not the cadre, we are the tip of a spear held by and wielded by the people. Our job is to do what people need us to do, to listen, to understand, and to act accordingly. Right now, I think that means to vote democrat, organize for democrats, and promote democrats.

   3) The above does NOT mean that we abandon all principle or ideals - we must, by all means maintain our criticisms, retain our analyses of the Democratic party leadership, policy, history, and core values. We should be working with, and for the Democratic Party base at the same time that we vocally and openly promote the criticisms and political opposition that we always have. This allows a number of possibilities to arise:

   • Having given of our efforts toward a goal shared by many, and honestly given time, energy, money, and effort toward a common goal, we gain trust and respect.

   • That trust and respect allows our words and ideals to gain a great deal of “ears” and people take our words to heart.

   • Having committed work toward that common goal, and at the same time expressed our criticisms and misgivings, there are a LOT of people who, when (as we predict on a regular basis) things work out in ways that are not desirable (Clinton axes welfare, newly elected Dems renege on promises, etc), will turn to us and say “You helped a lot last year, and you said XYZ, XYZ came to pass, and now we want to hear more from you”…

   These things really do happen, and they often happen in exactly the way described above.

   I have been working with my local democratic party organization for several years now (out of a combination of frustration, lack of viable alternaitves (due to living overseas), and genuine fear/angst over the rise of the TheoFascists (there really IS a lesser evil sometimes).

   Having contributed time, energy, money, hands, and etc, and having maintained a consistent and sharp criticism of a large number of the policies and people I had to work with/for, and having seen many of the disappointments I forecast come to pass, I am now in a position where I am given a pretty high degree of “say” when it comes to writing motions for passage, to writing statements on events, and to influencing the way our local moves with resepect to events and people. I have had a number of my Democratic friends/colleagues come to me with questions about Socialism, with requests for reading material, and with suggestions about how to get a Leftist idea into the mix…

   it’s a slow and frustrating process…but it works.

   Rosa Luxemburg wrote about the process under discussion in her “Reform and Revolution”…she was right.

   22 October 2006, 11:02 pm

10. Stan:

    My point about Chavez was not to compare Venezuela line-by-line with the US. Maybe I wan’t clear enough. My point about Venezuela was that its specificity ran counter to leftist dogma. That is precisely why I argue for the left to drop its schemas and do what Marx and others said… study every situation in its specificity. If it does not conform to some theoretical generalization, that does not mean the facts are anomolous. It means the generalization doesn’t work.

    It does not seem to be a logical quantum leap to say, if the generalization fails once, it might fail again… given the stubborn insistence of actual developments to contain themselves within our cognitive strictures.

    As to whether I can work the polls, being a socialist and all, and still retain my purity — this feels a bit like we are supposed to hire the equivalent of Shabbos goyim to do our political dirty work.

    My polling place is at a fire station near my neighborhood. On election day, several thousand people who live and work near me, and whom I never have an opportunity to meet or talk with, will be coming there with their minds on politics. I suppose I could hand them all a leaflet with an excerpt from the Grundrisse or The State and Revolution. Or I could hand them this rant by Kevin Tillman.

    Let me point out two things about this piece, which I admit (full disclosure) to having a VERY small hand in (mostly morale support).

    I know Kevin. I don’t agree line-by-line with his take in this piece, but it is HIS take, not mine. Kevin is not a leftist. He actually sees himself, in some ways, as libertarian… but he likes baseball a lot more than politics. He has never published anything in his life, and was very reluctant to publish this… and he may never publish anything again. But he wrote this from his heart, and from a place of tremendous pain that connects directly to the Bush amdinistration, right now.

    If he had written this with a drop more analysis, or as a socialist or anarchist or whatever, instead of as a grieving brother, the second thing I have to say about it wouldn’t have happened.

    Truthdig published this open-letter, and that raw emotion connected. It got more comment hits than anything they’ve published. Within one day it was reproducing at a rate of one every ten minutes at Technorati. Within two days, it was one every three minutes. It had gone full-blown, epidemic viral. There was no staff working to get the word out, no organization behind the distribution of this piece. My own SWAG math seems to show that hundreds of thosands of people have read this now. This happened because it mapped straight onto a growing sense of discomfort and latent anger, and actualized the latter for a lot of people to the point where they wanted to do something to strike back.

    In other words, this was a mass phenomenon. If the left picks and pulls at this by over-intellectualizing it, or engages in hair-splitting over the words, or runs forward to show the world that we are far-oh-so-far-smarter than Kevin and anyone who falls for this un-evolved expression, we will have effectively severed our connection to a tremendous quantity of people who are sick of this war and pissed off enough to do something.

    What do we want to tell them, right now, when their dander is up, when they’ve been shaken out of their frenzied, late-capitalist, metropolitan inertia?

    Well… let’s tell them, “Those elections won’t make any difference.”

    Then we can go home and stew about the fact that no one pays any attention to us. And we will be wrong. Dead wrong. Those elections do, dammit, make a difference.

    If — in this period, right now, given the way things are in the real United States, and not in some static universe where all our abstractions about reform and revolution apply — if this mobilized mass goes out wiht the one little weapon they have, a vote (something people died for in our lifetimes, by the way, and that white progressives should always think about), and see that they can throw a big fucking speed bump in the path of a government, the knowledge that they can do that is making a difference. If Republicans and Democrats see — and they will see — that regardless of how ignorant those masses are about the true nature and causes of the war, and the history of Middle East colonialism, and the structural nature of neo-liberalism, yada yada yada — if the R’s and D’s can see that the war was the issue that sent the peasants seeking their electoral pitchforks, it absolutely makes a difference. The difference is that the unequal balance of power between the ruling class and the rest is shifted a bit in our direction. Not because we have embraced Marxism-Leninism or Rastafarianism or the Beatle’s White Album as the people’s ideological weapon, but because we are more awake than we were before, more aroused than we were before… we haven’t got the answers yet, but we are paying attention… and more importantly, we get a glimpse of our own latent power.

    I used to be a practitioner of something called Unconventional Warfare. It means training irregulars — partisans, if you like — for guerrilla war. After training, the first mission the newly trained partisans are always to do is something small and relatively easy. Blow up a small bridge somewhere, maybe. It has limited tactical signficance, and even more limited strategic signficance, but it is hugely signficant. We called that first mission a “conifidence target.” If newly trained partisans took on a big mission the first time out, before they had experience, but more importantly before they had confidence in themselves, they would be demoralized, and worse, possibly slaughtered. But by succeeding in a small way, they gained a sense of their own agency, which becomes the basis for ramping up the organizaiton into more challenging missions.

    I’ll leave with that thought.

    23 October 2006, 9:08 am

11. BrianR:

    This is prudent strategy. The Dems need leftists more than ever. Simply because lefties live and work for the causes of all women, GLBT, people of color, immigrants, etc. Its lefties who have jobs at non-profits helping people. Its lefties who choose to make a difference before profit. We can help Dems do more than gather votes and power. We can teach them how to create real change, 21st Century style. I see Stan’s call as a type of coalition building. It’s possible to bring moderate Dems back towards the left.

    Context: I live in a North Carolina. Its run by Republicans nationally, corrupt Democrats on the state level, and all kinds of politicians locally. In my town and county we have elected liberal Democrats. So it isn’t very hard for me to visualize partnerships with Dems, even though I’m not registered as such. It seems like an rare oasis in NC but I have hope that NC will be much less of a Republican stronghold soon.

    23 October 2006, 9:43 am

12. Julio:

    Great piece, Stan. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve made similar arguments before. If you allow me to plug an old essay, it’s here:

    http://www.swans.com/library/art11/jhuato01.html

    23 October 2006, 11:47 am

13. ben:

    Stan– The link to the Bill Fletcher article is broken.

    23 October 2006, 1:23 pm

14. Legume Sam:

    “We can teach them how to create real change”

    Or they can teach you how to be co-opted. Didn’t John Kerry once bring down the war against Vietnam? Ah, yes, but that was at the end of a prior stage of capitalist discipline, not the one we are in now.

    Let’s try for some historical clarity here, shall we?

    And as for Julio’s piece in Swans, here are some thoughts:

    1) How can you be so sure that “The Democrats have shifted to the right”? My impression was that the Democrats have bought into neoliberalism, the whole package, since Dukakis ran in ‘88, and that they periodically have to shift to the left merely in order to obtain the votes of folks like you. And then when they’ve got your vote, they retract their promises to you, just like Clinton did when he shoved Robert Reich into a corner just after being elected in ‘92. Moreover, your political forces are so weak (while you remain under their umbrella) that the “shift to the left” that they must enact in dramatic performance is as wimpy at this point as John Kerry’s promises of tax rebates. How do you know that your weak leverage within the Democratic Party isn’t a consequence of the left’s staying within the party all these years?

    2) You make it out as if the critical issue here is that “political activity at the fringes of the country’s political life is not an antidote to the perils of bourgeois electoral politics.” But I find much in this center/ fringes metaphor to disagree with. In a society ruled by the bourgeoisie, aren’t the working class “at the fringes”? Eh? So is working with the working class an example of “political activity at the fringes”?

    The objection is lodged that workers “are invested in the (Democratic) party, because they feel it advances their interest better than the existing alternatives.” Why can’t we create something better?

    And then, in Julio’s essay, it is argued that “The only precondition to cooperate politically with other workers is that they are willing to act, to take part in struggles to advance the common interests, as long as those struggles are not incompatible with the broader unity of the class.” But can’t the working class be united against its interests? This seems to have been the case in ‘04, where voters went to the polls in the sort of show of near-unanimity that would have impressed Brezhnev, to vote for a candidate opposed to their interests.

    Rather, I would argue that the critical issue here is the one Stan brought up at the top of the thread: can the Democrats be a destabilizing force? That seems to be a whole lot more pertinent than the straw-figure arguments presented in Julio’s essay. If the Democrats do more to hold the current system together in line with Bushism than they do to disrupt its tidy unity, do they still deserve our support?

    3) As an alternative to these straw-figure arguments of “not voting” and the like, why not calculate the risks of building a viable third-party alternative to the Democrats against the opportunities it would provide?

    I’d like to conclude with Howie Hawkins’ article “Strategic voting” is strategic suicide. Howie is a war veteran, a longtime Teamster and third-party activist, and a friend.

    23 October 2006, 4:49 pm

15. doug nielson:

    Stan: “I abstained from the last election.”

    Me: Why did you post that you had put a Nader bumpersticker on you car? Supporting Nader equals abstaining?
    I can’t help but think there is something loose in your moorings. I think you should root around down there and find out what it is.
    -Doug

    23 October 2006, 7:19 pm

16. Required:

    Legume Sam,

    You seem to be stuck on the issue that the Democrats don’t represent the working class. I don’t think anyone here was ever arguing that they did.

    Why wouldn’t electing democrats help expose the democrats as the empty promise you claim they are?

    Your argument, while certainly impassioned and reasonably informed, seems to come from a place of, for lack of a better word, revenge. It seems to me like you’ve seen the Dem’s deceive people in the past, which has understandably outraged you. To get back at them you’ve promised yourself to denounce them at every election. They “deserve” to pay. But what they “deserve” has nothing to do with it. If your revenge fantasy’s towards the democrats involve them merely loosing their support base, you have a far more forgiving mind than I. The real question is what is going to help us now.

    It’s too dogmatic. It’s saying, “that’s what they want, so under no circumstances will I give it to them”. Well actually I don’t think it’s entirely true that winning is what they want. The individuals that make up the democrats may want it, but I don’t think the over all power structure wants it, because The Democrats work best not in power, because people grow to hate the people in power. Democrats have to be that unattainable, if only solution, off in the distance. If this isn’t the case people would look for other alternatives, such as turning against neo-liberalism (anti-globalisation (under Clinton)) and creating third party alternatives.

    It’s kind of like saying let’s not shoot Charlton Heston because buying guns is what he would want us to do. There might be other reasons not to do, but the fact that you’re interests are momentarily aligned does not make the entire strategy defunct.

    23 October 2006, 9:26 pm

17. RedDan:

    Legume Sam,

    Unfortunately (and by design) the US political system is anathema to third party groupings. The only way to change that is to enact structural changes to the electoral system itself - changing the calculus of determining representative districting and proportionality, changing the rules by which a state with 500K people gets the same representation in the senate as a state with 30M people, changing the electoral college, changing to an IRV or proportional representation system, and etc.

    Third parties have never had much of an impact except either a) locally, or b) as vote splitters.

    The only ways to get the requisite changes enacted are to 1) Have a revolution, 2) bring about the utter collapse of one of the parties and replace that infrastructure with a different party controlled by people who would make such changes, or 3) suborn, coopt or take over the existing party structures from the root levels upwards.

    I think #3 is far more practicable at this moment.

    23 October 2006, 9:53 pm

18. Julio:

    Legume Sam asks:

    > “How can you be so sure that ‘The Democrats
    > have shifted to the right’?”

    I’m under the impression that the Democratic Party was at a time an “enlightened” bourgeois political formation, largely as a result of the existence of the Soviet Union. I mean “enlightened” in the Bismarckian sense of using social programs to pacify working people, preempt their activism, and co-opt their leaders. I don’t mean to say that the Democrats are a political formation of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers. Far from that.

    > My impression was that the Democrats have
    > bought into neoliberalism, the whole package,
    > since Dukakis ran in ‘88, and that they
    > periodically have to shift to the left merely
    > in order to obtain the votes of folks like you.
    > And then when they’ve got your vote, they
    > retract their promises to you, just like
    > Clinton did when he shoved Robert Reich into a
    > corner just after being elected in ‘92.”

    My argument in favor of cooperating with the Democrats doesn’t depend on the personal decency of the Democrats. It depends on the divisions and political weakness of the U.S. working people and on the anti-working class viciousness of the Republican policies compared to those of the Democrats. To paraphrase Trotsky, if you’re being threatened by two thugs, one poisoning your food — which might kill you slowly — and another one pointing a gun at your head — which might kill you immediately — you’d be a fool if you didn’t first try to disarm the latter and deal with the former next.

    The Republicans know how to isolate the weakest among their opponents to crush them more easily. Divide et impera. Look at what happened to Cynthia McKinney in Georgia. Rove or not Rove, that’s politics 101. But such a simple principle in the political struggle is called names (”lesserevilism”) and cannot get into the minds of people in the left, who act as if ideology trumped action. We will have to learn to isolate and defeat the most vicious manifestations of capitalist rule before we are in any position to overthrow capitalist rule itself. Superficial radicalism says Democrats and Republicans are the same. In other words, its motto is: Unite your enemy and be defeated! No thanks.

    The differences among the rulers are not insignificant. But if they were, it would still make sense for us to try to sharpen them. As an ideology, neoliberalism is to the left of neoconservatism. And this is not without real-life consequence. When you look at things from the point of view of the poorer three fourths of the planet’s population, there’s a *huge* difference between being uprooted, displaced, and even starved by the “invisible hand” and being literally shred to pieces by bombs. The White House’s policies may have a gentler impact on the livelihood of U.S. people than they do on the lives and livelihoods of the working people abroad. It shouldn’t be too much to ask from those in the U.S. who live off their work to act as sisters and brothers of — and include in their political calculus the interest of — those abroad who have no direct influence on the extremely consequential political affairs of this country.

    > Moreover, your political forces are so weak
    > (while you remain under their umbrella) that
    > the “shift to the left” that they must enact
    > in dramatic performance is as wimpy at this
    > point as John Kerry’s promises of tax rebates.
    > How do you know that your weak leverage within
    > the Democratic Party isn’t a consequence of the
    > left’s staying within the party all these years?

    The political weakness of the left is *both* cause and consequence of having to cooperate with the Democrats. But a deeper cause of the weakness of the left is the division and political weakness of the workers at the grassroots level. You cannot just wish that away. Unity and political strength needs to be built from the ground up. And in so doing, I don’t see how ruling out cooperation with the Democrats speeds up the strengthening and unity of workers.

    > 2) You make it out as if the critical issue here
    > is that “political activity at the fringes of the
    > country’s political life is not an antidote to the
    > perils of bourgeois electoral politics.” But I find
    > much in this center/ fringes metaphor to disagree
    > with. In a society ruled by the bourgeoisie, aren’t
    > the working class “at the fringes”? Eh? So is working
    > with the working class an example of “political
    > activity at the fringes”?

    I don’t know if that is a ‘critical’ issue, but it is an issue. Just because I think that money is not nature but an oppressive social convention, that doesn’t mean that I should shred my paycheck. Mechanical separation from the Democrats doesn’t mean political independence. The Democrats are not just a group of people. They are a group of people who emerges and replicates itself out of a social context. That hardened social context is what needs to be dismantled and rebuilt on a different basis. What results from many people’s actions can only be dismantled by the concerted action of many people.

    I agree that, politically, the working class is pushed to the fringes. The rulers would love it if workers stayed there. But that doesn’t mean that the working people should gladly accept its confinement to the political fringes. There’s no virtue in social alienation. That is the problem. Not the solution. The solution is collectively taking over the public affairs of the nation — and ultimately of the world. We are a demographic majority. The working people must push back and get at the center of the political life of this nation.

    How has people historically done that? At first, invariably, they have tried — with all their strength and conviction — to use already-existing political vehicles, whatever is at their disposal, no matter how corrupted they may appear to enlightened minds. It’s only after those vehicles prove themselves unfit to advance their political interest that they discard them and forge new ones. Some radicals may think the Democratic party has already exhausted its political usefulness to advance working class interests. But it’s not up to them to decide that. It’s crowds, working people, collectively and massively, who need to reach that realization and show that in their actions. Clearly, we are not there yet. They key here is to look at the actual behavior of the bulk of the class and not just to the beliefs of a few radicals.

    I’ll leave it there. I already typed too much and feel like I’m abusing Stan’s space.

    23 October 2006, 11:37 pm

19. Stan:

    The reason I linked Bill Fletcher’s article (I’ll check the link, but it was at http://www.blackcommentator.com ), even disagreeing with both Bill and Julio on the business of “strategies” (that is a different thread for a different time), was that Bill made a long overdue attempt to deal with the description of a political party. In the same way that we cannot get our heads around politics without a long, hard, and continuous study of “the state,” an institution that is in constant evolution, I can’t see how we can have a conversation (or a strategy, haha) about political parties, established or insurgent, without some sustained attention being directed at what we mean by that term.

    Bill says the two established American parties are blocs. That is a useful lens. It leads us to look not merely at the leadership of those parties (a kind of great-man perspective), and not simply at which class controls those parties, but at the popular bases… which are not homogeneous. This is, at least, the beginning of a contextual peek at these institutions, though I suspect it is one that is seen as threatening to some of our most cherished schemas on the left. We can, after all, be right about something, and incomplete at the same time. Calling them bourgeois is accurate, but it is certainly not complete. What are the mass demographics of these parties, and what unites them?

    It is fairly accurate to say, for example, that one of these parties has always held the mantle of white supremacy. White supremacy is a social organizing principle in US society (that cannot be subsumed into pure-class analysis, btw). From the period prior to the Civil War until Richard Nixon’s presidency, that mantle belonged to the Democratic Party (proudly and explicity at times). With the implementation of the Southern Strategy, the Republicans began the process of exploiting white anger at Johnson’s support for Civil Rights legislation to take that mantle away… and they have held it ever since.

    It is fairly accurate to say that both parties actively compete to display some verison of muscular masculinity (a deeply patriarchal value), but that the Democrats are hobbled in this because of their dependence on a constituent base that is (1) not impressed with this crap, or (2) actively oppposed to this machismo… just as the Democrats are hobbled by in their ability to appeal to white folk by their dependence on Black voters. The Republicans are likewise hobbled by their dependence on Christian evangelical reactionaries on the one hand (the vast majority of whom are working class white folk), and those with libertarian tendencies on the other.

    Analysis of the political situation that fails to account for the economic and ideological status of these constituencies (and not simply the opportunism or gender-class allegiances of leadership) is an incomplete, and sometimes disingenuous, analysis. The belief that these constituencies have no influence on the parties, or that the masses are simply waiting for an alternative party so they can flock to its banner, is delusional.

    I totally understand how we can continually arrive back at the idea of the necessity for a party… why a program is preferable to competitive pluralism and all that. My question (and it is not merely rhetorical… I do struggle with it) is this: Do the conditions we face in the US, with 300 million people splashed across a huge fraction of a continent, and a comparatively stable political infrastructure that is deeply bureaucratically entrenched in every aspect of our lives, make the development of alternative parties viable, from an effort-benefit point of view? Follow-on question: When we focus our efforts at base-building on electoral politics, that is by taking on the Sisyphean task of pushing an alternative electoral party against a non-parliamentary edifice like the US system, are we tapping into the power that mass constiuencies do have and putting it to its most effective use, or are we disconnecting from them? There is empirical evidence on this latter question available right now, and it doesn’t go away because we “if-only” it to death. If we are going to overcome the political impasse of the left, then we have to be willing to question our most cherished assumptions. There may well be some slippery slopes along the way; but sometimes we have to navigate slippery slopes because they are between us and where we want to go.

    My initial point was that this is 2006, not 2004 or 2000, and a lot has changed. The antiwar movement probably played a hand in Kerry’s defeat, and did not vote for the man, so whether we get applause or tomatoes for that one, there it is. We exercised the litlle bit of power we had in the way we knew how. Did the same thing against Joe Lieberman, albiet in a more localized (and ultimately better base-building) way. Even the Repugs are (internally) acknowledging that the war is lost now. The accumulation of evidence of criminal activity has insinuated itself into popular discourse. And a lot of folks smell the blood in the water. If we hit them one side in 2004, then we might think about hitting them from the other in 2006. It’s called tactical agility, and it works about 1,000 times better than any Grand Strategy there is. Or we can sit on the sidelines feleing superior to all those dumb-assed people who want to put the brakes on the Republican Party, right now, when we can, in a few days.

    On the question of neoliberalism-neoconservatism, I suggest David Harvey, who oints out in detail why these have nothing to do with what we ususally call liberalism vs conservatism. Both parties are totally committed to neoliberalism, which is the imperial international consensus. Neo-conservatism is an attempt to militarize and regiment society to ensure the continued viability of neoliberalism. They are not antithetical.

    24 October 2006, 6:40 am

20. Mark:

    I’d definitely vote for an antiwar Democrat if one appeared in my state or district, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Hell, I’d even vote for one that supported Murtha’s BS redeployment proposal simply because it represents a fairly significant shift in the debate.

    As it stands, despite the fact that I’m in one of those ‘key’ states (Missouri), I’ll be voting Green. I just don’t see where supporting a rabid hawk like McCaskill does our cause any good. Here is someone who advocates war on Iran for christsake.

    While I understand Stan’s point about tactical flexibility, I think we need to consider such tactics on a case-by-case basis rather than under some overarching umbrella of who will or won’t control either house of the legislative.

    Not to mention, while Americans like to belive “every vote counts,” the fact is that any race close enough to be decided by the razor thin margin we represent will end up being decided by a court and not the voters.

    24 October 2006, 9:41 am

21. Julio:

    Haven’t been able to read Fletcher’s article, but there’s little in what Stan says about the parties as blocs, etc. that I’d disagree with. I don’t use the term “strategy” to mean some fixed, detailed recipe about how to accomplish long-term goals, but rather to denote the definition of the goals and outline of broad avenues to approach them — with the proviso that everything is in flux and must be adjusted as we go.

    The difference is, perhaps, that I view rejecting cooperation with the Democrats as akin to the unilateral disarmament of the left. There are a bunch of actions of the type I call “strategic” (e.g. some aspects of the political education for the long run) that the left can and should undertake that don’t depend on whether or not there is political cooperation with the Democrats. But some key actions require it. Why should we renounce to that option and not exercise it when the conditions are met? I can think of scenarios under which the Democratic Party could either be reformed from the inside or bypassed on the left flank by a popular insurgency. But that stage has to be preceded by a long preparatory work.

    I have no problem saying that this stage of the struggle is very likely to be long. Cooperating with the Dems is likely to be more permanent that some people in the left would wish. Stan seems to believe that there are only narrow circumstances under which helping Dems get elected is necessary (2006 is not 2004, etc.). I don’t think so. I think the exact opposite is true. Only under very special circumstances (we are organizationally and politically strong, the bureaucratic apparatus of the Dems is bankrupt, the rightwingers are in disarray), we are in a position to antagonize the Dems frontally. (And, by the way, this doesn’t mean that we cannot and should not criticize constantly the Dems when they support policies that are contrary to the people’s interest. That’s how you’d prepare either a credible attempt to reform the DP or to bypass it.) I can think of scenarios under which the DP could rapidly deteriorate and discredit itself before the eyes of the U.S. working people. But if that meltdown doesn’t coincide with the strengthening and unity of the left within and outside the DP, that scenario is something to dread, not to desire.

    Stan emphasizes the gender and race aspects of the struggle and says those aspects cannot be subsumed into class. I don’t have a problem with that. The question is whether, in the struggle to transform U.S. society into one where gender, race, and class privilege are abolished, the tactical pivot should be gender and race struggles. My view is that abolishing economic class does not automatically eliminate other forms of oppression, but it may still be the most economical path to tackling them in more favorable conditions. There’s no doubt in my mind that the emancipation of women, queers, non-Whites, undocumented workers, etc. require them to take matters in their own hands and struggle against specific forms of oppression, even when it comes from their own side in the class divide. But intra-class struggle needs to be duly conducted.

    With regards to neoliberalism and conservatism, Stan notes that they are not antithetical. Well, they are and they aren’t. They are both strategies (or whatever we call them) of imperial oppression. And, in some sense, they complement each other. But they also conflict with each other. In any case, they are not identical. Each of them places the emphasis on different methods of domination. In those subtle differences lie the possibility of fractures in the ruling class. Religious differences among workers do not have to necessarily turn workers into political enemies. Yet — exploiting them astutely — the rulers can use religion differences very effectively to pit workers against workers. They can use the most superficial differences to fracture the working class. That’s something to think about.

    This will be my last comment. Thanks for the space, Stan.

    24 October 2006, 12:11 pm

22. neilcaff:

    Interesting debate.
    I dunno if a Democratic victory would bring about some of the changes posited by the author. Particularly the idea that the Dems will issue a rash of court orders on high ranking Repubs. I think thats definately ruled out for the same reason the Dems won’t revisit electoral fraud in Presidential elections. To have an investigation would expose the rotteness of the regime that supports them.
    That said a Dem win would represent a shift in American politics, but that would only be temporary since the dynamics of capitalist crisis would force the Dems to persue roughly the same policies as Reps (hostility to Russia, scramble for energy resources, attacks on domestic working class etc) although probably not in such a ham fisted fashion.
    I’m wary of calling for a vote for Dems because ultimatley it obscures the need for the building of independent socialist working class movements. But I don’t live in America so I’m willing to accept I don’t know the specifics of consciousness in that country.
    I could (reluctantly) agree to call for a vote for Dems if, paralell to this there was a comittment from leftists of whatever stripe to do their upmost to expose the bourgeois character of the Dems. So for example mounting campaigns demanding there be investigations into how the invasion of how the Iraq invasion came about, going into the trade unions to agitate for more industrial action (which the Dem dominated bureaucracy would be sure to oppose) or whatever happens to matter to ordinary people on the ground.
    If voting for the Dems is a tacticall decision with a view to building independent socialist movments that can break the Rep-Dem oligarchy, then yes I can see the sense in such a call.

    24 October 2006, 12:30 pm

23. Stan:

    This is just more great-man politics. Again, who constitutes the base of the Democratic Party? The vast majority of Black folk. A majority of brown folk. A majority of women. Labor unions. Trial lawyers. (The latter two are small and smaller, but bring resources to the party… another distinction in analyzing parties, the contradictions between popular and financial bases).

    Here is what will happen in eight days. Millions and millions of people who are pissed off (but, alas, not as evolved as us) will vote for Democrats in an attempt to do what is immediately within their power to at least break the most dangerous of the two parties. That is going to happen. A miniscule number of self-professed radicals will stand on the sidelines and suggest that those people are oh-so ignorant… which will not affect those million one iota, nor will it cause any heartburn among the major parties (because this polarization is being expressed in bourgeois politics right now, like it or not). It will, however, further marginalize the left, and not just from a fraction of the working class, but from 90% of all politcally active African Americans, who laid lives on the line in our lifetimes for the mere right to go into that polling place.

    And as an added note, the politics of the “working class” is continually referenced with regard to US politics, and I don’t see it. I see the gender oppression, that one marxist just emailed me was not a useful analytical standpoint for him, and I see the national oppression of the Black Nation and an emerging Latin@ - American Nation, but this working class movement that is going to create these more favorable conditions for natioan and gendered systems of power… hey, tell me where it is, and I’ll head that way. So much for schemas.

    24 October 2006, 12:59 pm

24. Danny D.:

    Hi,

    You write, “My initial point was that this is 2006, not 2004 or 2000, and a lot has changed. The antiwar movement probably played a hand in Kerry’s defeat, and did not vote for the man, so whether we get applause or tomatoes for that one, there it is. We exercised the litlle bit of power we had in the way we knew how.”

    I certainly don’t remember this happening in 2004 - I just remember drowning in a massive tide of lesser-evilism as I campaigned for Ralph Nader in Massachusetts. I don’t remember the anti-war movement helping defeat Kerry or not voting for the man. I distinctly remember the anti-war movement becoming demobilized for most of the year as most liberal activists and groups put their energy into supporting the Democrats. I remember 500,000 or so people showing up on the streets of New York to protest the Republican National Convention, and less than 3,000 showing up at the DNC for a lackluster march at the DNC, while Democrat-controlled Boston instituted “protests pens” to keep the 500 or so people who stuck around to protest the DNC that week completely out of view. I don’t know where you get this statement from. In hindsight, should most of the anti-war movement have been more enthusiastic about Kerry? Would that have been a better tactic?

    We have seen a similar demobilization this year. UFPJ barely mobilized for protests on the 3rd anniversary, as far as I remember. I take it that the same problem existed during the Vietnam anti-war movement - the problem of the Democratic Party, and their role as the “graveyard of social movements.”

    You also cite Bill Fletcher’s conception of:

    “the two established American parties [as] blocs. That is a useful lens. It leads us to look not merely at the leadership of those parties (a kind of great-man perspective), and not simply at which class controls those parties, but at the popular bases… which are not homogeneous… Calling them bourgeois is accurate, but it is certainly not complete. What are the mass demographics of these parties, and what unites them? … Analysis of the political situation that fails to account for the economic and ideological status of these constituencies (and not simply the opportunism or gender-class allegiances of leadership) is an incomplete, and sometimes disingenuous, analysis. The belief that these constituencies have no influence on the parties, or that the masses are simply waiting for an alternative party so they can flock to its banner, is delusional.”

    My criticism is that this echoes the type of non-political, “view from the bottom up” analysis that is popular among New Left academics, which unfortunately negates the crucial questions of power and control while trying to point out the agency of the oppressed. I study labor history and this is what I see all the time in the books I read. Yes, fine, the Democrats have some support from workers, African-Americans, and women, which doesn’t just stem from their “false consciousness” - but do workers, African-Americans, and women control the party? Is it possible for them to ever control the party, or is it hopeless to try, given the dominance of big money and establishment politicians over the Democratic Party? These are the most important political questions, and any look back at history would show that history is littered with the corpses of movements co-opted by the Democratic Party, while the Democratic Party soldiers on as a reliable tool of big business.

    It is disturbing when CNN is running programs called “Broken Government” with segments called “Broken Democrats” quoting ordinary Americans saying in regard to Congress, “We need to throw out the bathwater, the baby, and the bathtub”, and yet many on the left continue to throw themselves into the abyss that is the Democratic Party.

    This all becomes more concrete when we start looking at the possibilities for developing a viable, vibrant third party. In a recent interview on Counterpunch Cindy Sheehan said she’s potentially looking into forming a third party (although the gist of most of what she said was that she had some hope in transforming the Democrats, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up). But what if Sheehan were to be prominently involved in a third party challenge to Clinton/Obama / McCain/Giuliani in ‘08? That would be a huge step forward for the left. But this will only happen if she can be persuaded that this is a good idea, and this is where figures like yourself could play a role, and why this debate over the Democrats is not just some abstract debate but has concrete implications.

    If you’d like to see some of my thoughts on the impossibility of transforming the Democrats, check out my article that I wrote a few months ago on Lamont/Lieberman: http://www.socialistalternative.org/news/article10.php?id=423

    Take care.

    24 October 2006, 1:06 pm

25. Mark:

    Julio:

    I’ve heard this strategy before, that you elect Democrats and then confront them on issues. However, if all they’re concerned about is your vote and you’ve already ceeded that than what leverage do you have (unless of course you’re a rich campaign donor)?

    It’s interesting that Stan notes the lack of stratgic agility among those who dogmatically refuse to vote for Democrats under any circumstances, because my experience among left leaning activists in my own community is that most of them are locked-in Democratic voters that will maybe only venture outside of the D box when the race is so overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican that the Democrat has zero chance (and often not even then). Since they’ve already surrendered that ground, they can be safely ignored.

    24 October 2006, 1:17 pm

26. Legume Sam:

    Required, while accusing me of excessive hatred of Democrats (many of whom are in fact my friends), asks:

    “Why wouldn’t electing democrats help expose the democrats as the empty promise you claim they are?”

    I agree that perhaps it would. I would like to know, however, how much further the Democrats have to be “exposed” as an empty promise before we figure out that that’s what they are? Did any of you read the link I provided on John Kerry?

    Rather, I suspect that American voters have been bourgeoisified (in the global context) by dollar hegemony, which keeps the products at WalMart nice and cheap, and that they are thus not as “fed up” with the status quo as we would like them to be. When dollar hegemony ends, their attitudes will change, perhaps for the worse, perhaps for the better.

    RedDan tells us:

    “Third parties have never had much of an impact except either a) locally, or b) as vote splitters.”

    I couldn’t disagree more. The 1860 election was won by a “third party” — the party of Lincoln. At the height of the Progressive movement, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party came in second in the 1912 election. H. Ross Perot’s 1992 Presidential run swung the election in favor of Clinton. And would Eugene Debs have done better as a Democrat or Republican? I don’t think so. The reality of it is that even though third parties are marginalized by the US electoral system, they do play a meaningful role in influencing public opinion, a role which may be even more meaningful in the future as things worsen.

    Julio was
    

    under the impression that the Democratic Party was at a time an ‘enlightened’ bourgeois political formation, largely as a result of the existence of the Soviet Union. I mean ‘enlightened’ in the Bismarckian sense of using social programs to pacify working people, preempt their activism, and co-opt their leaders.

    The Democrats were always a formation controlled by the super-rich, whose main work (as Bill Domhoff points out in Fat Cats and Democrats, published in 1972 at the height of American liberalism) has been to “set limits” on how far the people could proceed in defense of their own interests. Today, the limits they can set are much more severe, thanks to the triumph of neoliberal capitalism over the earlier, populist-Keynesian, formation back in the 1970s. That “move to the right” is now ancient history.

    Julio also doesn’t “see how ruling out cooperation with the Democrats speeds up the strengthening and unity of workers.” My point was that the unity of workers appears to have reached an all-time high in 2004, in that the workers were united in voting for Kerry/ Bush, both pro-war candidates representing the most predatory factions of capital. So, today, the workers are indeed strong in opposing their own interests. I credit the Democrats with this strength. They quieted the antiwar movement like no other force, as John Kerry proclaimed his militarism before a crowd of antiwar delegates, and as Boston had been turned in to a police state FAR worse than that which had been arranged for the Republicans at NYC. So I don’t see how working class unity is a problem. Hasn’t it been achieved? I do, however, see that the direction of this unity might be a problem. Just because the “left” is united in allowing the Democrats to mask its differences in favor of a generalized support for the “lesser evil” status quo doesn’t mean that this unity is a good thing. Just going along to be with the masses when the masses are wrong appears to me as an abdication of what puny amount of intellectual leadership I currently possess.

    Julio, at last, concludes:

    The problem I’m pointing to is that of the absence of an alternative to the Democrats, at least in places such as North Carolina. How do we know that the Democrats are still politically useful, if what we are merely observing is the absence of a meaningful electoral alternative within the current political space? Clearly, I think it would be useful to create that alternative, perhaps in a way that the Greens have not yet accomplished.

    Stan’s appeal to “tactical agility” is admirable. I do, however, think his options are limited by the failure of the American “left” to even consider an alternative to the pro-war Democrats, or to these go-off-in-a-corner-and-sulk alternatives we read about now and then. He thus feels obliged to play their game: “win” the next election. It’s easy to be “agile” when one’s options are so limited. But at some point we will need “tactical versatility,” meaning the possibility of using more than one tactic. Otherwise, the Democrats will continue to take the “left” for granted, as they do now.

    24 October 2006, 1:22 pm

27. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Uh, with all the phone-y baloney about how Pres. Bush and his gang of flunky’s is gonna ” make ” Iraq’s ” goverNment ” really, really get itself together ……… with all of that seRving as a distraction ……… let me point out, once more, at least once more , that Saudi Arabia is a) the country from which the majority of the 9-11-01 terroristers came from .. and b ) Saudi Arabia is currently a kingdom where the rights of ordinaRy
    folks do not exist.

    The reason that ’s a problem, and my reason for mentioning it, here, is …………………..

    The next 9-11-01 - style attacks will cause some serious head-scratching . Along the lines of ……… WHY are America’s politicians, Republican and Democratic , allowed to IGNORE
    the heap of sh - T that is current Saudi Arabia ? Where the likelihood of another set
    of terroristers gathering, planning, and performing their evil deeds is nearly guaranteed ? And another set of terroristers beyond that, too.

    All this b.s. about how the Iraq War is a central piece in the Global War on Terror. Come on now, people, where’s the companion piece to the central piece ? Where is the companion piece to
    the central piece ? It is in SAUDI ARABIA.

    No one has taken on the corrupt, evil ” goveRnment ” in Saudi Arabia. Not Secretary of State Rice. Not President Bush.

    And yet, fifteen Saudi Arabians did a naughty, naughty deed on 9-11-01 , quite possibly to ” get revenge at ” the goveRnments of the USA and Saudi Arabia.

    Timothy R. Anderson, grandson of a farmer.

    http://www.iava.org

    24 October 2006, 2:26 pm

28. Matthew:

    I agree with Stan on this one. My absentee ballot reads “DEM” all the way down, strictly as a means of turning the party into a Trojan Horse of sorts, or a Trojan Donkey if you like. Once the gates are open and the Donkey is inside, jump out and go from there. Is this a compromise? I suppose so. Unfortunately, where I’m at (deep inside the military establishment on isolated overseas duty), there is no movement whatsoever- even voting Democrat puts me on the fringe here. For those that have no access, what other choice is there? Simply not vote? I don’t see that as an acceptable alternative at this point.

    24 October 2006, 4:50 pm

29. Joaquin Bustelo:

    [I sent this originally to the Marxism list run by Louis Proyect (www.marxmail.org), but it seemed appropriate to also post here. My subject line was “Goff voting Democrat / Heart of Darkness” –Joaquin]

    “I see even less joy than I did 6 years ago, if joy
    can indeed be a measure of the health of a society.”

    – Maggie

    I’ve not been writing much for this list lately, and that for a reason. I find the discussions rarely intersect with my own focus and concerns. Rather, pieces like Stan’s (the one on American fascism) and Maggie’s comments are the ones that more hold my attention.

    There is a strange mood abroad, and I confess to finding myself trapped in it. Watching the collapse of the Bush regime since his re-election is fascinating: an immeasurably tall edifice of arrogance and lies coming down in impossibly slow motion, and all I want to do is stand, mouth agape, waiting for the thud and rising cloud of flame and dust that tells me that they have hit the ground.

    Perhaps, just perhaps, that New York Times editorial today [Trying to Contain the Iraq Disaster ] is the first whisp of smoke.

    An American general in Baghdad last week was complaining that the “terrorists” were trying to influence the outcome of the elections by killing American soldiers. Like, “Duh, dude, but what are you going to do about it?”

    But that tale is also told of me, and thee: “Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d?”

    I feel drawn not to the truths of Marx I learned as a young man but to that of the poets of my adolescence. Because it is the light I yearn for.

    * * *

    Referenced here recently was the speech/article that Bill Fletcher put in the Black Commentator, a very cogent analysis explaining the need for the left to have a strategic orientation of burying itself inside the Democratic Party.

    His argument? That unlike other countries (to varying degrees), the structures of the U.S. electoral system act to force people into a two-party system, and the parties thereby become party-blocs, vaguely defined alliances held together by money and opportunism.

    It does no good to argue that these parties are under bourgeois hegemony. Bill is a very smart man and he understands this, and his reply is going to be: in this society, what isn’t?

    The orthodox answer to Fletcher would be that those other bourgeois imperialist democratic regimes that do make room for third parties were not born that way. That space was carved out by working and oppressed peoples asserting their political independence.

    But from the ruling class’s point of view, if they did not fit into the bourgeois party system, then room had to be made for them in the bourgeois democratic regime. And it was. Which is how the British and Australian Labor parties and so many other “bourgeois ‘workers’ parties” wound up being what they are today, which is straight-up bourgeois bourgeois parties, no “workers” about them at all.

    Or is that really how they wound up that way?

    Independent political action needs a subject: it is an expression of a *movement* or it is not anything at all.

    It is quite clear, historically, that in the advanced capitalist countries there were working-class movements, which despite all sorts of problems, were nevertheless worthy of the name “labor movement.”

    But to speak of a “labor movement” as such in these countries today is, to put it charitably, an exaggeration. Certainly in the United States there is not now, nor has there been within living historical memory, an independent working class movement worthy of the name, not even in its most primitive form, a trade union movement *of the actual workers.*

    Undoubtedly it is “correct” for a Marxist to say that the working class needs its own political party, but saying that in the United States today is like saying that the Martians need their own political party, because the working class DOES NOT EXIST as a political or social subject or actor nor HAS IT EXISTED since WWII or shortly thereafter. It is, to be frank, preaching, and as such more akin to utopian socialism rather than the Marxist variety. For Marxism was born, very deliberately and explicitly, as the CONSCIOUS expression of an actual CLASS movement that was groping and stumbling its way towards social and political self-consciousness, and Marxism sees utopian socialism as a “religious” (idealist/alienated) expression of that class in its most inchoate, initial stages, before it has become a “class-for-itself.”

    What I’m raising is, what does that do to Marxism in countries where the working class has stopped being a “class for itself”?

    The working people of the imperialist countries –big sections of them, at any rate– long ago made a separate peace with the patriarchal/imperialist system and are no longer in a social or political sense part of any class movement save the movement of THEIR OWN ruling classes. They may be damn fools to do it, in the end it may come back to bite their behinds, but this is what they have done.

    In exchange for their support, the ruling classes give them a standard of living that is *qualitatively* higher than that available to factory or office workers elsewhere on the planet, i.e., than is available to most of the human race. And to me it makes no sense to say all these things are unrelated — the political support, the two qualitatively different standards of living.

    That is the truth, those are the facts on the ground. Tomorrow they may change, no one would be happier than me to see an explosive rebirth of the class movement of the workers in the imperialist countries, but for now, THIS is the world we live in and operate in.

    That is the reality that Stan Goff’s call on people to just pull the lever for a straight Democrat ticket is grounded in. That and the conjuncture: the Bush/Republican regime is collapsing, these elections will be an important moment in that collapse. This is very far from Bill Fletcher’s appeal to strategically orient to working within the Democrats.

    Those who bothered to follow the threads on his blog provoked by that post will see that Stan is still an advocate of independent political action. He calls on people to vote for the Greens where they are running. He still defends his opposition to Kerry’s campiagn in 2004.

    But this, too, should be noted. AFAIK, there is no Green Party any more in the South and Southwest, nor in much of the Midwest. It exists mostly in California, New York, and a handful of other states. There are fewer Greens running this year than two or four years ago, and the campaigns seem to be a lot smaller.

    Stan’s position is strictly a tactical one grounded in a very immediate way in the political conjuncture. And he explicitly counterposes it to the notion of tactics at the service of a “grand strategy,” which, as he notes, implicitly involves predicting where politics and the country are headed.

    Thus his position is a negation of saying that we can begin to see on the horizon the signs of a resucitation of a class movement by working people. On that, I have to agree with him.

    I am not sure whether I agree with him on calling on people to vote Democrat in states like Georgia or North Carolina, where no one else is running. Perhaps unlike Stan, I would like tactics to be informed by strategic concerns, if not a “grand strategy.”

    And concretely, there are two social movements, that of the Black and Latino peoples, who would be very well served by breaking with the Democrats. And there does seem to be a little of that motion at least among Latinos around the campaigns that Peter Camejo has carried out in California.

    Also, in the case of Georgia, at the head of the Democrat ticket is a gubernatorial candidate who has endorsed the anti-immigrant bill his Republican opponent, the incumbent, signed into law, saying he, too, would have signed it. And in my Congressional District voting Democrat means voting for a Black opportunist sock-puppet of white moneyed interests who defeated Cynthia McKinney in the primary (with the help, as usual, of Republican crossover voters from the northern part of the county). The other member of Congress that I think is worth thinking about in Georgia is John Lewis in the neighboring 5th Congressional District, mostly Atlanta proper. He is no Cynthia McKinney, unfortunately, but he is an embodiment in a pretty direct way of the gains of the civil rights movement, and seen as such by the Black community. I, too, would want the struggle by Black people for the democratic right to representation to find vehicles outside the two party system, but the reality is that it has been overwhelmingly channeled in and through the Democratic Party, which blunts and undercuts its basic thrust, but does not make it disappear as a political consideration.

    However, this year, the Republicans have not even dared mount a challenge to Lewis, neither with a sock-puppet candidate in the primary, nor with a Republican candidate in the general election. So Lewis is not a factor.

    My conclusion is that much as I would gleefully welcome a Republican collapse in these elections, and hope to see it, it seems to me Stan’s general call for voting Democrat undercuts and runs counter to the course of the actual social movements here, and therefore isn’t very useful.

    Similar considerations, I suspect, will also be true in many other places, and you have to couple that with the practical reality that perhaps 5%, or at most 10% of the seats in the House are really “in play,” along with the Senators from a half-dozen states. Elsewhere the electoral calculus (mostly due to gerrymandering) is such that no change is possible.

    Given this, I can’t agree with Stan, and this strictly from tactical, practical considerations of the immediate situation, and not from “principles” like never vote for bourgeois parties or that there is some sort of “class line” in bourgeois electoral farces.

    * * *

    But this whole discussion points to a much deeper question, which is the one we should be grappling with.

    Which is WHY is there no class movement in countries like the United States, and what this means for the Marxist movement, which views itself most fundamentally as the self-conscious political/ideological expression of this class movement, the one that does not happen to exist here right now and has not existed for a half century or more.

    That is the heart of darkness, the source of our problems.

    In other words, it is time to do a historical and materialist critique of Marxism, not this or that current or organization, but of the movement as a whole, the “communist movement” as a whole. We can no longer rely on the explanations many of us learned when we were young about revisionism in power, exceptional circumstances, the post-WWII boom, detours in the course of the world revolution, counterrevolutionary Stalinism, and all the rest of it.

    It is quite self-evident that “the movement” as a whole still exists, the “radical movement” or “anticapitlist movement” or the “better world is possible” movement.

    But, compared to a century ago, it has lost its coherence, its sense of self, its identity to the point where just now, I was at a loss to come up with a term that would adequately encompass it. In the early 1900’s there was no question but that we were talking about Marxist/socialist working-class-based movement.

    I have been resisting this conclusion for many years now, but find that I can no longer do so. Partly I have been driven to it by the “mountain stronghold” mentality that pervades the sects (including my own, the anti-sect sect, Solidarity).

    When they wrote the Manifesto, Marx and Engels laid out a guideline to communist organization:

    “In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

    “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

    “They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

    “They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.”

    My problem is not so much that the self-proclaimed Marxist or Communist groups in the imperialist countries have not been very succesful in applying this.

    It is that –at least in the United States– none of them –not one!– is trying. And the REAL TRUTH is there isn’t a single group in the United States that is even PRETENDING to be trying. *NOT ONE.*

    And how could they? Without the “proletarian movement,” what is left but “sectarian principles of their own”?

    So there is that, but there is something else. It is as clear as can be to me that the current system is built on three inextricably intertwined and interdependent pillars or oppression and exploitation: gender, race/nation and class.

    I put class last not just to counter the historical stance of the Marxist movement to put it first, but because the development and exploitation of the modern proletariat as a class came last.

    FIRST comes gender. The sexual division of labor, which as Engels explains in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, at a certain point becomes a *hierarchical* relationship, is at the root of all class societies and is what all forms of oppression and exploitation are built on.

    But also, genocide, slavery and colonial plundering of the “New World,” India, etc., is what preceded and laid the basis for the development of industrial capitalism and the modern proletariat.

    But contrary to what is EXPLICITLY anticipated in the Manifesto, a homogenous proletarianization of the population of all nations and both sexes did not supercede and make irrelevant gender or national oppression and epxloitation.

    On the contrary, as Lenin noted repeatedly in relation to imperialism and national oppression, it has exacerbated them.

    If you look back 100 years, what is clearly the case is that the main weight of the world anticapitalist revolution has been carried by the NATIONAL MOVEMENTS of colonial and semicolonial peoples, and increasingly the proletariat of the advanced imperialist countries ceases to be an independent class force and large sections of the working class of these countries become a mass base for “democratic” imperialism.

    We need a theory, and it needs to start with a Marxist (dialectial and historical materialist) critique of really-existing Marxism (the class-reductionist movement and its theoretical expressions).

    But this of necessity means that also we need a new *praxis*. The praxis of the existing socialist groups, even the best among them, will no longer do, we need groups that are fully and really *intersectional* in their politics. And this means, of necessity, new groups based on the actual people doing the actual work, the actual social movement organizing and protest activity, because there is nowhere else for the new theory to come from.

    There have been and continue to be conscious efforts to transform at least some of the existing socialist organizations in that direction, but they have not been succesful. Even when there is clarity on the intention, I believe the accumulated evidence is showing that the tradition of the past “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and we return to the well-worn projects, programs and procedures.

    So we talk about majority rule. We proclaim the need for a party and “political independence.”

    Political independence by whom? To what end?

    We need a subject, an actor or actors, and we need a program derived from the actual MOVEMENT or MOVEMENTS of that actor or those actors for “political independence” to make any sense at all.

    We need to understand, for example, who is the “we” that inhabits and animates this list. Not just in world-historical terms, but concretely, in late October 2006, who are “we” in THIS society and what do “we” represent.

    Unless we do that, we’re just preaching.

    Joaquín

    24 October 2006, 6:16 pm

30. Required:

    No, I didn’t read your link, I will. However I was not accusing you of excessively hating of the Democrats. What I was saying was how much you hate the democrats (which I actually tried to imply was LESS than how much I hate the Dem’s) is largely irrelevant to concocting a viable political strategy.

    As for “how much further the Democrats have to be “exposed” as an empty promise before WE figure out that that’s what they are?”

    No further, we’ve figured it out. Problem is me, you and the 16 other people reading this are not the majority of voters nor do we have a real hope of convincing the majority. Your question should be, how much further until the majority of people turn against the Dem’s?

    My answer would be, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s much more likely to happen by people experiencing a Dem government than being provided with a link to an Alexander Cockburn article. Do you not think that a Dem government was conducive to the rise or the anti-corporate movement or the greens party?

    I am anticipating a response along the lines of “but it’s the principal”. I can’t actually remember the entire quote but it reminds me of something Ward Churchil said in Pacifism as Pathology, in regards to pacifists who wouldn’t take up arms under any circumstances because it violated their principals, something which I think is comparable with a reflexive no-vote-dem strategy. Ward said, “there is no purity in failure.”

    I guess though for that to be a completely applicable argument I would have to prove that you would necessarily fail with your strategy. Which I haven’t done. But even you concede that a Dem government would advance left consciousness, you just think that it’s not useful because the people who haven’t gotten to the point we have, SHOULD have done so by now and rather than sully our principals in electoral politics, even to the benefit of these people consciousness, it would be better to stand on the sidelines and remain pure.

    24 October 2006, 8:14 pm

31. Stan:

    Joaquin Bustelo’s comment above is an example of why I have not yet turned in my identification card as a Marxist. This is what it looks like when the particular insights of that method are applied to the task of understanding our own historical process. As the sorely-missed Mark Jones noted once, the point of having this method is to use it… on the real world.

    We can live with whatever minor differences we may have over elections — if indeed they are differences, and not merely the incompletion of our own dialogic process. I have the habit of bending the stick back, and there was some bending to be done… and still is, imho.

    The latter portion of this post, for anyone who believes that the next historical period presents us with a choice between revolution and some unspeakable horror as our children’s future, is maybe the most important set of issues with which we will have to come to terms. As Joaquin points out, everything about what WE have done, as a political tradition, and what WE are, and what WE will do, has to be subjected to “a thorough and fearless self-inventory.” My own preoccupation with gender is not just some personal schtick, and Yolanda’s relentless attention to African America is not merely a standpoint, and Joaquin’s necessarily sharp critiques of anglo-leftism is not identity politics.

    “Class reductionism” is right! If it is heretical to say so, then it is not the heretics that require self-examination, but those very assumptions that have taken on the petrification of religious dogma. That includes the awful fetish of so-called “democratic centralism,” which Joaquin, a battle-scarred veteran of this organizational approach, has critiqued brilliantly.

    I am very grateful for his intervention here, and if the thread were to run off on a discussion of his latter points, it would not be seen as a hijacking, by me at least, but as a step toward some kind of refoundation of a left with real political agency, and which abandons the masculinist and — dare I say white — okay, eurocentric, reductions of the past.

    24 October 2006, 8:16 pm

32. Required:

    Leg, I just checked the article. I actually had read it when it was first written.

    Stan, I haven’t finished but the Joaquin article is great. I love “To those who would say “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” I would respond this isn’t a baby. There’s no such thing as an 80-some-year-old baby. This is a corpse. It is time to bury it.”

    24 October 2006, 8:44 pm

33. Legume Sam:

    Some responses to Required’s comments:

    “Do you not think that a Dem government was conducive to the rise or the anti-corporate movement or the greens party?”

    Perhaps toward the end, though I think that’s a one-off, since afterward, especially in ‘04, the Democrats were prepared and had a counter-strategy so effective that the above movements hardly register on the radar screen anymore.

    “But even you concede that a Dem government would advance left consciousness.” No, actually I concede no such thing, and if you think I did, then I openly retract it, accompanied by an apology for having given that impression. Definitely, I would hope for such a thing, just as I would hope that the McGovern ‘72 campaign were to be reincarnated tomorrow. But, as I said in my first comment, as the current fraction of capital continues to consolidate its hold on power, Democrats become more tightly neoliberal. Certainly the Clinton Administration advanced right-wing consciousness in a major way (Contract w/America, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MAI, Welfare Bill, wars on Serbia and Iraq, propositions 187 and 207 and (worst of all) 227 in California, ad nauseam). Indeed, my biggest concern is that with a Democrat government, all of the bad things about Bush would simply accelerate, only this time the “left” would side with the government, because after all this time it’s “our” government.

    Btw, if by “left consciousness” one means a wistful nostalgia for the social democracy in Stage 3 of capitalism (1948-1971 or so), then I don’t think we need any more of it. What we need is socialist, feminist eco-consciousness.

    24 October 2006, 9:55 pm

34. RedDan:

    “Third parties have never had much of an impact except either a) locally, or b) as vote splitters.”

    I couldn’t disagree more. The 1860 election was won by a “third party” — the party of Lincoln. At the height of the Progressive movement, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party came in second in the 1912 election. H. Ross Perot’s 1992 Presidential run swung the election in favor of Clinton. And would Eugene Debs have done better as a Democrat or Republican? I don’t think so. The reality of it is that even though third parties are marginalized by the US electoral system, they do play a meaningful role in influencing public opinion, a role which may be even more meaningful in the future as things worsen.

    All of the examples you cited simply reiterate the point you seemingly disagreed with.

    1) Both the Republican victory in 1860 and the Bull Moose near victory under T. Roosevelt were the result of major fractures within and takeover of the infrastructure of pre-existing factions of one or the other of the major parties.

    2)Perot’s 3rd Party run was a classic case of 3rd parties acting primarily as vote-splitters, and the same is true of Nader in 2000 (distinctly) and 2004 a bit. The same could also be said of Anderson in 1980.

    You have not made your case, Legume Sam.

    24 October 2006, 11:59 pm

35. Legume Sam:

    “1) Both the Republican victory in 1860 and the Bull Moose near victory under T. Roosevelt were the result of major fractures within and takeover of the infrastructure of pre-existing factions of one or the other of the major parties.”

    Which of course DISCONFIRMS the point that “Third parties have never had much of an impact except either a) locally, or b) as vote splitters.”

    25 October 2006, 11:04 am

36. Josiah:

    Joaquin covered a bunch of points I have been thinking about lately, as a result of frustration with the impasse of organizing with two “Marxist-Lenininst” groups, the FSP and the SWP. He touches on two interrelated, and really important, things: 1) the “new international division of labor” that emerged during the 1970s, i.e. the “core”/”periphery” dialectic of deindustrialization and “offshoring,” and b) the mass shift in employment in the imperialist countries to the non-productive “service sector” and the related collapse of labor militancy there. These issues, as Joaquin points out, go to the heart of the role of the “worker” in activism and revolution, and also to the problem of industrialism as a geographically priveleged non-generalizable phenomenon, unlike substistence agriculture. (As Deandander has alluded to and why Hornborg is mentioned on this blog, etc.)

    When I was with the SWP, we spent a lot of time trying to organize industrial workers, the SWP strategy being to get members employed in plants, factories and mines to unionize workers and spread the revolutionary gospel. This is absurd where I live, in Philly, a city full of abandoned factories, in a state full of tapped-out coal mines. As a classic “Old Left” group trying to mobilize ‘the workers,’ it is hard for members to admit that only about 14% of the U.S. population is made up of industrial workers in 2006. I hate to quote the Chamber of Commerce (like consulting FEMA on meteorology), but these statistics on the breakdown of the U.S. workforce can’t be ignored:

    Managerial/professional specialty 34.9%
    Service occupations 15.9%
    Sales and Office Occupations 15.9%
    Construction and Maintenance 9.9%
    Production, transportation, and material moving 13.1%
    Farming, fishing and forestry .6%

    Sorry for taking up space with all that. But Marxist-Leninist groups fetishize the last two categories, which leads them to spend their days (many of mine!) in exurban coal towns and meatpacking plants stalking workers with their biweeklies and membership slips. Gender and race are elephants in the room here, as there is a refusal among white male organizers to see “pink-collar” (read: disproportionately female and of color) workers at the bottom of the service industry, i.e. Wal-Mart cashiers, janitors and cleaning ladies, bus drivers and nurses, as “real workers.” These occupations also do not lend themselves to shop-floor models of union organizing, as the workers are decentralized, often part-time, single mothers, etc.

    And doesn’t this flawed thinking go back to Marx’s assumption that colonialism would recreate intra-European conditions internationally, with the surplus peasantry created by enclosure and capitalist agriculture being proletarianized and radicalizing? He was right about the ratio of constant to variable capital always increasing, or automation/mechanization throwing workers on the street. But the U.S., Japan and Western Europe still dominate manufacturing, but employ a quarter or less of their pop. in those sectors, while the surplus has been largely absorbed in the “tertiary” (managerial/retail etc.) sectors. Labor-intensive worker is “offshored” to guarded “export-processing zones” that employ a very, very small proportion of the populations of Ecuador, Indonesia, etc. As Jouquin points out, 20th century revolutions were mostly in the colonies and semicolonies, never in the imperialist counties. Because while the “surplus” peasantries in Europe were absorbed into an industrial labor aristocracy on better and better terms with capital via welfarism and state subsidies, expropriated Third World peasants were either starving in shantytowns or semi-enslaved in mines or plantations producing for export. The metro. working class became a vast annd overfed “home market” for imported manufactures globally, and its oil-depleting suburban consumer lifestyle and the superstructural sectors that employ the majority are massively subsidized by corporate investment and state subsidies in the military, criminal justice system, and public works. Prisons absorb the mostly Black and Latino inner-city surplus population created by the transfer of factory jobs to the periphery, and employ the mostly white surplus rural population created by capitalist agribusiness in the core as guards or maintenance in “prison towns,” etc. The military provides jobs in the strip-mall service sector around bases, and pours money into the aerospace, computer, communications, and other industries to create suburban jobs…etc. Point is, we need to take our focus off industrial workers and look at “service” workers and weak points in the whole import-dependent infrastructure. Sorry for going on so long…

    25 October 2006, 4:58 pm

37. Julio:

    I’m breaking my promise not to make further comments. Forgive me. But I’d like to submit my opinion on the issues Stan and Joaquín raised on the latest comments. Joaquín’s essay is impressive, but I’m unpersuaded on key points. And I don’t know how deep is my disagreement with some of Stan’s remarks. I guess we are all blindsided by our experience. That’s fine, but I would still like to disentangle substantive disagreements from those that are merely semantic.

    I cannot accept the notion that class is politically irrelevant in the U.S. *only* because there’s no radical left embedded in the vehicles through which, today, workers in the U.S. express themselves politically. In fact, my claim is stronger. Class is not only relevant, but the most fundamental political issue in today’s U.S. society. I know that sounds like old Marxism, but perhaps not everything in it has to be jettisoned.

    Even the roughest, most mechanical version of *economistic* Marxism makes a lot of sense to me when thinking of what’s going on in the globe. So I cannot fathom that in the very core of the global capitalist economy, where the profit motive has reached its highest heights (to put it in Dr Seuss’ terms), the human engine that keeps the wheels turning doesn’t exist as a class.

    The argument goes: Of course the working class exists *in itself*, but so what? If a class doesn’t exist *for itself*, politically unaware of self, a mere appendage of the exploiters, does it *really* exist? If it exists as a fragmented mass, politically paralyzed, the commonality of interests attributed to it at some level, is not politically operational. If their alleged common interests have not asserted themselves in decades (even centuries), then who cares? They are not a class, but a sack of potatoes.

    Well, I don’t find this argument convincing. It is tantamount to saying that, since something hasn’t happened before (or in some relevant past), it’s never “meant” to happen (again). It makes sense to use this principle (the so-called Copernican Principle) to inform our moves, but only when we don’t have information other than the record of the past existence of a phenomenon. But we do have extra, solid and specific information saying that, in social formations akin to the U.S.’s, the working class exists and is capable of independent political action within a given historical period.

    And there are *many* instances that validate this claim. Of course, each of these instances is somehow different from the U.S., but how different? Say we associate the fragmentation and political paralysis (or “nonexistence”) of the class to imperialist privilege. Well, there are historical examples of imperialist powers (England, Holland, France, etc.) where workers were, more or less, historically speaking, capable of independent political action in pursuit of their class interests. Etc. The historical contrast of these cases illuminates the extent to which imperial privilege is at the root of this paralysis — and its limits. Comparisons of that kind give us a way to tell apart what the factors involved inducing the political “nonexistence” of the class may be.

    I understand that the new is not very likely to emerge in the next instant (the Copernican Principle again), but — over the lives of a few generations — social life has shown not to be an ergodic dynamical system, where the past just keeps repeating itself in some sense. There are historical tendencies that take a long, long time to assert themselves.

    I can push my argument further. The U.S. working class, as it exists divided and politically weak is *already* expressing itself politically. In a myriad forms, not necessarily to our liking, but… as a class? Actually yes, with some qualifications — largely without much political self-awareness.

    I mean, we know workers are all over the place politically with its largest most-active share clustered around the Dems. But the key here is that some of them (a good chunk of them) are already *in motion* in directions that are not incompatible with a possible broader unity of the class. That justifies my speaking of the workers’ *movement*, because it actually exists as a movement — or, rather, as various movements, some of them mutually compatible (or connectible) and some of them not.

    Take the antiwar movement or, if you prefer, the opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Who are the bulk of the participants? I’d say they are a very diverse array of, mostly, working-class people. How many of them live off accumulated wealth, sufficient for them to avoid work over their lifetimes? Not a large share.

    The potential of the antiwar movement is huge, if we understand its inherent logic, which stems from the aspirations of its main constituencies. On the other hand, whatever the specific reasons to pursue the war, those who have sought (and seek) to benefit *most* from it are a tiny group of members of the ruling class. So, almost in its face, it is a class struggle! Further, it is an international class struggle.

    How about the movement for immigrants’ rights? It’s clearly a working *class* movement. Joaquín and Stan emphasize its national (mostly Latino) character. That’s fine. Actually, that’s essential to grasping its specific logic, its scope, etc. But, still, the class aspect of the issue jumps at you. It doesn’t escape many immigrant workers either. I mean, what is the immediate result of having workers with no legal rights? The fragmentation of *the class*! Who benefits from that disunity? It is blatantly a wedge, pitting workers against workers.

    So, what are we to do with the element of national vindication, historical identity, ethnic pride, etc. inherent to this movement? It is a force. It cannot and should not be ignored. But it’s a force we want to support to the extent it is turned against the rulers. We want to escalate it even. But to the extent that energy is turned against sectors of the same class who oppress them or somehow benefit from their oppression, we have to look for other methods to settle differences (e.g. propaganda, patient persuasion, collective dialogue).

    Will that work out, given that White workers may have material interests tied to their race and imperial privilege? (I think the privilege is largely illusory, but suppose.) I don’t know. But, talking in general, we have to give it a try. If not for other reasons, sheer tactical wits: you don’t want to fight on many fronts at once. All threats are not created equal.

    While the movement for immigrant rights has been very dynamic because it is defensive and the issues involved are virtual (if not immediate) life-or-death issues to those involved, it can be judo-ed against the immigrants by exploiting the racial animosity of Whites. That’s why the movement has to be careful not to be boxed in as an anti-American movement.

    Is it anti-American? Well, it depends on what your definition of “American” is. If you’re trying to appeal to radicals, then sticking that label to the worst ills this society generates would work. But if you’re trying to appeal to regular folks, then you may not want to frame it that way.

    There are uggly examples of anti-immigrant hysteria and vicious xenophobia in the U.S. (not to mention slavery and genocide), but there are also decent precedents of solidarity with the immigrants. Which precedent should define what’s legitimately American and what’s not? I don’t think this is up to a few leftists to decide, but to the working people themselves.

    Back to the antiwar movement — Except for those with families in or personal ties to the military, this movement doesn’t have a constituency with an incentive to mobilize permanently. No wonder