Re: [Marxism] Follow-up from Joel Kovel

[joel kovel <jkovel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't see much of a quarrel here, Louis. I certainly agree that the
Democrats only rose to the level of decency when they incorporated working
class elements, and that their decline is coextensive with the suppression
of this for a bunch of structural reasons and their political epihenomena.
Since I try to stay curious about the world, it is worth pondering how
Dean's surge is grounded in tapping into populist dissatisfaction via a new
technology, and also how limited this is precisely because it shows no signs
of going further than populism. But one should remain alert to such things.

As for fascism and fractional blocs of the ruling class, well, that would
more or less describe how it does happen. A segment breaks away from the
rest and bids for state power using authoritarism means, various
mythologies, etc. You can't think of the ruling class as homogeneous; if it
were, there would be no need for a state as an executive "committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." As Ralph Miliband
pointed out, Marx saw here that there were necessary differences, inherent
in the very character of capitalist competition and individualism. But there
is also a "common" dimension, which is not so much self-evident as produced
through political struggle and invested in the state. What certainly needs
to be emphasized is that the various fractions of capital can tend to come
together in support of the leading bloc once that seizes power. This
happened in Nazi Germany and could happen again now, particularly inasmuch
as capitalists see rationality in the Bush-Cheney drive to commandeer world
gas and oil resources, and to use heightened US militarism as a
counterweight to declining economic power.

Joel

> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 10:05:12 -0500
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: jkovel@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Follow-up from Joel Kovel
> 
> Joel Kovel wrote:
>> Note that Soros is pulling back his support for Dean, joining the protests
>> from other mainstream Democrats afraid, as ever, of democracy.
> 
> Soros might have pulled back, but Al Gore jumped into the breach. If
> anything, Soros is far to the left of Gore ideologically so I am not sure
> what conclusions can be drawn at this point.
> 
>> In assessing them we should attend to their past but not be locked into
>> this because reality changes and people can change with it?though to
>> repeat, I have yet to see enough of this in Dean to support him, nor do I
>> think it possible for anybody to do so who has embraced the Democratic Party.
> 
> Joel, the Democratic Party has been around since the early 1800s. It was
> the party of slavocracy. Despite the best efforts of New Deal ideologue
> Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to paint  Andrew Jackson as some kind of tribune of
> plebeian democracy, the Democrats consolidated the rule of the Southern
> planters. Except for the brief period when FDR was forced under pressure to
> enact welfare state legislation, this party has promoted racism and
> imperialist intervention. Woodrow Wilson jailed presidential candidate
> Eugene V. Debs for speaking out against WWI. I doubt that even George W.
> Bush would consider doing something like this.
> 
> In Nicaragua, politics was also the monopoly of a Liberal and Conservative
> party. When student radicals led by Carlos Fonseca decided once and for all
> to fight both parties, it marked the beginning of a profound social
> transformation. While they were armed with rifles, it was their ideological
> arming that made all the difference. Armed struggle is not on the agenda in
> the USA, but the need for ideological struggle against the twin parties of
> war and racism is as necessary than ever.
> 
> Howard Dean has the same relationship to the Democratic Party today that
> certain reformers had in the 1850s who sought to ameliorate the "race
> problem" in the USA through colonization schemes, such as the kind that led
> to the formation of Liberia. In reality, there was no race problem, only an
> economic problem whose solution could be found through the kind
> of  revolutionary action Frederick Douglass called for. Those are our
> antecedents.
> 
>> Whatever the theoretical problems I think it?s really stupid to assume
>> that just because the American system has always equilibrated that we will
>> remain formally a democratic republic. This gets back to the question
>> first bruited about in the ?30s, whether fascism ?can?t really happen
>> here.? Because it didn?t happen then doesn?t mean it can?t happen now.
>> We?re all in the same boat these days, watching the system drift further
>> and further to the right, and we?re entitled to wonder whether the rogue
>> faction of capital represented by the Bushies may represent the instrument
>> capable of pushing us into dictatorship.
> 
> Rogue faction? This sounds like the Christic Institute, which explained
> Oliver North and his pals as a "rogue faction" of the CIA. I don't think
> this is true at all. The Bush foreign policy team has its roots in the
> Reagan presidency. At the time, Reagan was also depicted as some kind of
> fascist threat because of his super-aggressive foreign policy that broke
> with "containment". In reality, "containment" and "rollback" are
> dialectically related. Those who favored containment were simply worried
> that overt rollback policies would backfire. As it turned out, rollback did
> work. That is why so many liberals were happy to raise a champagne glass
> with the Reaganites when the Berlin Wall fell. Furthermore, if an Iraqi
> resistance had not risen, Time Magazine and Howard Dean would not be
> speaking so loudly about "mistakes" being made in Iraq. Their differences
> with the Bush team are purely tactical.
> 
> 
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
> 


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