[Marxism] Re: Marxism] Michael Moore, Wesley Clark and Jose Perez

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A couple of brief comments in response to Mike:

Is the US state becoming more totalitarian under Bush?  Definitely.
Did it become more totalitarian under Clinton.  You bet.
Was the process bipartisan in each case? Yes, it was.  Will it keep
getting worse.  Basically -- there  could be tactical retreats in the
face of a mass upsurge as there were after the 1960s -- yes.  The
evolution of the state from bourgeois democracy to totalitarianism is
a basic inner tendency of imperialism and the centralization of
capital, the need wage war to defeat revolutionary struggles, punish
recalcitrant nations, and carry out interimperialist competition up to
and including war.


The fact is that basic institutional changes in this direction DID
take place during the Truman witch-hunt which evolved into the
McCarthy witch-hunt which had elements of a fascist movement.  The
fact is that we have all gotten very used to those institutional
changes.

The functioning of the predecessor of the FBI as a political police
began under Wilson but was not fully institutionalized until Roosevelt
in 1938 began to reshape the state machine for the coming World War
and to tame the labor movement for this purpose.

Another feature of this is the coming together of the political
parties --  the war parties or, if you prefer, "the bipartisan war
party."


The totalitarianization of the state and the "bipartisan" character of
basic policy are features of a US imperialism which has been
contending for world hegemony since the preparations for World War II
got under way.

Of course, Wilson had this "vision," too, but his attempt to
institutionalize this failed, because at that time the parties still
represented different domestic imperialist camps with contending
interests (Europe-Centered vs. Latin America and Asian rim).
"Isolationism" was part of this dispute about more limited objectives,
not a tactical dispute over how to achieve world hegemony like the
unilateralism vs. multilateralism debate today. The struggle for world
hegemony is not some new Bush, Cheney, neocon, or Leo Strauss policy.
The intra-ruling class debate between "isolationists" and
"internationalists" was basically resolved when the ruling class
united around the perspective of winning it all in World War II.

But yes, the current "war on terrorism" represents an escalation over
Clinton, just as the Bush-Clinton wars represented an escalation over
Reagan who escalated Carter who began the massive arms buildup, draft
registration, and other preparatory moves for containing and
controlling an unstable world.

This is the real trap of lesser evilism.  Imperialist decay leads
toward fascism and war, and tends to keep doing so whichever party is
in office.  So, all things being equal, things will tend to get worse
under the current administration than they were under the last one,
although Bush has yet to make an attack on social welfare legislation
comparable to Clinton's attack on welfare -- but he is probably
waiting on his second term to unleash that.

There is a long-term trend for the answer to the question, "Are you
better off than you were four years ago?" to be no. This is the
advantage that the "out" party usually has these days.
Fred Feldman



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