Re: [Marxism] Should socialists call for democratic structural change?Was Wassup?

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Shannon" <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Marxmail" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 10:02 AM
Subject: [Marxism] Should socialists call for democratic structural
change?Was Wassup?


First -- thanks for replying and not ignoring.
________________________________--

And you're welcome, and your misapprehensions are welcome:


"The demand for a democratic republic was a major demand in both 1905
and 1917. In fact, that was what was involved in dissolving the
National Assembly, which the Bolsheviks and others had called for. When
the workers came to power in the soviets, they went beyond the
democratic demands."
_______________

It's one thing to talk about demands, and another thing to talk about
real content, i.e. the lessons of those struggles.  One of the lessons
of the Russian Revolution is quite clearly that non-class specific calls
for "democracy" are more than obsolete, worse than unrealizable.  Such a
demand  may actually become the focus for  anti -working class
revolutionary struggle. Soviets existed well before the workers actually
took power, proving that the real content, rather than the demand of
certain organizations, was class struggle.

The driving forces behind 1905 and 1917 were class struggles, struggles
over the organization of production, relations between city and
countryside, struggles between property and labor.   We don't have to go
back to square zero 100 years later, 210 years after the French
Revolution, 140 years after the US Civil War,  134 years after the Paris
Commune, and dress ourselves in the costumes of "true democrats."  This
isn't Halloween, and we're not trick or treating.
-------------------------------

"Our developed and dominant imperialist nation still has an undeveloped
political structure that serves the capitalists very well indeed, but
does not serve the rest of us."
______________________________

Please identify and define exactly who is the rest of us?  The division
is a class division.  The political structures serve classes, no matter
how democratic or representative they may or may not appear to be.
Undeveloped political structure?  Perhaps, but the "development" of one
that serves a class has to be or become a class specific organization,
i.e. a class political party, a class organization of political power.
________________________________

" It works as the founders intended over 200 years ago, but many
constitutions have been created since then. Probably none in the world
is as regressive and powerful an upper chamber ours. Yes the “issue
still exists.” Shouldn’t the Senate be abolished?"
______________________________

Of course the senate should be abolished, as should the HOR, the Supreme
Court, the Executive Branch, etc.  Proposing the abolition the Senate as
what?  non-"ultra-left," in contra-distinction to the what?
"maximalist"? program is a much a waste of time and means of distraction
as demand the maximalist program itself.
__________________________________--

"The Electoral College does not work at all as intended. Recall that
independent leaders were to sit down and among themselves choose the
best person. That never happened from the beginning."
_________________________

Again the electoral college was designed to protect power and property
from the rabble-- the growing urban, i.e. wage-labor, population.
____________________________

"“Bringing this” is a way of saying “make a demand.” To the major
parties, we say that you claim to be representatives of a democracy,
but you aren’t.

It is basically asking for the same thing that progressives have asked
for when they demanded the right to vote for women and
African-Americans. We now ask for one-person, one-vote for everyone."
____________________________________

You ask the institutions of the ruling class to do provide one-person
one-vote? Then take it to court, that's what they'll say.  They'll say
the mechanisms are there to redress your grievances.  They'll say:
'Read your Constitution.  Don't Ask Us.  You need to introduce a
constitutional amendment.  Go home and organize for those constitutional
amendments, which by the way will require approval from 3/4 of the
states. Call us when you got something more than Michael Moore's mailing
list'

We should say-- hey the viability of representative democracy exists at
the luxury of the ruling class.  We should say we remember the
struggles for the right to vote for women and African-Americans, we
remember the MFDP and 1964, and we remember how those struggles
withered, ebbed, retreated under the very representative assaults of the
ruling class .

  We should say we know what triggered the movement for the emancipation
African-Americans, and for equal rights for women, and it was the entry
of both into the working class, the tremendous upsurge in women's
participation in the labor force, the reorganization of Southern
agriculture by industrial capital during and after WW2, the movement of
the African American population into the hated cities of our
bourgeoisie's forefathers.....

rr






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