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

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reply to rrubinelli

>>"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." -brian

>>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. -rr

A demand can have a working-class content without being explicit. The 
demand for Proportional Voting, for example, has a content that allows 
working class parties to campaign among workers in the electoral area 
with a working-class program. It undercuts the “lesser evil” argument. 
The demand for Runoff or Instant Runoff Voting allows working-class 
parties to say: vote for a working-class program without worrying about 
“wasting your vote.”

At this stage of political development in America, we do not need to 
worry about future difficulties. The working-class parties in Russia 
called for a National Assembly. That demand helped them to organize the 
workers and other classes against Czarism. The fact that they had to 
dissolve the National Assembly when they came to power did not mean 
that the demand was obsolete. It was one of the motors of the 
revolution and was raised again in China and Spain and other 
underdeveloped countries.

>>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. -rr

In the electoral arena in the United States, we are still at “square 
zero.” There is no working-class party, nor even one on the horizon.

The electoral area is also an arena of class struggle. But we are in it 
with our hands tied by electoral laws that have nothing to do with 
modern society. Compare our political life to that of dozens of 
advanced capitalist nations.

There is nothing wrong with electoral reform in and of itself. Why is 
the demand for living minimum wage a class demand while the demand to 
have a vote not? By that reasoning African-Americans should not have 
bothered with the right to vote in the 1960s. What good is the right to 
vote if your vote can’t bring any weight due to the winner-take-all 
Electoral College system?

>>"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." –brian

>>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. -rr

Democratic demands are expressed in terms of the whole people. The 
content of democratic demands benefit blue and white-collar workers, 
farmers, professionals, small business people, and idealists who 
believe in democracy.

Development of a class-specific organization is not the same as 
development of democratic demands, which are designed to draw in and 
appeal even to those who don’t think of themselves as distinctly 
working-class.

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

>>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. -rr

You have to tailor your demands to appeal to obvious and comprehensible 
inequalities. Abolishment of the Senate has long been a demand of 
progressives because it is the most egregious and obvious inequality in 
our structure: California has 2 senators; 22 smaller states whose 
population equals California have 44. The demands that I suggest are 
tailored to open up the electoral area, not to abolish the capitalist 
state.

It is not a waste of time if it undercuts the dominant ideology and 
ignorant assumption that we have the best possible democratic republic. 
A revolutionary movement that consistently argues that our so-called 
democracy is stacked against working people is also laying the 
groundwork for future actions directed against the system as a whole.

>>"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." –brian

>>Again the Electoral College was designed to protect power and 
property from the rabble-- the growing urban, i.e. wage-labor, 
population. -rr

But you are against that, right? And if you want to get rid of it, you 
need to make reasoned arguments. You have to campaign on the field that 
is there.

>>“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. -brian

>>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. 
-brian

>>You ask the institutions of the ruling class to 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' -rr

Yes, we organize around the ruling parties refusal to practice 
democracy, just as we organize against their whole program.

The answers to these demands are much more reasoned than you imply. 
Dead wrong of course. It is the liberal who is satisfied with the 
status quo that throws out these dismissive replies. We need to 
confront liberals and conservatives regularly and consistently and 
integrate these or similar demands into our program as a whole.

>>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. -rr

>>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

Knowledge of “what triggered” movements, i.e., the change of 
composition, the entry, the reorganization and so forth is an excellent 
thing. But the need for social change had to be translated into action 
by the people who were so “composed, entered, and reorganized.” They 
did this as sentient human beings creating and responding to demands 
for equality.

Saying, “we know what triggered” without discussing the movements that 
were created and without coming to grips with the difficult creation of 
future movements is static and dead in the water.

Brian Shannon
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