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

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last on this, I promise:

Intense Red says:

"Perhaps one could imagine a role of the Senate in representing the
states
in the original 1780s era of the US republic.  In that era, the Senate
fit
into the idea of states rights and of a union or confederation of states
with
those states having distinct rights and powers.

   Today, the 10th Amendment has long been defacto abolished.  Today,
states
only have whatever rights and privileges that Washington allows them to
have.
Whatever vestiges of legitimacy the Senate ever had are long, long
gone."
_____________________________

  That, the abolition of states rights was a good thing, the last
progressive thing the bourgeoisie of this, or any country, has ever
done.  And it wasn't done by a campaign for democracy, it was
accomplished by a civil war.  And that civil war wasn't about democracy
or national salvation, or preserving the union, it was about destroying
the slaveholders' property in order to clear the way for industrial and
free-soil capitalist expansion.

States rights meant slaveholders property then.  It meant
segregationist, Jim Crow power not so long ago.  States rights is a
veil, a cover, through which some of the "intra-class" disputes of the
bourgeoisie might be glimpsed.  But it, states rights, has zippo to do
with the legitimacy of the Senate. The legitimacy of the senate, like
the HOR, the Supreme Court, is the legitimacy of the ruling class, on
the legitimacy of the class property relations.

And not to put too fine a point on this-- but our task is NOT to rescue
bourgeois democracy from the bourgeoisie, no more thant OUR task to to
rescue capital from the capitalists.

rr

"I don't know which species is worse, Burke.  You don't see them fucking
each other over for a percentage."
--Ripley.




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