RE: [Marxism] French elections

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sayan writes, "This line of thinking is familiar.  It calls for a vote for
Democrats in the USA (because the Republicans are worse), for the Congress
in India (because the BJP is worse) for Blair in England (because the Tories
are worse), etc. What you wrote could apply to each of these cases."

Well, that's true enough, but what are the alternatives? A political
alternative to the capitalist parties could only be based on social sectors
that cohere as an independent movement, escaping from bourgeois political
and ideological hegemony to at least some degree. In traditional Marxist
thinking, this would be the "class for itself" movement of the proletariat.

However, there is no "class for itself" movement of the U.S. working class
as a whole. To the extent there have been conscious and self-conscious
movements among working people here in the post-WWII period, where class
consciousness has been a significant component, it has been overwhelmingly
centered and focused in oppressed nationality communities and the national
component of the consciousness has been central. 

Various attempts by Blacks and Chicanos to constitute independent political
parties failed to find even a faint echo among broader layers of working
people, dooming them to be no more than probes or tests. This left these
communities with the choice between pursuing political representation in and
through the bourgeois parties or abandoning all hope of having any
representation.

There is no sector of the working people in the United States more radical
or politically conscious than the Black proletariat. Black working people
vote in disproportionately large numbers compared to similarly economically
situated whites, especially striking when you take into account that more
than 3% of the entire Black male population is in prison at any given time
(probably something like between 4 and 5% of the voting age male population)
and many millions more are disenfranchised because of laws that strip those
caught in the maws of the criminal justice system of their citizenship
rights -- and permanently in a number of states, especially in the South,
where the majority of Blacks live.

And the Black working class not only votes much MORE than economically
similar whites, they vote overwhelmingly, crushingly, by margins in the
20-to-1 ballpark for Democrats. Are they stupid? Are they suicidal? Isn't
this a reality that calls for analysis and understanding? Is the desire of
Black people in the United States for political representation to be
dismissed as just another manifestation of the bad idea of lesser-evilism? 

Joaquín



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