Re: [Marxism] Democratic Party

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't think working people and the oppressed gain anything by supporting
the Democratic Party, any more than they "gain" by hiring out to
capitalists. They are exploited by the Democrats (and the Republicans, of
course, who used to have much more political flexibility than they do at
this moment).The support working people give builds their imperialist enemy
and make themselves relatively weaker regardless of the crusts of bread they
can sometimes buy with their votes.

But, of course, the masses, most of the time, don't really have much choice.
In the United States the two party system has emerged as a fundamental
institution not only of capitalist rule, but even to some extent of life
under capitalism. At present, though I can foresee a shaky future, it is in
a lot better shape than, say, the bourgeois family, not to mention white
supremacy and male domination (all of which the two party system helps to
defend).

I admit that the leftist or Trotskyist practice of berating people for
voting Democratic or having voted Democratic or being capable of voting
Democratic again seems empty and counterproductive to me today because it
ignores the deep social roots of the two-party system in the United States.
A lot of the yelling at Nader and McKinney for bending to the Democrats has
that character to me.

I don't believe in yelling or screaming at Black or Latino fighters in the
immigration rights or Black struggle who vote for a McKinney or a Latino
activist who runs in the Democratic Party, but I do believe in patient
explaining that they pay a price for those votes, and that those activists
dwho seek office. The activists who seek office in that imperialist enemy
organization.

The oppressed and exploited need something or some things in politics that
speak for and serve them, not their deadly enemies. That's abstract today.
Unfortunately, however, it is an abstraction that is 100 percent true.

McKinney in particular strikes me as a person who has a finger on something
stirring in the Black and broader oppressed and exploited communities. She
is not just another radical run out of the Democratic Party.  If she were to
run on a Green ticket, on the ballot in 33 states, I believe there would be
an opening to reach out more broadly to the stirrings among Blacks, Latinos,
women, youth and others who are restless in the two-party political prison
in which we all live in fact even if we don't vote for it. I do not,
however, imagine at present that she would get a big vote.  But I think she
could run an effective propaganda campaign that would find a response in a
layer of working people today.  Depending on how the class struggle goes in
the next years, those seeds could take root.

I consider the Green Party to be a rooted in basically middle-class (both in
outlook and substantially in composition) porotest against the
anti=working-people and antihumnan course of capitalism today. 

I am going to simply acknowledge here that I have a much broader conception
of what constitutes the intermediate or middle classes today than a lot of
radicals.  The experience of decades of using the term petty-bourgeois as a
term of personal slander of hysterical condemnation of millions of people
has made it quite popular on the left to adopt a "nobody here but us
workers" view of the US population, or to dissolve the real stratifications
into a general concept of the completely undifferentiated "people".  I
prefer to drop the baiting and take note of what I see s real and layered
stratification (including within the middle classes) without the hate-speech
and the attempts at exorcism.

I don't think the Green party will grow slowly into a mass organization of
the oppressed and exploited.

Personally, I think the characterizations of the Green Party are part of the
tendency to see support for the Democrats and Republicans as a crime
committed by nasty or weak individuals, not part of the basic social
condition of the oppressed, exploited, and all their potential allies.

I think that the class-national break in the two party system will require
radically-changed social conditions.  But these are not just the work of an
instant.  I  AM AN UNRECONSTRUCTED VANGUARDIST, in that I think that those
who, for whatever reason, have learned to see the future in the present
should be arguing for the need for these developments and not passively
waiting for the volcano to explode and the masses to do the job completely
spontaneously. I think ideas are important even before their time has fully
arrived and that, as Fidel Castro said, "the truth must not only be the
truth, it must be told."

>From that standpoint I think a Green Party campaign, especially if McKinney
is the candidate, and the fight for resistance to the socially  overwhelming
pressure of the two-party system on that party is worth fighting.

Finally:
I reject Joaquin's transformation of Marx's phrases about the working class
as a "class for itself" into a sectarian absolute that justifies effectively
rejecting the working class as a force for transformative social change, not
only in the United States but around the world.  Anywhere that the
letter-perfect, seamlessly unified, unstratified, uncorrupted, 100 percent
revolutionary working class is not to be found and I assume that is
everywhere, Joaquin's response seems to be "fuhgedaboudid!. It is a simple
fact, it seems to me that the more Marx and Engels became integrated and
involved in the actual working class of their day, the less need they had
for such somewhat Hegelianized generalities. 


My own and others' practical experience in the working class -- the
stratified, imperfect, un-for-itself working class -- goes straight against
the way Joaquin treats it routinely. The mainstay of white supremacy and
male domination and every form of savage reaction that Joaquin sees as
dominating the working class is actually, for the most part, a relatively
weak presence today.s

I think it would be beneficial to Joaquin politicaolly if he redirected at
least some of his growing flexibility toward the Democratic Party to the
possibility and reality of the working class, including its participation in
struggles today. That would be better than overworking himself
intellectually to dismiss any manifestations of working class struggle as
insufficiently "for itself," whatever such a philososphical abstraction is
supposed to mean in the real world. 

Right now, it seems to me that Joaquin is prone to respond to just about any
positive reference to workers and unions (for example, the fact that sizable
numbers of "illegal" Latino workers are joining unions, finding them usable
defense organizations on the job and sometimes even against the government,
and that "illegal" workers are quite boldly leading significant strike
battles) by reaching for his literary gun.
Fred Feldman



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