Re: [Marxism] Democratic Party

[Benjamin Morgan <foreverblaze89@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comrade Ben:          We continue to engage in this intellectual masturbation. 
In the end unless were trying to get greens in congress which has passed for 
the moment this conversation over democrats versus republicans versus GPUS is 
pointless. Need I remind you historical materialist that the U.S is not a 
democracy but a republic. For 50 years people couldnt vote for who was in 
congress. In the present the people have no power to elect the president that 
is the job of the electorial college. Many presidents including Bush have lost 
the popular vote but won the election. The whole system is corrupt but 
who'd figure?     Ben

Fred Feldman wrote: 
> 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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