Re: [Marxism] The campaign and the debate around Obama

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marvin wrote:

I've suggested on any number of
occasions there is little to choose between these parties. Their core base
in each case is composed of urban workers and professionals who are
sympathetic to trade unions, social movements, and world peace; their formal
policies largely reflect the same concerns and aspirations of their base
with respect to domestic and foreign policy; and their leaders are quick to
jettison these policies (Joaquin wouldn't find the stripped-down "election
manifestos" of the NDP all that praiseworthy) and to capitulate to the
corporate agenda the closer they get to power....

I've noted before the tendency of US radicals to justify their distance from
the Democrats by idealizing the social democratic parties, as if latter were
open and democratic "workers' parties" - somewhat foul-tasting but still
kosher - and therefore qualitatively different in class terms than the
bourgeois Democrats in which the masses are ostensibly absent. In Joaquin's
case, it seems to me there is further effort at distancing in his
suggestions that he supports not the Democratic party but only it's
standard-bearer, Obama, as the representative of black America. I have to
say
I'm not as persuaded as Joaquin and others seem to be that the lines between
the social democratic parties and Obama, on the one hand, and the Democratic
party on the other are as sharply drawn as they attempt to make out.

Fred comments:
I think Marvin is going to badly pull a brain muscle if he keeps straining
to exactly equate all manner of different things.

First of all, it is not just American radicals who differentiate between the
NDP and, say, the Liberal Party and therefore from the Democratic Party here
(more an equivalent of the Liberals than of the NDP as Marvin stretches his
reasoning to demonstrate. Canadian radicals do so also, and insist that it
is possible to do work in local units (Toronto for example) and to fight
effectively and sometimes successfully for positions etc. Even the British
Labor Party is still not fully caught up with the top-down structurelessness
of the Democratic Party base.`

He should consult comrades like John Riddell, Suzanne Weiss, and Barry
Weisleder, all of whom have quite a few experiences with the structural
differences between the NDP and the Liberals (or the Democrats here) and
have had occasional successes in work in the NDP.

Marvin's position would be more logical if he argued for the Canadian labor
movement abandon the relatively isolated NDP for the big as all outdoors
Liberals, who after all include a lot of people who sympathize with unions,
social movements and think that, all other things being equal, world peace
is preferable to world war.

And to suggest that the base of the Democratic Party is "sympathetic to
trade unions, social movements, and world peace" is a great prettification
of both the base and their preferences. The Democratic base is much, much
more inclusive than the NDP's, for example. The base of the Democratic Party
includes, for example, investment bankers, cops and prison guards, machine
politicians and lots of others. (It is also true that the NDP is pretty much
nowhere among the Quebecois and, I suspect, the Native peoples, whereas the
DP has a big Black and Latino base.) It includes not only peace-oriented
sectors of the population but quite hawkish ones.  Lieberman was not a
Democrat by mistake.

Marvin should avoid talking to radicals in the United States as though we
are all absolutely ignorant not only of Canada but of everything about the
US as well. This most recent contribution shows slippage in that direction,
in my opinion.
Fred Feldman


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