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

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marvin writes: "If the Democrats, for example, were to import the base,
leadership and program of the Labour Party tomorrow, the political behaviour
of this new creature in US circumstances would change not one iota, and vice
versa. Clinton and Obama and Blair and Brown and the NDP's Layton regard
themselves as belonging to the same political family and see eye to eye on
all essential matters. The more benign British and Canadian politicians
might cluck sympathetically about the messy compromises their liberal
American counterparts have to make in deference to a more backward political
culture and the imperatives of US imperialism, but that's about it.

"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
standardbearer, 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."

I ALREADY wrote a quite extensive and reasoned reply to this, but that p-o-s
Microsoft program Outlook crashed and threw it away, so this will be
briefer.

I do not believe there is any "principled" difference between voting for the
Mensheviks, or the Cadets, or the American Democrats, or the British (old)
Labour, or New Labour, or the Tories, or Margaret Thatcher, or Winston
Churchill, or Attila the Hun, or Adolph Hitler. None. Zero. Zip. 

Bourgeois electoral farces are farces. BOURGEOIS "workers" parties are JUST
AS BOURGEOIS as the German Nazi party to the aleph null power.

What is "workers" about some BOURGEOIS parties are simply those tactical
circumstances that make it possible for revolutionaries to try to undercut
and destroy them by hypocritically PRETENDING to be "for" them. THAT IS ALL.

ONE of those circumstances being, it should be noted, the existence of a
workers movement. Which makes the ENTIRE discussion about as relevant to the
US political scene as the Soviet incantantion you learn at Hogwarts in
advanced classes on defense against Dark Arts. A discussion that belongs
entirely to the realm of Fantasy.

Marvin seems convinced that I'm pimping for Obama. I hate to disabuse him,
but the TRUTH is, with the friends and coworkers I have, MOSTLY in the last
couple of days I've been pimping for Libertarian Bob Barr. Mad-dog racist
right winger Bob Barr. To understand this, you have got to get your head
unstuck from your anal orifice and realize that the US is NOT going to have
a "bourgeois democratic" election for president. The U.S. is about to have
50 quasi-feudal winner-take-all voting farces for the members of the
cretinous institution of the electoral college.

I could explain further, but I won't. Either you GET IT that tactics are
concrete, or you're the socialist equivalent of all the right wingers having
orgasms about Bristol Palin bearing witness to "life." 

Joaquin


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