Re: Gary Trudeau, Iraq and Nader

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marvin Gandall:
> It's the people in these parties I feel a kinship with. They're family:
> politically interested wage- and salary-earners, many of them women and
> members of minority groups, many of them active trade unionists, antiwar
> activists, environmentalists, feminists, gays, civil libertarians, etc. I've
> lived near them and worked with them all my life. I don't particularly mind
> that they call themselves social democrats or liberals. They do so because
> they presently see the parties which go by these labels as more able than
> others, including the inconsequential far left organizations, to defend
> their living standards and urban social values.

The problem is that they are mistaken, at least with respect to the
Democratic Party and New Labour in Great Britain. Both have appropriated
the socio-economic agenda of Thatcher and Reagan. If John Kerry announced
tomorrow that he was going to reclaim the heritage of Richard Nixon's
presidency, that would be a big advance over the anti-working class,
anti-minority, anti-environmentalist and anti-woman DLC program he is
running on.

Furthermore, there is a big difference between bourgeois parties and social
democratic/labor parties that have not mutated into their opposite like
Tony Blair's. The Labor Party in Great Britain ushered in many important
social reforms after WWII just at the very time that the Truman
administration was beginning to put teeth into the Taft-Hartley laws and
launch the red scare. I should add that even when the Democrats are
introducing some pallid reform legislation, they never lose sight of the
need to protect imperial interests overseas without giving the natives an
inch. The obvious symbol of this was LBJ and Vietnam. While doling out some
grants in the black community (but never really touching the underlying
racism that accounted for Harlem, Watts, etc.), he was bombing the
Vietnamese into oblivion. If you want to understand the historical
precedent for this, you should look no further than the Kaiser's
introduction of what amounted to the first social security laws in modern
history. All this was done with the understanding that it was necessary to
mollify a working class so that it would willingly become cannon-fodder in
future imperialist wars. Read "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and Hal
Draper's commentary on it for further edification.

> I don't make a fetish of their attachment to these parties. I know that if
> they become sufficiently disastisfied with them, they will leave them -- and
> they won't, as we often like to think, do so only if we're there to "lead"
> them. It's clear, incidentally, that not of all of us will be "there" if
> such a time should come. As you know, I believe this would only happen if
> and when capitalism no longer provides them with jobs and rising incomes --
> or at least the promise of same -- which, by some people's standards, would
> qualify me as a vulgar materialist.

This is a rather binary notion of how capitalism works. It doesn't "stop
working" all of a sudden, unless there is a 1929 crash. We are facing
instead a rising tendency to intervene aggressively all over the planet,
especially to protect oil holdings, and declining wages, working conditions
and health/education benefits. The reaction to this slow, gestating crisis
is manifold, but one aspect is the Nader campaign. That is why the
bourgeoisie wants to strangle it in its cradle, with the help of all those
"Radicals for Kerry" that Stephen Gowans derided.

> Some of my friends and old political associates have moved over to the Green
> party. They're still part of my political family, and I can understand the
> frustration that's led them there. They've invited me to join them. I've
> joked and asked them to contact me again when trade unions and other popular
> organizations begin affiliating and passing resolutions in support.

I think you'll be much happier where you are.