The Proletarian Situation As U.S. Imperialism Declines (Part 5)
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The shell game: not a dime’s worth of difference?
“It is as foolish and self-destructive for workingmen to turn to Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties on election day as it would be for them to turn to the Manufacturers‘ Association and the Citizens’ Alliance when they are striking against starvation wages.
The capitalist class is organized economically and politically to keep the working class in subjection and perpetuate its power as a ruling class. They do not support a working class union nor a working-class party. They are not so foolish. They wisely look out for themselves.” – Eugene V. Debs, “Debs Attacks “the Monstrous System” of Capitalism”
Well-known socialist Dave Walters stated in a Marxmail [listserve] call for a September 2023 forum “Socialists and the 2024 Elections in the USA”: “I’m still opposed to voting for Democrats BUT I no longer can honestly say to folks ‘there is no difference’ between the two parties. There is a huge difference, and it affects lives every day… I no longer tell people they shouldn’t vote for Democrats because of the near total disintegration of any viable alternative…serious alternative. I can’t ethically justify telling people not to vote for them.”
Who ever said there was no difference? The Democrats represent the big bourgeoisie from varying perspectives. Both parties contain the same assortment of pro-Capital views. Just in different proportions in different eras. Carrots, sometimes, sticks at others, always for private profit. Democrats need the “two-party system” to have a foil and who to blame for never delivering reforms and acquiescing in repeals of them.
“Where there are no Bolsheviks or where they are not allowed to speak, there we find excesses, demoralization, and pseudo-Bolsheviks.” (Bolshevism and “Demoralisation” of the Army, VI Lenin)
If Walters represents demoralization and surrender, two of the other speakers at this forum are stalwart in their support for bourgeois parties, John Reimann of Oakland Socialist (OS) for the Democrats and Howie Hawkins for the Green Party.
Reimann spouts the liberal ‘fight fascism thru the Democrats’ nonsense: “…it was correct in the past to oppose voting for Democrats. However, the situation has changed drastically and while we cannot rely on the Democrats, the most important task today is to stop the fascist-connected Republicans, which means when it comes time to actually vote we should vote for the Democrats.” Reimann has been standing in line to vote Democrat since before the last election. Back then his justification was voting only takes a couple of minutes. How many minutes are there in five years? In six? This is a colossal lie, exactly worthy of an out-bureaucrat, a pro-Zelensky champion of imperialist war for a scientifically impossible objective, the national self-determination of Ukraine without socialist revolution.
This is a miasma of a type Lenin specifically denounced. Even Gus Hall understood his Communist Party tactic of electoral work in the Democratic Party had to be hitched to some idea of class independence. He declared they were preparing a “mass breakaway” to the formation of a workers party. Hall said this in person at a 1976 meeting at the Waldorf Astoria and in a “Gus Hall Speaks” pamphlet (a strategy derided as his 3-Legged Stool). Now the DSA replaces the CP as the chat room for the perpetual discussion of the hard break vs. soft break tactic.
The talk of “realistic alternative” is as old as the hills and was the labor fakers’ rationale for supporting the racist Wilson against labor’s own Eugene V. Debs! It is nothing but an abject and across the board surrender to the flimflam program of liberalism, i.e. lying election promises (the Employee Free Choice Act [EFCA] and the PRO ACT) which bourgeois politics has dragged so far to the right that Eisenhower’s 1956 platform reads like the MAGAs idea of communism! Our erstwhile astute socialists Reimann and Hawkins are clearly hoping to offset some historically regulation Democrat rightism, getting the class-conscious to negate the various RFK Jr. and Joe Manchin candidacy efforts.
Reimann cries in the face of the imposing fascist Trumpian hordes and runs to the skirts of the Democratic Party clinging to hope that the norms and institutions of the ‘bourgois-democratic’ state will protect the workers and oppressed from fascist reaction. For the likes of him and Hawkins, calling for a labor party let alone union led self defense guards is never more than an add on, if not an outright provocation. To defend from facism at home Reimann and OS abdicate workers’ agency for that of the capitalist state. This ‘praxis’ is exactly what class-collaboration is. Down this way, our class loses!
Trotsky had no such illusions that the workers could rely on bourgeois norms as the last stop on the way to fascist slaughter. He argued, “Fascism is the punishment for the workers when they fail to take power.” And then went on to argue for the workers party intervening in and creating workers councils and militias with a transitional program. Nowhere did he suggest bourgeois parties were thoroughgoing anti-fascists, and the whole experience of People’s Fronts and the Spanish Civil War proved him right.
It is no surprise that Reimann/OS have the same position on the Ukraine proxy war, subordinating the proletarian revolution to the war of national defense; not a word on closing U.S. bases and abolishing NATO. How could he while petitioning the treasury of the U.S. for F-16s, cluster bombs, training, and whatever is next? Boots on the ground? Not a word that those boots (overt and covert) have been there for years fostering Russophobic nationalism, Reinhard Gehlen’s spies and saboteurs and OSS/CIA/ NATO’s Banderite spawn! OS and the Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Committee [USSC] have staked out one of the two social-imperialist positions, backing the western bloc policy alongside various anarcho-democrats.
Long time socialist Green activist Howie Hawkins finds himself closer to USSC on arming Ukraine, but differs with Reimann on running independent candidates. But in his chosen political vehicle, he faces a Green Party which is shooting at him from across the front lines in Donbas. His position does not align with the historical Jill Stein Green Party line, nor that of Cornel West, who was seeking the Greens’ endorsement until recently.
The Green Party
The Greens have created an unprincipled combination that unites self-identified socialists, anarchists, sympathizers of “actually existing socialism” (from the Stalinist, Baathist, Bolivarian, to the social democratic variants), with small capitalists with aspirations of reforming the empire with techno-eco solutions implemented by the capitalist state untrammeled by proletarian revolution. Their leading media figure Jill Stein has supported the Russian, Code Pink, the Communist Party and the United National Antiwar Coalition [UNAC] positions on negotiations to solve the Ukraine war; calling for negotiations on Russian terms…which Ukraine rejects out of hand because they would concede annexations as faits accompli.
The Greens, despite the presence of a smattering of ex SWPers and various socialists, never raises a dual defeatist call for workers to turn imperialist wars into class war at home for peace and to defeat the capitalist class and expropriate the means of production. That’s a line the Greens are yet to and unlikely to ever cross. On one side the Green leadership stakes its international program on support of the BRICS project and soft support for Putin, while a feigned neutrality on Syria put them as campists with Assad and Putin.
Still clinging to the claim that the Greens are a socialist party, Hawkins and other self-identified socialists, know well the history of WW1I, the betrayals of the German SPD and other Socialist Parties which voted for imperialist war credits. Yet Hawkins effectively does the same thing advocating the arming of the capitalist Zelensky regime of Ukraine. We say Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves, but Putin and Biden have agreed this is a war which can go on indefinitely. The only definite method to end inter-imperialist war is proletarian revolution. Here our “democratic” socialists reject the verdict of history and like liberals and Stalinists propose that national self determination can be won by an imperialist proxy bourgeois state in hock up to its eyeballs! This is the warmed over social-democrats’ rejection of the Permanent Revolution. Many wars do end in negotiations. But these two social-imperialist camps will never end this war. Exhaustion can only result in a pause or pauses.
How to reconcile Howie Hawkins (pro-Ukraine fake socialism) with Professor Cornel West’s “Black Prophetic Fire” radical Christian revivalism? For reasons not yet revealed, West has ditched running for the Green’s ballot line. This doesn’t alter what his politics are.
West supports negotiations, the preferred Russian position pressed by the likes of Code Pink and all the Roy Singham funded network from Tri-Continental’s Vijay Prahsad to NUMSA’s Irvin Jim. His campaign does not explicitly call for a labor party and on the international stage the Greens become social-imperialist sycophants of Russia, not an attractive alternative when one is fighting for the workers of the world to take power! Make no mistake, the Greens are a pro-imperialist bourgeois party, as much now as in the Jill Stein 2016 campaign. Like Radical parties of old and in Europe, their program is a mishmash, a wish for a green future with calls for ‘responsible’ capitalism. Behind ex-CP and other burned out radicals on their ballot lines, they propose a mystery road to eco-socialism, nowhere defined, but everywhere without mobilizing the worker masses to conquer power. With or without Greens, West is a ‘reverend,’ not a workers’ champion.
Hawkins did not fit well with the Tankie/Assadists who ran in 2016 and 2020 and has found himself a political home as a State Department socialist in the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign. Socialists must be held to fighting for the Abolishing of NATO, to Close Foreign Bases and Stop Funding the War Industrial Complex. Instead they call for U.S. arms to Ukraine alongside Lindsey Graham and Nancy Pelosi. Having found a home near the State Department this layer of “left” out trade union bureaucrats find a way to cozy up to the broader layer of social imperialist Democratic Party union hacks, even though those hacks consider them little more than accidentally stepped in dog excrement-for purportedly depriving the Democrats of votes.
The workers are only offered the capitalist Democrats, Republicans and the fake socialist Greens in the 2024 elections; none of them offer a path to workers power over our own lives or destiny. We offer another road out of the unfolding catastrophe and it does not lie in any of these parties’ rise to power. During these elections we focus on the historic task of resolving the crisis of leadership of the working class and rising up a new class struggle leadership committed to class independent solutions which only a workers government can impose.
Again On 2024
Revolutionary socialists never said there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans; to have done so would have been to over simplify a complex phenomenon to an abstraction irreconcilable with reality. Even identical twins grow apart manifesting identifiable specificities. Revolutionary Marxist workers see the Republicans as explicitly capitalist, increasingly isolationist, patriarchal, anti-union, obscurantist science deniers, and obliquely when not explicitly racist, misogynist, homophobic, haters of the poor whose existence they accept because Jesus said, ‘they would be with us always.’ The modern MAGA/Republican party has all the trappings of extreme white Christian nationalism with authoritarian and fascist overtones. The Trump movement has millions of adherents who have affinity to the insurrectionists of January 6th and have extended an open hand to the fascist accelerationist outfits whose imprisoned leaders they see as martyrs, lower on the hero scale than Trump, but martyrs in their culture war on the ‘woke’ to Make America White Again. Trump’s persistent lying, gaslighting and lashing out at opponents has divided the U.S.A. and indeed much of the world versus the sanctity of bourgeois decorum and at least a feigned commitment to objectivity.
The new Trumpian bar, like his much lauded mental competency test, has been set so low that the Democrats easily strike a mature pose filling the reality void as the adults in the room acting in their defense of capitalists’ right to exploit workers the world over. Like the Republicans they are staunch capitalists, they revere a highly militarized role for the U.S. empire in perpetuity. So they are now, more than ever, wrapping themselves in the flag heaping adulation on the DOJ, FBI and national security state, in competition with the flag waving patriots of January 6th. No one should have had illusions in the Democrats being civil libertarians extraordinaire, they have done nothing to close Guantanamo, Free Julian Assange, own up to the framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, while the list of their repulsive accomplishments in the service of their real masters is a fat catalog!
In cities, where workers are concentrated in mid to lower income housing close to their low wage jobs, Democrats are generally favored and win local elections. In turn they administer over the crime of poverty in all its ugly manifestations, giving right wing media damning footage and talking points. The Democrats are easily damned from the right for administering the decaying system they both had a hand at molding. A deepening crisis Republicans have no alternative for other than increased repression, authoritarianism, racism, misogyny and homophobia including physical threats and intimidation of the poor and workers. Gaming the Judiciary’s electable posts and installing a super-majority on the Supreme Court, they have made state Trumpism a perpetual motion machine. The Democrats insist on the necessity of the “two” party elections arrangement. What escape is there for the youth? The no-future suburban and rural youth, the fentanyl streets of the cities? The two parties offer destruction of surplus Capital, fixed and variable, either in depression or war. And that variable capital is you, kid.
Yet it has been in these Democratic cities, often led by “leftist” mayors and city councils, that the police were used against the Occupy and BLM mass movements while Trumpian street fighters were allowed to create mayhem and murder and in most cases walk free.
In the lead up to the elections all the Sheepdogs come out. Bernie Sanders’ pitch is not unlike the other state-department socialists who call for a vote for Biden. Like Oakland Socialist, Sanders represents a very fearful layer of liberalism, fearful that Trumpism will defeat democracy in the U.S.. Instead of taking up the call of the Vermont AFL-CIO and others for union led strikes and self defense against insurrectionists, Sanders calls on the progressive community to have faith in an electoral defeat of Trump by backing Biden. Biden, of course, is the quintessential politician from the “corporate wing” of the Democratic Party. The wing which Sanders has railed about for years. Sanders achieved relevance declaring, ‘we have to take on corporate greed’, yet he can’t get out from under the corporatist wing. Why is that?
Let us extend his metaphor a little. Metaphorically Bernie’s winged party, is akin to a bird, a plane, or a locust with two or more wings. Implied is that the other wing(s) comprise the unions, workers and specially oppressed Black, Brown, women and LGB&TQI people. Surely that’s the demographics of the party. Numerically lopsided but that’s the point. Every bird, plane, and locust has not only wings but a head (pilot) and a body (motor/heart & muscles). Every observer and participant knows that the corporate wing has long been in charge! Even the Blue Dogs have more power than the progressive and Black caucuses because they can and have reigned in every minimal offering to the left. Witness the power of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocking the Biden plan. LBJ had the power to bring errant senators to the fold, yet Biden, only in power because both wings put him there, is powerless against the most adamant layers of the corporate wing of his own party. The Democratic party is not a party with two wings, it is the other party of the capitalist class with the workers and oppressed in tow, clinging on for crumbs from the bosses’ table.
Democrats on the whole represent the same 0.1% layer of the top ruling capitalist class. Among them are many in the corporate management who learned they must appear to have mitigated the most noticeable and egregious violations of civil rights on the job. Exhibiting prejudice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other vile ‘isms’ has become a liability, which ‘good corporate citizens’ eschew or at least cover up with NDAs. Yet structural economic inequality persists and specially oppressed castes of workers (racial, ethnic minorities, women and LGB&TQI) are quantifiable in Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Child labor is being overlooked where allowed on farms and legal exemptions are expanding to more occupations this year.
As for the other team, MAGA and Republicans with no shame, any disciplining of such vile hateful and abusive speech and behavior at work, in government or in media, is proof positive that a ‘woke communist elite’ composed of cultural Marxists and reverse ‘racist Black’ administrators, politicians, judges and prosecutors (Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, Federal justice Tanya Chutkan, and NYC prosecutor Alvin Bragg) have taken the country from its rightful owners, the Christian Nationalist men and their subserveriant families. In other words, today in their eyes, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers are riding shotgun with Biden the ex-senator from DuPont! And sadly, Angela and the Black community are still (as the statistics show), 60 years after the March on Washington, in the back seat of the bus, hoping after hope, despite every betrayal that the Democrats will get us to the ‘Promised Land.’
Both Republicans and Democrats, when in power, administer to maintain capitalist property relations and the right of private ownership; not only of small shops and small plots of land (homes and family farms), but vast conglomerates where capital concentrates production in national and intercontinental enterprises. Their express purpose is to extract maximum profit for their biggest shareholders regardless of social, environmental and human needs. The nickel’s worth of difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats, when they feel the pressure, from natural limits, liabilities or intensified class struggle, favor regulatory solutions to stop the bleeding and relieve, but not eliminate, the pressure or its root cause. The shell game is up! Today humanity faces the existential choice of socialism or extinction! Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic is not going to work.
The working class needs to put its hands on the levers of political and economic power in order to mitigate the industrial death trap capitalism, class society and production for profit have created. The globalization of production, the extreme concentration of wealth, finance, production, are waiting to be seized by the working class for reorganization under a democratically developed plan of Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan/Moon Shot proportions to prepare humanity to survive.
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