Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

February 26, 2020

Thoughts triggered by ex-ISOers seeing the light

Filed under: electoral strategy,Lenin,reformism,Russia,two-party system — louisproyect @ 10:40 pm

On January 31st, ex-ISOer Alan Maass posted a nearly 9,500 word article on Medium that offered “a retrospective assessment of the politics of the former ISO on elections and some thoughts on socialist organization.” It boiled down to a self-criticism for his past belief that revolutionary socialists must oppose the Democratic Party on principle. Only a year and a half ago, Maass wrote an article for the ISO newspaper arguing the exact opposite. I guess a lot can change in 18 months. Must be something wrong with me, I suppose. After voting for LBJ in 1964, who promised that he would not “send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” that was it for me. Fifty-six years ago and I am still pissed.

Like Alan Maass, fellow born-again democratic socialist Paul Heideman also argued against supporting the DP four years ago, when he wrote an article for Jacobin titled “It’s Their Party.” It told the story of how SDS supported LBJ in 1964 as part of a realignment strategy to purge the DP of its segregationist Congressmen. He credits Max Shachtman with the realignment strategy that he described as representing “one of the high points of the struggle for social democracy in the United States.” That sounds like a pretty low bar but what do I know? This long article finally gets around to the essential point:

Any political action comes with opportunity costs, and the costs of a strategic focus on electing Democrats have been grave — from the labor movement’s inability to defend itself against attacks from “their” party to antiwar movements that disappear when a Democrat comes to office.

Unlike Maass, Heideman never came out with a mea culpa. Instead, without any fanfare, he resurfaced in 2019 as a full-blooded Sandernista, indistinguishable from any other Jacobin author. He even goes further. He advises Sanders against defining himself as a “good socialist” as opposed to a bad socialist like Maduro or Castro. It is best to avoid those divisive questions about what capitalism or socialism from some pedantic standpoint as if it really mattered. Instead, just equate socialism with all the great things that have sprung up under Democratic Party rule:

He should point to the long line of policies that have been denounced as socialist and are now bedrock institutions of American life. Social Security? They called it socialist. Unions? A socialist project. Medicare? A socialist takeover of health care.

Yeah, sure. Who would want to get into such boring and irrelevant matters such as the right of American companies to have more money than entire countries. Walmart, for example, had revenue of $486 billion in 2017, out-earning the sixth-largest economy in the euro zone – Belgium, with a GDP of $468 billion. If it were a country, Walmart would be ranked 24th in the world by GDP. Has Bernie Sanders ever questioned the right of the Walton family to own 11,503 stores and clubs in 27 countries? Not unless he wanted to be called a communist or something.

Ex-ISOer Danny Katch is another fellow traveler on the Road to Damascus. Understanding that brevity is the soul of wit, Katch takes only 1,225 words to let Indypendent readers know that even though the Democratic Party is undemocratic, the path to making it democratic runs through the trail blazed by Bernie Sanders and “the squad”.

If Sanders becomes president, he would have to try to democratize the Democrats as part of the fight to enact his agenda without disastrous compromises. If these efforts fail to redeem an irredeemable party, they could at least start a national conversation about the long-overdue creation of a legitimate U.S. socialist party.

Even more emphatic than Maass and Heideman, Katch wrote an article in 2016 titled “Why I Won’t Be Voting For Bernie” that gave me hope that the ISO would become the badly needed pole of attraction needed for a mass socialist movement. As should be obvious by now, the comrades wilted under the pressure generated by the DSA. It makes me wonder how committed the comrades ever were to the task of strengthening the class independence of the left.

Katch’s article makes points identical to those I have been making in recent weeks on Facebook where it seems like 75 percent of my “friends” are gung-ho over Bernie Sanders:

I have enthusiastically felt the Bern this past week, without ever questioning my decision to not vote for him (or Clinton) in the Democratic primary tomorrow.

Not because Sanders’s isn’t “radical enough” for me–although I do consider his version of socialism to be more like old-fashioned liberalism, especially his unquestioning support for the right of the U.S. to bomb and invade other countries.

But if a candidate with Sanders’ platform were running as an independent, I would strongly consider supporting the campaign and working within it to try to push it further to the left. Bernie is running as a Democrat, however, and like other members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), I don’t vote for the Democratic Party (or the Republicans) as a matter of principle.

What exactly did Katch mean by “principle”? What do Marxists regard as principles? Every so often, these questions come to the fore. In 2017, the DSA had a bit of a scandal on its hands when it was discovered that Danny Fetonte, a newly elected member of their National Political Committee, was a longtime organizer for the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT)—the largest organization representing Texas cops. He stepped down subsequently.

Crossing a picket line is also a matter of principle. Under no circumstances should socialists cross a picket line. This question divided the left in 1968 when both the Trotskyist SWP and the Maoist PLP took the side of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville administrators in New York who were trying to purge racist teachers from their schools. When Albert Shanker organized a strike to keep them in place, it was necessary to side with those fighting for community control.

Socialists have also opposed on principle settling disputes in the capitalist courts. Even when one group libels another, it is very rare for the aggrieved party to file a suit. Closely related to this is the principle that you should not use violence within the movement. Back in the 60s, this was a major problem since the Maoist groups and Larouche arrogated to themselves the right to use violence since their adversaries were supposedly outside the movement.

When it comes to voting for bourgeois parties, it becomes a bit more complicated. To start with, those on the left looking for an escape clause from the burdensome task of swimming against the stream. After all, it takes a lot of backbone, if not stubbornness, to resist the seductive popularity of an FDR or a Bernie Sanders. There’s always the precedent of the IWA, the first socialist international, sending congratulations to Abraham Lincoln for his electoral victory. If opposing capitalist parties is a principle, how could Marx and Engels endorse Lincoln? Keep in mind that they were on record of calling for workers to run their own candidates in 1850 in an address to an early communist group:

Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled.

As I have said, Marx and Engels were on solid grounds congratulating Lincoln but were far from grasping the complex relationship of class and racial forces during the Civil War. They saw Lincoln as completing what amounted to a bourgeois revolution that would put the workers of the north in a better position to build a socialist movement. When the abolitionists lined up with Victoria Woodhull, Marx and Engels threw their considerable weight behind her rival Friedrich Sorge who saw the Irish immigrant worker as more crucial to the revolutionary movement than the emancipated blacks. Suffice it to say that Marx and Engels were not close enough to the situation to anticipate how convenient it was for Republicans to abandon black people by 1877. In any case, by the time Reconstruction ended, it should have been obvious that the two-party system was well on its way to maintaining its stranglehold on American politics.

That is why Engels saw any challenge to the two-party system as critical, even when it came to the election campaign of Henry George who clearly had no clue about the abc’s of socialism. In a letter to the clueless Friedrich Sorge in 1886, Engels made the case for backing a “confused and highly deficient” party set up under the banner of Henry George:

The rottenest side of the K. of L. [Knights of Labor] was their political neutrality, which resulted in sheer trickery on the part of the Powderlys, etc. [Terrence Powderly was the head of the Knights of Labor]; but this has had its edge taken off by the behaviour of the masses at the November elections, especially in New York. The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement–no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement–in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.

You’ll note that Engels speaks of “The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party.” This, in other words, is a restatement of what he and Marx advised in 1850. It might even be said that the endorsement of Lincoln was something of an outlier, but hardly equivalent to backing any other Republican following his death.

I’d make the case that it took the German and Russian socialist movements to fully come to terms with a principled basis for electoral politics. In Germany, the socialists were divided between Marxists and Lassalleans. The Marxists advocated a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist state, while Lassalle’s followers (he died in a duel in 1864) sought concessions from the state, especially when it was led by an enlightened politician like Otto Von Bismarck. While most leftists today, including Bernie Sanders, regard the New Deal as virtually synonymous with socialism, it might be argued that Bismarck was as progressive as FDR, if not more so. In volume four of Hal Draper’s “Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution”, you can see how willing Bismarck was to support progressive measures as a way of undermining the revolutionary left:

In 1883 a Sickness Insurance Act was passed, with the workers contributing only a third of the cost. In 1884 an Accident Insurance Law followed, with costs borne by employers alone. In 1889 an Old Age and Disability measure was adopted. In 1903 came a code of factory legislation, with a system of labor exchanges to promote employment. Many of these measures were the first of their kind in the world; by the time of the world war Germany had become the model land of advanced social legislation, under the pressure of the absolutist state, not the bourgeoisie.

Perhaps if Bismarck had not been so determined to crush the Socialist Party, Lassalle’s ideas would have gotten a bigger foothold. Leaving aside Kautsky’s problematic understanding of how a revolution might be possible, you at least have to give him credit for seeing the need for class independence. In chapter five of “The Erfurt Program”, his call for independent political action on a principled class basis can hardly be mistaken for the “dirty break” policies advanced in his name:

The interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are of so contrary a nature that in the long run they cannot be harmonized. Sooner or later in every capitalist country the participation of the working-class in politics must lead to the formation of an independent party, a labor party.

At what moment in its history the proletariat of any particular country will reach the point at which it is ready to take this step, depends chiefly upon its economic development. In some degree, also, it depends upon two other conditions, the insight of the working-class into the political and economic situation and the attitude of the bourgeois parties toward one another.

When you keep in mind that Lenin’s chief goal was to build a party in Czarist Russia that lived up to the example of the German social democracy, you can easily understand why he would be so adamantly opposed to forming blocs with the Cadets as advocated by the Mensheviks. Certainly, the Erfurt Program was uppermost in Lenin’s mind when he proposed a program for the Russian movement in 1899 that openly stated, “We are not in the least afraid to say that we want to imitate the Erfurt Programme: there is nothing bad in imitating what is good, and precisely to day, when we so often hear opportunist and equivocal criticism of that programme, we consider it our duty to speak openly in its favour.”

If you want to understand the differences between those on the left today who see the question of support for a bourgeois party on a principled rather than a tactical basis, the best place to start is with Lenin’s polemics against the Mensheviks. With all proportions guarded, the Cadets were the Democratic Party of Czarist Russia consisting of a liberal, modernizing section of the bourgeoisie that hoped to see an end to the monarchy but without the resolve needed to lead a bourgeois revolution. Lenin hoped to push the Cadets aside and lead such a revolution (it turned out to require a working-class leadership) but had to deal with the Mensheviks who saw the Cadets as allies.

The Mensheviks considered Lenin to be impractical and obstinate. Like Jacobin today that views a Nordic model as the only feasible socialism for a country in which revolution is no longer possible, the Mensheviks set their sights low. It would take an extended period of enlightened bourgeois rule to allow the working-class movement to gather the strength it needed to gain power.

While undoubtedly the ex-ISOers would never accept the idea that they are the counterparts of the Russian Mensheviks, their rallying around the Sandernista banner leads this observer to believe that they find it much easier to swim with the current. In a 1906 polemic against the Mensheviks, Lenin refers to the possibility that they are wilting under the pressure of a much larger, wealthier and legally unfettered capitalist party: “But what about the bourgeois opportunists? They own a press ten times larger than that of the Social-Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries put together.” I imagine if Lenin were alive today, he would coolly appraise the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party, with the massive coverage it gets in the bourgeois press, and still insist that we stick to our principles.

Just as 1914 threw socialism into a crisis across Europe, you can expect a convergence of late capitalist decrepitude and political routinism on the left to create a fertile ground for the kind of revolutionary socialism that is no longer fashionable. My recommendation is to stick to your principles, comrades, since they are the only way you will be able to be effective in a period when the walls start caving in around us.

February 8, 2020

Eric Blanc’s ersatz socialism

Filed under: DSA,reformism,two-party system — louisproyect @ 10:56 pm

Eric Blanc

For those trying to keep track of the ongoing attempt to seduce American radicals into Democratic Party politics, Eric Blanc’s articles are essential. Unlike most of the people who write for Jacobin, Blanc got some intensive training in Marxism starting with his membership in Socialist Organizer, a tiny sect affiliated with the U.S. fraternal section of the Organizing Committee for the Re-constitution of the Fourth International. His next stop was the ISO, where he was likely in the vanguard of the group’s mass exodus into the DSA. Now, comfortably ensconced there, he is a member of the Bread and Roses caucus that takes pride in itself as the Marxist redoubt of the group hoping to Re-constitute social democracy in the USA.

On top of all this, he has been something of a disciple of Lars Lih who has written millions of words extolling Lenin while at the same time making it clear that he is not a socialist. This deep immersion in Marxist lore has seen Blanc come up with some very fresh ideas, especially on the role of borderland socialists and the evolution of Bolshevism on national liberation. More recently, and unfortunately, his erudition has mostly been used to promote voting for Democratic Party candidates as a tactical “dirty break”. Unlike the crude “lesser evil”, “stop the fascist threat” analysis perfected by the Communist Party, Blanc frames his arguments in neo-Kautskyist terms, even though, as his critics make clear, Kautsky was adamantly opposed to voting for liberals.

Blanc’s latest foray into DP apologetics is available in an article titled “From Meyer London to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”. In analogizing the two politicians, he is once again using an ersatz version of socialist theory and history in the same manner as his “dirty break” article that made the case for socialists using the ballot line of the two capitalist parties in primaries. Historically, this coincided with SP leader Meyer London being elected to the House of Representatives without such gimmicks.

London never used this dubious tactic since at the time the SP had massive support. In Eugene V. Debs’s run for president in 1912, he got an astounding 6 percent of the vote. As for Meyer London, he was one of the only two SP’ers who were ever elected to Congress. The other was Victor Berger, who, like London, was a “sewer socialist” with politics akin to Eduard Bernstein. Why in this day and age of deep capitalist crisis with fascism on the march all over the planet would anybody look to someone like Meyer London as some kind of positive example? Beats me.

Blanc believes we should study London’s career because he proposed New Deal type reforms in Congress long before the New Deal. In Blanc’s words, he had “only a light commitment to Marxism…, believed in an evolutionary transition to socialism and wavered in his opposition to the First World War.”

Notwithstanding these political flaws, Meyer London was more dedicated to the working class movement than any Democrat. He was a strong ally of the garment workers in New York City and pushed for “comprehensive social insurance for all in the form of national health care, unemployment and disability insurance, and public works jobs programs.”

Of course, there is a yawning gulf between London and A. O-C, who is obviously intent on serving as a Democrat despite her lip-service to socialism. In the second half of his article, Blanc explains why this decision was forced on her.

There are no easy answers or simple formulas for how to proceed in today’s novel context. Given the relative weakness of the socialist movement, and the well-known obstacles to electing third-party candidates in the US, it made tactical sense for Ocasio-Cortez, like Sanders before her, to run on the Democratic Party ballot line. At the same time, elected socialists will ultimately need full political independence from the party establishment in order to advance their class-struggle agendas. We’ll eventually need a party of our own. Playing by the rules of the game has led all too many honest politicians to cover for, and bend to, a corporate-funded Democratic machine whose built-to-fail centrism led to our current Trump nightmare.

It was only after reading this subtle exercise in Marxoid casuistry a second time that it dawned on me what he was carefully eliding. Meyer London was a member of a party. He had to operate within its political guidelines in order to get its financial and organizational support for his election campaigns. In other words, his relationship to the SP was like that of any politician in the European Second International parties. With all proportions guarded, he and Berger operated as parliamentarians that were expected to carry forward their party’s program in the same way that they did in Kautsky’s SPD. In fact, the term “democratic centralism” did not originate in Russia. It originated in Germany long before “What is To Be Done”.

As Paul LeBlanc explains in “Lenin and the Revolutionary Party”, the term predates Lenin by many years and was first used in 1865 by J.B. Schweitzer, a Lassallean. Furthermore, in Russia it was first used by the Mensheviks at a November 1905 conference. In a resolution “On the Organization of the Party” adopted there, they agree that “The RSDLP must be organized according to the principle of democratic centralism.” A month later the Bolsheviks embraced the term at their own conference. A resolution titled “On Party Organization” states: “Recognizing as indisputable the principle of democratic centralism, the Conference considers the broad implementation of the elective principle necessary; and, while granting elected centers full powers in matters of ideological and practical leadership, they are at the same time subject to recall, their actions are given broad publicity, and they are to be strictly accountable for these activities.”

So, what in the hell does this have to do with today’s “democratic socialist” movement? Not only is Bernie Sanders not a member of the DSA; he doesn’t even encourage people to join. Basically, they and Jacobin operate as his fan club. He is free to say whatever he wants and when he says or does something clearly problematic, they are free to say “tut-tut” or rationalize it, as was the case with the Joe Rogan endorsement.

While they are not in the same kind of exalted position as Sanders, A. O-C and the “squad” pretty much have the same kind of latitude even if they are members (Ilhan Omar is not). They rely on the DSA to do the grunt work and once they are elected they use their own judgement when they vote or say something dumb. In a Left Voice article titled “Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Represent the Politics of the DSA?”, we see how far she can stray from democratic socialism, a program that would likely exclude support for Israeli war crimes:

Ocasio-Cortez’s statements about replacing ICE with a more humane INS have already garnered criticism from her left supporters. But a major source of concern for DSAers was Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on the occupation of Palestine. Pushed a bit by Margaret Hoover on Firing Line about a tweet in which she denounced the Land Day Massacre, Ocasio-Cortez said not only that she “believes absolutely in Israel’s right to exist,” but also that she “just looked at that incident [as] just an incident.” When asked about her use of the term “occupation,” she replied, “I’m a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue, and I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these.”

Although my politics are much more aligned with Rosa Luxemburg than Karl Kautsky, I would be a lot more sympathetic to the DSA if it was aspiring toward Kautsky’s model. Instead, it is much more reminiscent of the Young Democrats I used to run into during the Vietnam antiwar movement. They came to meetings wearing Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern buttons, politicians they saw as being capable of returning the Democratic Party to its New Deal traditions. In exchange for passing out campaign literature, the young activists might be rewarded with an early end to the Vietnam War just as DSA’ers hope that the USA will be transformed into Sweden if Sanders is elected.

 

December 21, 2019

Pete Buttigieg and the $900 bottles of wine: what they tell us about capitalist politics

Filed under: capitalism,two-party system,water — louisproyect @ 8:27 pm

Last Thursday, during the Democratic Party presidential candidate debate, Elizabeth Warren took a dig at Pete Buttegieg, the gay, neoliberal Mayor of South Bend, Indiana:

So, the mayor just recently had a fund-raiser that was held in a wine cave, full of crystals and served $900-a-bottle wine. Think about who comes to that. He had promised that every fund-raiser he would do would be open-door, but this one was closed-door. We made the decision many years ago that rich people in smoke-filled rooms would not pick the next president of the United States. Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.

Buttegieg defended himself by pointing out that she too has taken donations from rich people and that he, unlike her and the other people on stage with them, was no millionaire. Clearly anticipating some static over his unabashed sucking up to billionaires, he told her:

Senator, your presidential campaign right now as we speak is funded in part by money you transferred, having raised it at those exact same big-ticket fund-raisers you now denounce. Did it corrupt you, Senator? Of course not. So to denounce the same kind of fund-raising guidelines that President Obama went by, that Speaker Pelosi goes by, that you yourself went by until not long ago, to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election. We’d like to bring everyone in.

Warren, trying to triangulate between Bernie Sanders’s grass-roots fundraising and the sort of feeding at the trough that routinely goes on in Democratic Party campaigns for President and Congress, had no answer for this. She is clearly a stealth candidate who, if elected, would probably cave in to corporate interests willingly. In the unlikely event that Sanders was elected, the caving would be unwillingly.

With much of the controversy revolving around the ostentation of the fund-raiser, much more has to be said about Craig Hall who was upset over being in the spotlight. Hall, a real estate and winery baron who has donated more than $2.4 million to Democratic Party candidates over the years, felt like they were picking on the wrong guy: “These people don’t know who they’re talking about when they throw me in the class that they did. As much as it’s frustrating, it’s more disappointing to me that Democrats are fighting with each other when we have a common goal, which is to get back to the White House.”

Like most billionaires, Hall is involved in philanthropy, which means that for every $100 he gets in tax cuts, he gives “worthy causes” $10 off the top—and tax-deductible, if you please. Unlike his fellow real estate magnate, the grubby Donald Trump, Hall runs what practically sounds like it was based on Murry Bookchin’s writings: “[W]e strive to do business responsibly. This includes developing environmentally sustainable buildings, encouraging employee volunteerism through paid time off‑, and operating our business with unwavering integrity, morality and a commitment to truth. We believe in doing what is right over what is easy.”

In the mid-80s, Hall was implicated in a crooked deal to avoid bankruptcy with Jim Wright, a member of the House of Representatives from Texas who was as powerful as Nancy Pelosi in his day. Like the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis was all about gambling on real estate. Craig Hall was Texas’s biggest real estate mogul, who had financed his empire with high-interest loans from S&L’s that were never supposed to get into that kind of business, just as banks 30 years later were not supposed to get involved with mortgage-based securities.

Hall used his massive donations to the Democratic Party to influence Jim Wright’s intervention on his behalf. Overseeing the efforts to keep the failing S&L’s afloat was a government agency called the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. In a strong-arm effort reminiscent of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky, Wright told the regulators to look the other way when it came to Craig Hall, who was having trouble making payments on more than $1 billion in mortgages to some 20 S&Ls. If he couldn’t pay, the S&L’s would come tumbling down like dominos, which were under the supervision of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. (FSLIC).

Like Hall, the FSLIC was on thin ice. When the S&L crisis was just beginning in 1986, the FSLIC asked Congress for permission to sell $15 billion in bonds to recapitalize their insurance fund. The “FSLIC recap bill” was approved by the House and headed for a vote.

In late September of 1986, Wright called the Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Edwin Gray and asked him to lay off Craig Hall using the same kind of indirection mafia bosses and Donald Trump use. Gray told House Ethics Committee investigators that Wright did not ask for anything specific, but “anybody who has worked in government for very long knows that when the soon-to-be speaker of the House of Representatives is asking you to look into it, its not just anybody.”

On September 26, Wright put a hold on the bill to recapitalize the FSLIC. As Hall himself put it, “Congressman Wright has in some manner held up the bill and … it appeared it somehow related to us.” Like the cut-off of military aid to Ukraine, Wright’s pressure had the desired effect. Hall got new loans at tax-payer expense and dodged bankruptcy.

One of the other types of pressure that Wright used was to get regulators fired if they were too uppity. Edwin Gray told ethics investigator about one instance:

And so I received a call and it basically was another call about the treatment of Texas S&L; institutions. And then (Wright) said that he understood that (names a federal bank regulator in Texas)) was a homosexual. And he understood from people that he believed and trusted (that the regulator) had established a ring of homosexual lawyers in Texas at various law firms, and that in order for people to deal with the Federal Home Loan Bank supervision people, they would have to deal with this ring of homosexual lawyers.

Wright’s ham-fisted interference eventually led to the end of his career, which unfortunately doesn’t seem in the cards for Trump. He resigned as House Speaker on May 31, 1989, the first on account of a scandal.

Like all financial crises, the S&L crisis petered out and Hall began making out like a bandit again. He wrote a book in 1990 titled “News of My Death Was Greatly Exaggerated: How I Survived the Texas Depression: My Financial Strategies for the ’90s.” Somehow I doubt that it gets too deeply in Jim Wright’s role in keeping him alive.

Once the cash started flowing again, Hall began using it to buy protection if disaster fell again. He got added to Vice President Al Gore’s rolodex and attended a White House coffee gathering. President Clinton nominated his wife Kathryn to serve as ambassador to Austria, undoubtedly because the Halls contributed more than $240,000 to the Democrats during the 1996 election cycle and not because of her expertise in Middle European diplomacy. The Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis said, “The fact that a sitting Vice President would call someone whose failed S&L cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars — that’s a metaphor for the whole campaign fundraising scandal itself. … This person Hall should be a pariah that politicians would run away from.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that more than $100,000 of the Hall’s contributions to the DNC came after the Halls received a call from Gore’s office in April 1996.

Showing the same inclination to feed at the billionaire’s trough, Hillary Clinton made a pilgrimage to the Halls’ winery in 2015. The invitation-only event, with tickets reportedly ranging from $250 to $50,000, targeted the same rich bastards that showed up last Thursday to greet Buttegieg.

As for the winery, the Halls run the same jive that they run on their real estate business: “Responsibility is one of our core values. This translates to developing LEED certified buildings, sustainable farming and operating our business with unwavering integrity. We are constantly innovating to turn our words into actions.”

The reality contradicts this bullshit as Wine Business reported last year:

A Napa County Superior Court on Tuesday tentatively ruled against the opponents of a vineyard slated to be developed above the Napa Valley floor.

Judge Thomas Warriner’s tentative ruling in favor of Napa County is not final as lawyers representing environmental groups and a residential water district continue to argue their case in court.

Attorneys for Living Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and Circle Oaks County Water District seek to overturn Napa County’s 2016 decision to approve Kathryn and Craig Hall’s plans to develop Walt Ranch on Atlas Peak. The attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity also represents the Sierra Club.

Walt Ranch is the 200-acre vineyard development long proposed by Craig and Kathryn Hall of HALL Wines.

Like Stewart and Linda Resnick, the pistachio and pomegranate juice billionaires, the Halls have little interest in how their wine-making impacts working people. They proposed removing nearly 23,000 trees to develop 271 acres of vineyards on the 2,300-acre Walt Ranch, which occupies a sensitive watershed. Geoff Ellsworth, a member of Wine and Water Watch, told the Food and Environment Reporting Network: “We’re in the middle of a business war. This big corporation is competing against that big corporation, and the collateral damage are the citizens and the flora and fauna.” The worries are the same as when farmworkers living near the Resnick plantations discovered that they often lacked enough water pressure to take a shower or flush a toilet:

While the Napa Valley conjures images of idyllic winery estates and luxurious lifestyles, all is not well in wine country. A growing number of residents decry the region’s proliferation of upscale hotels, the wineries that double as event centers and the strain on Napa Valley’s water resources. In the wake of California’s unprecedented drought, the city of Calistoga—like others—has been under mandatory water rationing. “We’re told not to flush our toilets,” says Christina Aranguren, a vocal critic of the proposed resort, whose guests will be under no such restrictions. “I want to know where the water will come from.”

Yeah, where will the water come from? Who cares, as long as the wine keeps flowing.

 

July 21, 2019

Reflections on the Samuel Farber/Todd Chretien exchange

Filed under: parliamentary cretinism,two-party system — louisproyect @ 9:02 pm

Samuel Farber

Todd Chretien

On June 30, Samuel Farber wrote an article for Jacobin titled “What Revolutionary Socialism Means to Me” that was probably the first one I ever agreed with even if it predictably gave short shrift to Che Guevara as an “insurrectionist”.

In a section titled “The Democratic Party”, Farber defends independent class action—a principle shared by those from my generation who were trained either in James P. Cannon or Hal Draper’s politics. Farber was a member of Draper’s group and I was in Cannon’s. If I had an access to a time-machine, I’d probably travel back to 1967 and sign up with the Draperites. He cites Lance Selfa, an ex-ISOer who might have more trouble adapting to the new-found “democratic socialism” of other exer’s in light of what he has written, according to Farber:

As Lance Selfa shows in his book The Democrats: A Critical History, important sectors of capital contributed similar, if not higher, sums to the Democratic than to the Republican Party in the 2008 elections. Contributions to the Democratic Party included 45 percent of all the funds contributed to the election by agribusiness, 68 percent of all the election contributions from the communications and electronics sectors, 52 percent from defense, 55 percent from finance, insurance, and real estate, 54 percent from health, 74 percent from lawyers and lobbyists, and 55 percent from miscellaneous businesses.

After recapitulating key arguments why you should not support DP candidates (“lesser evilism”, lack of accountability, etc.), Farber turns to the Jacobin/DSA that has been irresistible to a number of ex-ISO’ers looking for a place where swimming upstream doesn’t go with the territory. In a section titled “The Dirty Break”, he refers to articles by Seth Ackerman and  by Eric Blanc’s that make the case for socialists running on the Democratic Party line in primaries. This ultra-sophisticated tactic is dubbed a “dirty break” as opposed to the “clean break” with the two-party system that moldy figs like me advocate. Farber is having none of that:

The main problem with this tactic is that it might end up unintentionally misleading voters who might feel manipulated unless they are explicitly informed that the “dirty break” candidates do not support, and in fact oppose, the Democratic Party as presently constituted. And the candidates pledge, in advance, that if elected they will not join the Democratic caucus and instead create a separate caucus. And that if they lose, they will not support a mainstream Democratic Party winner (a big problem with Bernie Sanders’s strategy of supporting mainstream Democrats who win the presidential and other primaries.) This approach would also have the virtue of preventing the cementing of illusions about the Democratic Party.

Todd Chretien is one of the ex-ISOers who has abandoned the independent class action perspective of both Farber and Selfa. Along with Paul Le Blanc, Chretien has become an enthusiastic Sandernista. In a July 6 Jacobin article titled “Revolutionary Socialists in the Democratic-Socialist Movement”, he tries to answer Farber.

He starts off by making a point heard from many ISO’ers just before they dissolved themselves. They were behind the curve: “But the reality is that the proponents of democratic socialism have grown proportionally stronger over the last few years because they have answered some key questions correctly; revolutionary socialists, meanwhile, have hesitated.” I don’t know about that. The DSA has grown because it was a magnet to tens of thousands of young people who voted for Bernie Sanders and who were much more ready to join a group that had an amorphous understanding of “socialism” rather than to hook up with a group that required a much bigger commitment and support for an ideology that was rooted in Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, et al and all those other musty figures from the past who have never been on Chapo Trap House. That’s a bridge too far for an 24-year old kid forced to work in a Starbucks because his or her art history degree proved to be a waste of $100,000.

In response to Farber’s warning about the susceptibility of leftist DP elected officials to become corrupt or to shift to the right, Chretien offers up a non-sequitur:

But does knowing that Cyril Ramaphosa went from union leader to billionaire, or that the European left has hit an impasse, or that the Lenin-Kautsky debate deserves serious study answer the question of whether or not to vote for Sanders? Or whether or not to support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib?

Probably not. In fact, the more relevant question is whether there is a class criterion that defines the Democratic Party. Keep in mind that until 1934, socialists always opposed the two capitalist parties as a matter of principle. After the Popular Front, all that changed. FDR was the Bernie Sanders of his day. The patrician politician convinced everybody on the left except the Trotskyists and Norman Thomas to get on board his bandwagon even though he rejected the idea of socialism. Perhaps that’s of little consequence given Sanders’s insistence that he wants to be the FDR of 2020. What does it matter if the word “socialism” is an empty signifier? As long as you are for government assistance, that’s good enough for democratic socialists. To give some oomph to the New Deal rebirth, all we need is to restore Communism in Russia and China. That would scare the bejeezus out of the Koch brothers and Jeff Bezos and get them to fund a Green New Deal, wouldn’t it?

In a mea culpa, Chretien writes:

In 2016, I believed that Sanders would be brought to heal [sic] by the DNC. Instead, he helped fuel the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America and, remarkably, played a role in giving teachers and others the confidence to strike. And recently AOC tweeted in support of one of the first political strikes in modern US history at Wayfair in solidarity with immigrant families caged in concentration camps.

Well, I’m glad that AOC tweeted in solidarity with immigrant families but has Todd forgotten what Sanders said about open borders? At a campaign even in April, someone criticized his open borders stance, to which he replied: “What we need is comprehensive immigration reform. If you open the borders, my God, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world. And I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point. Can’t do it. So that is not my position.”

Yeah, that’s not his problem. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. If he had one percent of Eugene V. Debs’s radicalism, Sanders would have said something like this: “There already is open borders for American investors and American subversion. Hondurans are taking their lives in their hands to cross the border into the USA. Chiquita Banana stole land from the Honduran farmers and when they resisted, the Marines invaded Honduras 7 times between 1903 and 1924. If Honduras would be allowed to close its borders to Chiquita Banana and the Marines, then I’d understand closing our own. Until that happens, I’m for open borders.”

Chretien makes light of the kind of criticisms that would likely appear in the Spartacist newspaper rather than from a serious socialist, or even a half-serious gadfly like me:

AOC, Bernie, Chicago’s recently elected six socialist city council members, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and others are at this point confounding the revolutionary socialist expectation that they will fall prey to what Karl Marx referred to as “parliamentary cretinism” in short order.

In fact, they have functioned honorably. So did many Democrats over the years who had radical credentials, from Vito Marcantonio to Bella Abzug. This is not the issue. It is instead whether progressive politicians have anything to do with making a revolution in the USA. The implication of DSA-backed candidates “fighting the good fight” is that more is needed. More AOC; more Ilhan Omar… Okay, if that’s the goal, go right ahead but at least respect the right of others on the left to stick to Marxist principles. What Marx wrote in 1850 still makes sense to a lot of us:

Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled.

 

June 12, 2019

Charles Post, Left Voice, and the question of a labor aristocracy

Filed under: Lenin,two-party system,workers — louisproyect @ 9:09 pm

Rodrigo Carrillo, a farmer in Hoja Blanca, Guatemala, says falling coffee prices mean he can no longer make a profit on the once-lucrative crop. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

On May 25th, Left Voice published an article by an Argentine Trotskyist named Matías Maiello on “Social Democracy and Imperialism: The Problem with Kautsky” that was the latest in a series of critiques of Eric Blanc, a DSA/Jacobin figure who has justified backing Democratic Party candidates on the basis of Karl Kautsky’s pre-1910 writings.

On June 5th, Charles Post responded to Maiello’s article in Left Voice, which to its credit has opened its pages to criticisms. Despite the magazine’s professions of Leninist orthodoxy, this is a departure from the norms of the American SWP that I belonged to from 1967 to 1978. Then again, the norms of the SWP might have been in violation of Bolshevik practice, given Iskra being published to further debate among socialists.

Like Maiello, Post is a critic of Jacobin’s neo-Kautskyism, even going so far as to refer to Eric Blanc as a “left reformist”. In the world occupied by Post and Maiello, the “left” that qualifies “reformist” might be regarded as damning with faint praise.

Most of Maiello’s article is an attempt to demonstrate the affinity of the German Social Democracy with the leftwing of the Democratic Party, personified by figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In either case, you are dealing with self-described socialists adapting to imperialism. This is obviously manifested by the German socialist parliamentarians voting for war credits in 1914 and Sanders voting in favor of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which called for removing “the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power.” I should note that Maiello cites my editor Jeff St. Clair of CounterPunch on Sanders’s voting record. I commend the Argentinian for his ability to keep on top of the truly radical press in the USA. This sets an example for the kind of proletarian internationalism so necessary in a “globalized” world (please excuse the tautology.)

After stating his agreement with the main thrust of the Left Voice article, Post parts company with Maiello for his alleged support for the theory of “labor aristocracy”:

We differ, however, in our analysis of the material roots of the bureaucratization of the workers movement. Maiello relies on Lenin’s notion of “labor aristocracy” to explain working-class reformism. According to Lenin, the export of productive capital from the Global North to the South since the late 19th century allowed large, “monopoly” capitalists to accrue “superprofits,” which were used to “bribe” a sector of the working class and create a labor officialdom. Thus, reformist bureaucrats defend their national imperialism in order to maintain the social basis for their relatively privileged position in the working class.

You’ll note that Post refers to Lenin’s “notion” but in the next paragraph refers to a “theory”: “Unfortunately, the theory of the labor aristocracy, in all its variants, is without factual-empirical basis and rests on questionable theoretical assumptions.” This is an important distinction and one that he neglects to clarify. In Lenin’s copious writings, there are not many references to the labor aristocracy. Probably the best known of them was his 1916 “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism”  that only refers to some letters by Engels that express his dismay over the state of the British working class: “…The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” Not only did Engels write this letter prior to the mature imperialism examined in Lenin’s writings but as an off-the-cuff remark without much of a “theorizing” ambition.

Once he is finished quoting from Engels and Marx’s letters, Lenin adds his own thoughts that add up to a “notion” rather than a theory:

Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.

Other than this article, the only other attempt by Lenin to present his own understanding of the labor aristocracy is in the preface to the French and German edition of “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” that only contains a couple of paragraphs similar to the one above. There are several other articles that offer up a line or two but are hardly worth mentioning. My advice is to consult the Marxist Internet Archives (MIA), an invaluable resource for researching such matters.

The MIA reveals that in the entire “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, as opposed to the preface, there is not a single reference to the term. There’s a good reason for that. That 1914 work was an attempt to explain the economic basis for WWI as a conflict between monopoly capitalist powers, using J.A. Hobson as a primary source. If you are looking for a class analysis of the trade union bureaucracy and its base of support among skilled tradesmen, you won’t find it in Lenin. You only can find “notions”, to use Post’s word, but that’s about it.

If you are looking for a fully developed theory, you can find it in a 1982 pamphlet by Max Elbaum and Robert Seltzer titled “The Labour Aristocracy The Material Basis for Opportunism in the Labour Movement” that tries to bridge the gap between Lenin’s theory of imperialism and his scattered and rather minimal references to the upper layers of the working class being bribed, etc.

Elbaum and Seltzer were members of Line of March, a Maoist sect that was founded by Irwin Silber, the film critic of the defunct but essential Guardian Newsweekly. Line of March was part of a significant Maoist current in the USA that existed from 1968 or so to the mid-80s. The Maoist press wrote about “white skin privilege” and Third World revolution swamping the imperialist strongholds after a protracted People’s War, etc.

For Elbaum and Seltzer, the aristocracy is not just the workers you’d expect to be singled out, like the white construction workers who beat up antiwar protesters in 1970. It is the entire American working class that benefits from imperial bribery:

Certainly relative to the masses in the colonies and semicolonies, the entire working class in the advanced capitalist countries possesses political, economic, and cultural advantages. Just as monopoly capital consolidated the split between the labour aristocracy and the lower strata of the proletariat, it accentuated the division between workers in imperialist countries and the masses in the oppressed nations. Indeed, this latter division has often served to moderate (and obscure) the tensions between the labour aristocracy and the lower strata in imperialist countries, as both have benefited somewhat from imperialist exploitation of workers in the colonies and neocolonies. Lenin observed this phenomenon and didn’t mince words about its meaning: “To a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations.”

Post does not refer to this pamphlet in his Left Voice article but in 2006, he wrote a two-part article in Solidarity on “The Myth of the Labor Aristocracy” that took aim at the Elbaum/Seltzer pamphlet as well as articles written by a member of the Democratic Socialist Party in Australia that endorsed their findings. What makes this linkage interesting is the Trotskyist heritage of the DSP, which despite the name had little to do with the DSA politically. For Post, it might have seemed odd for people with the same ideological background as his to be defending nominally Maoist beliefs but not so strange in light of what Leon Trotsky had written over the years. For example, in “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay”, a 1940 sketch for an article that was never written due to his assassination, he wrote:

Hence flows the need of the trade unions – insofar as they remain on reformist positions, ie., on positions of adapting themselves to private property – to adapt themselves to the capitalist state and to contend for its cooperation. In the eyes of the bureaucracy of the trade union movement the chief task lies in “freeing” the state from the embrace of capitalism, in weakening its dependence on trusts, in pulling it over to their side. This position is in complete harmony with the social position of the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy, who fight for a crumb in the share of superprofits of imperialist capitalism.

Part of the problem, of course, is the failure of Lenin or Trotsky to flesh out what they meant by a “labor aristocracy”. Is it the same as the labor bureaucracy? Evidently not, or else they wouldn’t have used two different terms.

Ironically, Post and Elbaum/Seltzer agree on the existence of a class-wide privileged layer in the imperialist heartland but draw different conclusions. Post writes:

Higher profits result in more investment across the board in the industrialized countries. More investment eventually brings a growing demand for labor (within limits set by investment in newer, more capital intensive technology), falling unemployment and rising wages for all workers in the industrialized capitalist countries.

Put simply, this means that imperialist investment in the global South benefits all workers in the global North – both highly paid and poorly paid workers. Higher profits and increased investment mean not only more employment and rising wages for “aristocratic” steel, automobile, machine-making, trucking and construction workers, but also for lowly paid clerical, janitorial, garment and food processing workers. As Ernest Mandel put it, “the real ‘labor aristocracy’ is no longer constituted inside the proletariat of an imperialist country but rather by the proletariat of the imperialist countries as a whole.” That “real ‘labor aristocracy’” includes poorly paid immigrant janitors and garment workers, African-American and Latino poultry workers, as well as the multi-racial workforce in auto and trucking.

For Post, the “bribe” is distributed across the board almost like Social Security and as such it would refute the notion that it was only hard hats with their fishing boats and 6,000 square foot houses in Suffolk County that are “aristocrats”. It would also include the janitors and garment workers, et al. This is his way of discounting the viability of this theory. On the other hand, it might explain the willingness of African-Americans to vote for Joe Biden by 46 percent as opposed to Bernie Sander’s 10 percent approval rating in the Black community.

It is always necessary to remind ourselves that Lenin wrote articles and books in the heat of the moment. Within 5 years, he referred to “What is to Be Done” as a work that was obsolete. To regard “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” as a work that can explain today’s world is a useless exercise but often taken to dismiss the idea that imperialism exists since definitionally it was next to useless. Those committed to formal logic rather than Marxist dialectics were the loudest in questioning its applicability.

In Post’s Against the Current article, he scoffs at the idea that the imperialist nations were in any way reliant on superprofits extracted from the Third World:

Imperialist investment, particularly in the global South, represents a tiny portion of global capitalist investment. Foreign direct investment makes up only 5% of total world investment – that is to say, 95% of total capitalist investment takes place within the boundaries of each industrialized country.

Of that five percent of total global investment that is foreign direct investment, nearly three-quarters flow from one industrialized country – one part of the global North – to another. Thus only 1.25% of total world investment flows from the global North to the global South. It is not surprising that the global South accounts for only 20% of global manufacturing output, mostly in labor-intensive industries such as clothing, shoes, auto parts and simple electronics.

Data for profits earned by U.S. companies overseas do not distinguish between investments in the global North and global South. For purposes of approximation, we will assume that the 25% of U.S. foreign direct investment in labor-intensive manufacturing in Africa, Asia and Latin America produces profits above those earned on the 75% of U.S. foreign direct investment in more capital-intensive production in western Europe, Canada and Japan. It is unlikely, however, that more than half of the profits earned abroad by US companies are earned in the global South.

This, of course, is consistent with his dismissal of the idea that capitalism relied on slavery in its early stages. You have to understand that his aversion to theories tainted by the Monthly Review dependency theorists and other neo-Smithians was strongly influenced by Robert Brenner whose 1977 NLR article warned against theories that called attention to how imperialism was “squeezing dry the ‘third world’”. Instead of nonsense about the core versus periphery, the cities versus the countryside, etc. the answer was in the international proletariat allying itself with the oppressed people of all countries against the bourgeoisie. Who can be opposed to that? The idea of American workers organizing a general strike against Trump’s anti-immigrant racism is inspiring, even if it is a fantasy.

Part of the problem in reducing the core-periphery relationship to one of a bribery extracted from superprofits is that it does not account for the entire ensemble of economic relationships that condemn a country like Guatemala to the desperation that drives its citizens to risk drowning in the Rio Grande or dying of thirst in the Mexican desert.

Today’s Washington Post reports that “The migration problem is a coffee problem”. It seems that falling coffee prices have driven growers into dire poverty, even when they are the owners of their own land. Now, if the USA had not intervened in Central America in the 1970s and 80s, perhaps all of Central America could have been liberated from dependency and formed socialist cartels to support prices for coffee exports that advantaged the farmers rather than Fair Trade hustlers like Starbucks, et al. This might have meant that American workers, who were addicted to coffee like me because it was the only way to take a proper shit in the morning, might have to pay $6 for a cup of coffee rather than $2. When the global South became master of its own commodities, it would have forced the American working class to decide where their loyalties should be placed. It might be possible to enjoy a cup of coffee or a banana without going broke but only if that entailed reducing the funding for the American military until it reached Costa Rica’s, namely zero.

Based on Charles Post’s analysis immediately above, you might conclude that Guatemala’s problem is one of malign neglect since American FDI in Guatemala ($1.1 billion) is dwarfed by the capital poured into Canada ($392 billion). However, this does not take into account the American support for rightwing dictators in Guatemala that have been armed and supported by both the USA and Israel for the past 60 years at least. To see American imperialism exclusively in terms of where banks finance capitalist expansion is a narrow way of understanding class relationships. Although Brenner scoffs at the notion of Andre Gunder Frank’s “the development of underdevelopment”, that is exactly the malady Guatemala and most of Latin America suffers from. I should add that it is no accident that Argentine Trotskyists writing in Left Voice have a better handle on that than him.

Finally, on the question of the reformist tendencies of the working class, aristocrats or plebeians, this is a question that has been at the heart of American politics going back to Werner Sombart’s 1904 “Why There is No Socialism in the United States” that states: “For the average American being successful means first and foremost becoming rich.” I rather have my doubts about this but after 52 years advocating socialism, I tend to accept Marx’s verdict in “The German Ideology” that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

I suspect that my take on the pace of revolutionary struggles in the USA are much more restrained than those of the Left Voice editorial board but am glad that it at least can draw clear class lines in a period when the entire capitalist press is solidly behind “democratic socialism”, whatever that is.

Most workers simply can’t be reached by revolutionary ideas today, even if their life is being torn apart by capitalist contradictions. Reaching the average worker will take something like the Ralph Nader campaign in 2000. I have vivid recollections of returning from a trip from seeing my girlfriend at the time, who was a graduate student in Albany. On the Amtrak, sitting on the opposite side of the train from me, were three UPS workers who spent the entire 2 hours discussing Nader’s ideas. Nader was not a socialist but he was a leftist who had the guts to run as a Green Party candidate. Was he a reformist? I guess by Left Voice’s standards, he was.

At some point in American history, someone like Ralph Nader will be a reformist block to socialist revolution but that will only be a result of UPS workers discussing Karl Marx rather than Ralph Nader. That might take decades to unfold but acting as if this was Russia in 1910 might be a serious error in tempo. I should add that even if it is a mistake, it is one that I would prefer to see people make, just as I made in 1970, then see them ringing doorbells for Democratic Party candidates.

January 27, 2019

Eric Blanc, the LA School Strike, and Swimming Against the Stream

Filed under: DSA,Education,electoral strategy,two-party system — louisproyect @ 7:39 pm

Unlike other teachers strikes over the past year, the one that just took place in Los Angeles confronted a Democratic Party machine rather than one run by the Republicans. For those trying to understand our current period in class terms, it is a useful reminder that the labor movement has to learn how to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla is the Republican Party with its snarling right-to-work, Koch-backed politicians while Charybdis is the Blue State power elite that uses seduction to get its way. Put in a nutshell, the main obstacle to putting public education in Los Angeles on the same footing it enjoyed 60 years ago means breaking through the veil of seduction and overthrowing the liberal establishment.

There’s a useful article by Eric Blanc on Jacobin titled “Never Trust a Billionaire’s Antiracism” that takes names and kicks ass as we used to put it in the 1960s. He singles out LA School Board President Monica Garcia who supported charter schools against the teachers union attempt to rein them in:

Nobody embodies this hypocrisy better than LAUSD head Monica Garcia. The daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants in East Los Angeles, Garcia has leveraged her personal background to climb the city’s power structure. She consistently paints her political project — which mostly consists of promoting charters and opposing the strike — in activist colors.

When it comes to issues she has no control over, Garcia is as progressive as can be. Her Twitter account is full of Nelson Mandela quotes, denunciations of Trump’s xenophobia, and praise for Elizabeth Warren. Despite her hard opposition to today’s strikes, Garcia is nevertheless fond of hosting conferences that raise the banner of the 1968 Chicano student walkouts.

Unfortunately, Blanc continues along his patented neo-Kautskyite lines in this article by drawing a contrast between LA’s former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Garcia on one side and the “socialist” wing of the DP on the other:

That’s why figures like Garcia and Villaraigosa were pushed forward to attack (in the name of racial justice) a movement of, and for, a predominantly nonwhite workforce and student body. It’s also why the Democratic Party establishment and its pundit apologists will continue to use antiracist rhetoric to attack Bernie Sanders and the resurgent socialist movement.

In May, 2016 Sanders told an Ohio audience: “I believe in public education, and I believe in public charter schools. I do not believe in private – privately controlled charter schools.” Hmm. I hope one of his aides clued him in that charter schools in LA are public schools. That is the problem, after all. They drain public resources into an essentially private enterprise. Indeed, Bernie voted for the Charter School Expansion Act of 1998. He believes, however, that these they must be “held to the same standards of transparency as public schools to ensure accountability for these privately managed organizations.” Transparency? Accountability? Jesus fucking Christ. These are not the right criteria. The right criteria are funding and the right to have a union. Charter schools get the lion’s share of the funding and teachers lose the right to challenge the administration through strikes or grievances.

As for Antonio Villaraigosa, Blanc merely refers to him as “a former union organizer who quickly abandoned his pro-labor commitments upon becoming LA’s mayor in 2005.” It is worth pointing out the DSA enthusiastically supported him for mayor. Writing for the DSA Democratic Left, Peter Dreier singled out the networks who were crucial to his election:

When he ran for Mayor the first time in 2001 he lost, but he ran again and won in 2005. Now we have a progressive mayor, thanks in large part to this impressive network of grassroots organizations, labor unions and community and environmental organizations. Many of them have lifted up some of their leaders into positions of electoral power. It’s a network of activists that work closely with elected officials, like Congresswoman Hilda Solis, and it’s just remarkable what L.A. has become.

In 2010, Villaraigosa named Austin Beutner as his Deputy Mayor. Beutner became Superintendent of the LA School System last year, appointed by the current mayor Eric Garcetti. Whatever made Villaraigosa pick someone like Beutner to be his second in command? In 1989, Beutner was a partner at Blackstone, a private equity group run by Stephen Schwarzman who once described Obama’s “crackdown” on Wall Street as “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Soon after Beutner became Deputy Mayor, he stated in an interview that his goal was “to make Los Angeles the most business-friendly city in the country.”

In 2015, billionaire Eli Broad, the Waltons and Michael Bloomberg spent $2.3 million to help elect a board of education that backed charter schools. This has been part of a major offensive by the capitalist class to restructure American education along quasi-privatization guidelines. Despite Bernie Sanders’s foolish notions about private versus public, all charter schools are private. The only difference between Arne Duncan and Betsy Devos is degree. The same thing with Obama saying in November 2018 “That whole suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people” and Trump targeting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—just a matter of the degree.

What is going on with people like Villaraigosa selling out? Why can’t “democratic socialists” anticipate such developments? Perhaps the best way to understand this is the sheer difficulty of being a revolutionary in the USA. I can’t blame Eric Blanc for joining the DSA rather than the ISO. Being in a small revolutionary organization swimming against the stream is a taxing business. Can’t you imagine the excitement around Villaraigosa’s campaign in 2005 when he had an “impressive network of grassroots organizations, labor unions and community and environmental organizations”? It must have been as heady an experience as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being elected to Congress. Or Obama getting elected in November, 2007.

Unfortunately, swimming against the stream is the only way to make a revolution in the USA. As tiresome as it is for the salmon to reach its spawning grounds or for tiny numbers of Marxists to break out of their isolation and rally working people to the cause of revolution, this is the task that confronts us in the 21st century. All around us are signs of terminal decay, from monarch butterfly extinction to a new nuclear arms race. If it was possible for the Democratic Party to overcome these crises, it might make sense to adopt an “inside-outside” orientation. There’s a wrinkle, however. The 20th century was replete with radicals being taken over by the Nancy Pelosis of the world rather than us taking over the Democratic Party. Let’s make the 21st century a new start for independent class action. If the ability of government workers at airports to withhold their labor could torpedo (even if momentarily) Trump’s wall, imagine if they and the rest of the working class could form a left party with the resolve to create a new society based on human needs rather than private profit. That was Karl Marx’s goal and it is still worth pursuing.

November 19, 2018

Nancy Pelosi and the horse trading progressives

Filed under: two-party system — louisproyect @ 8:27 pm

Nancy Pelosi has been making news lately as an obstacle to the transformation of the Democratic Party into the kind of European Social Democratic Party the DSA and Sandernistas yearn for. There is a growing momentum to reject her bid to be reelected as Speaker for the House of Representatives.

Norman Solomon, the director of RootsAction.org, a Sandernista online activist group, wrote an article for Truthdig titled The ‘Pelosi Problem’ Runs Deep that does not quite call for a vote against her: “Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.” Solomon instead urges his 1.5 million “members” (nothing more than clicking a link online) to continue more or less the same course DSA urges, namely activism around various issues such as a “Green New Deal” and electing people like Ocasio-Cortez.

Justice Democrats, another online activist outfit like RootsAction.org focused on electing “progressives”, has received the endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez. Two days ago she got on the phone with some 700 Justice Democrats, most of whom were active in the Sanders campaign, and told them: “Long story short, I need you to run for office. We all need to run at all levels of government, but I really hope that many of you join me here in Congress.”

Last Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez participated in a sit-in at Pelosi’s office calling for a Green New Deal that she views as requiring the same commitment as WWII and the Marshall Plan. If I were her, I’d probably not have alluded to such obvious imperialist projects but then again I live in Another Country, as James Baldwin once put it.

Does this mean that she was ready to vote against Pelosi becoming Speaker? Surprise-surprise. Four hours ago, she pledged support for her as the “Most Progressive Candidate” . She added, “All of the rebellion for the speakership are challenges to her right, and so I think it’s important to communicate that.” Among the 16 House Democrats opposing Pelosi is Max Rose, who just got elected in Staten Island, a NY borough that has much more in common with rural Iowa than the rest of the city. Filled with white cops and firemen, you’d think that Rose would be another Joe Manchin. A visit to Rose’s website, however, will reveal that he favors lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55, etc. The NY Times analyzed why he beat the incumbent:

His pedigree might have alienated potential constituents, but his rhetoric did not. He offered a simple, unifying message that was progressive in substance but relatively neutral in its delivery: that the system is rigged to benefit special interests, that the little guy is getting stiffed over and over, that we need better infrastructure and stronger unions.

The most outspoken opponent of Pelosi’s reelection is Marcia Fudge, an African-American Representative from Ohio, who has even been considering a run against Pelosi. Fudge has been stigmatized as homophobic for refusing to co-sponsor the Equality act but defends herself by saying that that she supports gay rights, but not the way that particular bill was handled. She said, “They can’t find one vote, not one vote, that’s anti. I just don’t want to insert it into the civil rights bill. It should be a stand-alone bill and I’d support that.”

Fudge is an ally of Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who also signed the letter against Pelosi and who ran against her for the House Speaker post in 2016. There’s nothing much in his record to place him in the DP’s rightwing. Indeed, in an op-ed piece for the NY Times, he stated: “I think that Ocasio-Cortez was expressing the frustration that so many people feel right now that our systems aren’t working for the people who work hard and play by the rules. She talked about the cost of rent, health care, wages and education. Those are bread and butter issues that play all across the country.”

I really don’t have the time, nor the motivation, to look into the background of the other 15 Democrats but for argument’s sake will accept the possibility that they are to the right of Pelosi. What interests me more is how this fits into the broader question of how to understand the role of the Democratic Party in American society.

To start with, Ocasio-Cortez does have a point. Pelosi is, by DP standards, fairly progressive. On Facebook, Stephen Zunes, a San Francisco professor and well-known journalist of the left, wrote:

Given that under Nancy Pelosi’s leadership the Democrats won back the House while under Chuck Schumer’s leadership Democrats actually lost seats in the Senate, why is it Pelosi whose leadership is being challenged?

1) Pelosi, while not nearly as progressive as I would like, is still more liberal than Schumer. For example, she opposed the invasion of Iraq and supported the Iran nuclear agreement while Schumer sided with the Republicans on both of these important foreign policy matters. Pelosi is also more progressive on a number of important domestic issues as well.

2) Pelosi, because she is more willing to challenge Republican priorities, has been attacked a lot more by Republicans than has Schumer and some Democrats get easily spooked by right-wing criticism

3) there is still a lot of sexism among Democrats

In my view, the opposition to Pelosi is overdetermined in the Althusserian sense. Among the various factors, each of which by themselves would serve as a sufficient grounds for opposing her, are:

  1. As Zunes said above, she has been pilloried for years now by the Republicans. Leaving aside the merit of their attacks, her unpopularity rating is at 29 percent. To some extent, this is the same sort of burden Hillary Clinton carried around. The two are female (obviously), wealthy, urban, and indifferent to the plight of the working people. For example, in 2010 Pelosi opposed a moratorium on home foreclosure, something Clinton ironically did support.
  2. As opposed to the Republicans, the Sanders wing of the party views her as inimical to the changes that are necessary to make the DP an agent of “socialism”. Despite the Republican attack on her as a “radical”, Govtrack.us ranks her as the 37th most conservative Democrat in the House.
  3. Probably the most important motivation for replacing her is the perceived need voiced by younger elected officials in the DP to make room at the top for themselves and their cohorts. In a way, it is the same problem that exists in the academy where professors continue to hold down jobs well into their 70s, if not their 80s. An old friend who taught sociology at Columbia described this as “calcification” not much different than the kind that can cause a stroke.

You get a real sense of the ambitions that drive opposition to Pelosi from Beto O’Rourke, the leftwing darling who lost a narrow race to Ted Cruz in November. In today’s NY Times, he comes across as the ultimate careerist:

“You have some of the institutional members say, ‘Who are these upstarts?’ ” one of these younger Democrats, Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who was elected in 2012, told me in 2015. “One member of Congress compared us to spoiled kids, like teenagers who want a car on their 16th birthday. But you look at my class: Tulsi Gabbard, she’s not going to stay in the House for long — she’ll run for governor. Joe Kennedy, the same. Pat Murphy, the same. And they’re all talented, ambitious and good fund-raisers. I’ve just got to think that when you see that 20-year road to be in a position of consequence, other options look a lot more attractive.” O’Rourke, of course, left this year to pursue those other options, following his fellow erstwhile rising House stars Xavier Becerra (who was appointed attorney general of California in 2017) and Kyrsten Sinema (whom Arizona elected to the Senate this month). [emphasis added]

This reminds me quite a bit of what Les Evans told me when I joined the SWP in 1967. “I looked around when I joined and saw that I could become a leader of this party without too much trouble.” (Or something to that effect.) After cutting his ties to the party during the turn, Evans took a position at UCLA exploiting his knowledge of Chinese he developed in the party. Today, he is a Zionist and a liberal. Who knows where O’Rourke will be in 20 years? I can say that when he started out, he was not exactly the sort of politician that would endear himself to the average DSA member.

Probably the most savvy take on the progressive opposition to Pelosi comes from Politico, a website that views this sort of thing the way that touts view the odds at a horse race. Titled Progressives back Pelosi for speaker — in return for more power, it sees the compromise as old-fashion horse-trading, to continue with the equine analogy.

It wasn’t a coincidence that moments after Nancy Pelosi promised progressive House leaders more power in the next Congress, a host of liberal groups announced they were supporting her for speaker.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who is expected to co-chair the House Progressive Caucus next year, left a Thursday night meeting with Pelosi in the Capitol and proclaimed that her members would have more seats on powerful committees and more influence over legislation.

The Washington state Democrat then phoned MoveOn and Indivisible with the news, and they promptly tweeted out support for Pelosi. Then, on Friday morning, Jayapal, previously uncommitted on whom she would back for speaker, gave Pelosi a full-throated endorsement.

“No one can really doubt Pelosi’s progressive chops,” Jayapal told POLITICO in an interview. “And I do think, for the next two years, as we lead into 2020, and are coming off this big wave, we need someone who is smart and strategic and has done this.”

Smart and strategic? I suppose so. To give you an idea of what this means in practice, look how Jayapal and her cohorts finessed the abolish ICE demand as reported by In These Times:

In July, three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.)—introduced a bill to abolish ICE. They intended it as a statement of principle and, as Vox observed, “weren’t ready to be taken seriously,” given that the majority of Americans oppose abolishing ICE and Democrats themselves are split. House Republicans threatened to bring it up for a vote, with the hope of embarrassing Democrats. The progressives then announced they would vote against their own bill. But as with Warren’s plan for reforming capitalism and the more ambitious climate change plans, such laws that push the moral envelope lay important groundwork for when progressives and Democrats actually have power. [emphasis added]

So if they don’t take themselves seriously, why should we?

Writing for The Nation, the abysmal Joan Walsh interviewed Jayapal as “a bridge between the still-feuding Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democratic Party”. It concluded with these words from Jayapal: “We can’t tear each other down. If we start to divide ourselves now, we’re really lost. It doesn’t mean we can’t disagree about things. But we agree we’re all working toward the same place. That’s when we begin to win.”

For the past year or so, we’ve been hearing about how people like Jayapal and Ocasio-Cortez will eventually take over the Democratic Party. Mark my words. Within a year or two, the Democratic Party will have taken them over. That’s what it has been doing with the left for over a century and it is an art it has perfected. When those being co-opted are getting richly rewarded for their surrender, no wonder there will barely be a whimper. It is up to us who still see a need for revolution to scream at the top of our lungs from every rooftop.

November 9, 2018

Why Democrats are so okay with losing

Filed under: Counterpunch,two-party system — louisproyect @ 2:37 pm

Mikie Sherrill, the true, new shining star of the Democratic Party–not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 9, 2018

Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the left-liberal press about the need to run “progressive” candidates if the party wants to win. The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: “By running to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory.”

The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively.

In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of Representatives for the Democrats. In this month’s midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that a “Blue Wave” would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans—put them in the driver’s seat. It turned out to be more of a “Blue Spray”, not to speak of the toothless response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.

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September 19, 2018

Ocasio-Cortez endorses Cuomo while he flips her off

Filed under: two-party system — louisproyect @ 10:33 pm

From “State of the Nation”, CNN, September 16:

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Cynthia Nixon did a phenomenal job.

JAKE TAPPER: She lost your district by 30 points.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: Right, right, but we focused on our local candidates, and we focused on the legislatures.

But I think that what she did was that she centered a lot of phenomenal issues. She centered racial justice. She centered criminal justice reform. She centered the legalization of marijuana, single-payer health care. And a lot of down-ballot candidates benefited from that.

And what I also look forward to moving forward is us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November.

The Guardian, September 14, 2018

Andrew Cuomo says progressive wave is ‘not even a ripple’ after primary win

Governor discussed his vision of the Democrat party at a press conference on Friday, calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win ‘a fluke’

 in New York

‘I’m not a newcomer. But I am a progressive. And I deliver progressive results,’ Andrew Cuomo told reporters.
 ‘I’m not a newcomer. But I am a progressive. And I deliver progressive results,’ Andrew Cuomo told reporters. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, has said the so-called insurgent progressive wave in his party is “not even a ripple”, arguing that it’s pragmatists like him who can get things done who are the true progressives.

Cuomo, a two-term Democratic incumbent, on Thursday defeated challenger Cynthia Nixon by a 30-point margin – turning back the latest attempt by a newcomer from the left to unseat a Democrat favored by the establishment.

The governor, viewed as a potential 2020 presidential contender, used a victory lap press conference on Friday to make a forceful case for his own vision of the party.

“I’m not a socialist. I’m not 25 years old … I’m not a newcomer,” he told reporters at his Manhattan office. “But I am a progressive. And I deliver progressive results.”

Cuomo was fighting back against another narrative that has taken hold in the party: that the upset win by New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic socialist who knocked off the powerful representative Joe Crowley, set off a domino effect in primaries around the country, including upset wins by progressives running for governor in Georgia and Florida and for a congressional seat in Massachusetts.

“Where was that effect yesterday? Where was it?” Cuomo asked.

Instead, he said the win by Ocasio-Cortez in Queens in June was merely “a fluke”, explained by the timing of the vote which resulted in low turnout.

The statewide primary this week, by contrast, saw a spike in turnout, and Cuomo bragged that he got more primary votes than any governor in history.

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“That is a wave,” he said. “On the numbers – not on some Twittersphere dialogue where I tweet you, you tweet me, and between the two of us we think we have a wave. We’re not even a ripple.”

Cuomo won despite a series of missteps in the closing days of the campaign, when he drew criticism for a mailer sent out linking Nixon to antisemitism, which his camp and the state Democratic party were forced to disavow.

And after Cuomo hosted an event alongside Hillary Clinton to mark the opening of a new bridge named for his father, the span was forced to stay closed due to structural dangers.

Cuomo ruled out a presidential run during the primary race, promising to serve a full term as governor unless “God strikes me dead”, but there are already rumblings he could change his mind.

To have a chance, he would have to make the case that a politician like himself – the son of a former governor, known more as an operator and dealmaker than an ideological purist – is the best standard bearer against Donald Trump, an argument that was apparent in his remarks on Friday.

He pointed to his track record of raising the minimum wage, creating a paid family leave program, and legalizing gay marriage.

“A progressive Democrat, a Democrat in New York state – these are not ivory tower academics. These are not pontificators. These are not people who live in the abstract or the theoretical. New York Democrats, these are hard-working men and women,” he said.

“They opened the envelope and they looked at their check, and they saw that their check went up. That’s how they know a $15 minimum wage meant something to them.”

 

August 3, 2018

Young Marxist intellectuals and the Democratic Party

Filed under: DSA,two-party system — louisproyect @ 5:29 pm

Adam Hilton: McGovern + Marx = democratic socialism

The “democratic socialist” movement spawned by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign has led to an interesting development. Highly educated and self-described socialists in the academy have written erudite articles making the Marxist case for voting Democratic. Even if they are wrong, I am impressed with the scholarly prowess deployed on behalf of obvious casuistry.

These articles often appear in Jacobin, which has managed to repackage arguments made by Irving Howe a half-century ago in the snazziest of graphics. In 2016, for example, Seth Ackerman, a Jacobin editor and dissertation student at the highly prestigious Cornell University, wrote “A Blueprint for a New Party” that advanced “new electoral strategies for an independent left-wing party rooted in the working class” but in fine print recommended running in Democratic Party primaries. Jacobin followed up with another such article by Eric Blanc but couched in terms of a “dirty break” from the Democratic Party as opposed to the “clean break” advocated by Marxist dinosaurs like me. Such a “dirty break” was adopted by the Nonpartisan League in the early 20th century, when it ran candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties (a case can be made that the Republicans were the lesser evil at the time). Blanc, who is a dissertation student at NYU, is even more steeped in Marxist lore than Ackerman. One supposes that this is a prerequisite for convincing congenitally radical young people to work for Democratic Party candidates when disgust with the party is at an all-time high.

The most recent occurrence of this special pleading can be found in the 2018 Socialist Register. Adam Hilton, a visiting lecturer at Mount Holyoke, takes up 31 pages in consideration of “Organized for Democracy? Left Challenges Inside the Democratic Party” that is based on his 2016 dissertation “Party Reform and Political Realignment: The New Politics Movement in the Democratic Party”. Essentially, Hilton points to the “New Politics” movement of the late 60s and early 70s as an experiment that might have produced a European style Social Democracy if George McGovern hadn’t gotten clobbered by Nixon. For an unrepentant Marxist like me, the nostalgia is over 1917 Bolshevism rather than 1972 left-liberalism. For that I make no apologies.

Hilton has defended pretty much the same thesis in six different scholarly journals and another four more easily accessible magazines, including two for Jacobin. One gathers that there is a booming market now for “democratic socialism” in both high and low venues. Since most of you don’t have access to the paywalled Socialist Register, my advice is to read one of the Jacobin articles, with this one best for understanding my critique.

My interest was piqued by Socialist Register publishing an article defending work in the Democratic Party since the editorial board virtually constitutes the high priesthood of Marxism, with York University’s Leo Panitch earning pride of place as a long-time advocate of class politics, resistance to bourgeois parties and all sorts of other good things. Maybe he included an article defending voting for Democrats as a courtesy to Hilton, who was his dissertation student. Let’s hope so since the Democratic Party would be the last party in the world I’d expect Panitch to promote.

For me, this pandering to the oldest, still-functioning, capitalist party in the world by smart young things is a novel experience. Ever since I got into Marxist politics in 1967, the only people on the far reaches of the left who advocated voting Democratic were in the Communist Party. You were not likely to find references to the Nonpartisan League running in Democratic primaries a century ago in their party press. Instead, it was more like vote for Hubert Humphrey or else we get WWIII.

If Hilton has a scholarly grasp of what was going on in the Democratic Party in 1972, he seems a lot less knowledgeable about the broader dimensions of a debate that has been going on since the 1930s when for the first time in history the Communist left in the USA supported the Democratic Party under the ideological umbrella of Georgi Dimitrov’s Popular Front.

In the second paragraph of his article, he states that “amidst the Great Depression, the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal successfully integrated insurgent farmer and labour groups, after which independent third-party vote shares in US elections declined and never recovered.” Declined and never recovered? This almost makes it sound organic, like a zinnia dying after the first frost in autumn.

In fact, there was widespread support for a labor party in the 1930s but it was quashed by the same people who told you to vote for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In 1980, Mike Davis wrote an article in New Left Review titled “The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party” that anticipated his classic 1986 book “Prisoners of the American Dream”. Describing the hunger for electoral alternatives even with a friend of labor in the White House, Davis writes:

In ‘feudal’ steel towns, as we have seen, political mobilization for democratic rights was a virtual precondition for union organization. Similarly in auto centers, the sitdown strikes spurred UAW militants to campaign against corporation-dominated local governments. In Lansing and Jackson, Michigan, for example, UAW ‘flying squads’ did double duty on picket lines and ballot counting, while in Flint and Saginaw the union stewards were also organized on a residential basis, creating a powerful ward organization. Local after local of the auto, electrical and garment workers voted support for the concept of a labour party in a groundswell of political independence that discomforted Lewis and Hillman. A Gallup Poll conducted in August, 1937, following the sitdown wave, showed that at least 21% of the population supported the eventual formation of a national farmer-labour party.

What if the Communist Party had thrown its weight behind the formation of a labor party, especially after working-class ire was raised by FDR’s “plague on both your houses” statement during the Little Steel strike? In 1937, Chicago cops opened fire on a Memorial Day parade organized by the steelworkers that left ten dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire or clubs. The mayor who ordered the attack was a Democrat named Edward J. Kelly who had been endorsed by the CP. Afterward, Kelly met with the CP-led steelworkers union and promised to keep the cops on a short leash if it would endorse him once again in 1939. Not only did it agree, a worker who lost an eye in the massacre did a radio spot for him during his re-election campaign.

There was one independent left party in the 1930s and early 40s, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, but the CP succeeded in merging it with the Democratic Party in 1944. While the party was shaky at best, taking a hostile position toward the Trotskyist-led Teamsters Strike in 1934, it was something that could have been made more effective by the presence of an organized and supportive socialist component—in other words, the sort of thing the DSA is up to in the DP. Writing for CounterPunch in 2014, Graeme Anfinson referred to Stalinist elements within the party, who had been instrumental in bureaucratically shutting down any disagreeing voice from the unions, being at the forefront of the merger.

So, the independent third-party vote did not die of natural causes during the New Deal. It was killed.

Targeting moldy figs who still view the Democratic Party as a bourgeois party, Hilton assures us that it cannot be bourgeois since it has intimate ties with the trade unions. He writes:

Even though, as will be developed below, Democratic Party organs have rarely served as centres of community life, the party apparatus did develop structural links with trade unions in most large industrial states in the 1930s as well as at the national level in the process of presidential nomination and campaigning. In some states, such as Michigan, these institutional linkages of elite brokerage fused into tightly integrated party-union relationships. In other states, through the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ political action committee (CIO-PAC) and, later, the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), organized labour engaged in voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, literature distribution and get-out-the-vote drives for unionists and non-unionists alike.

Seeing my wife go through the ordeal of getting tenure, I understand how dissertation students have to be monomaniacally focused on their topic but surely Hilton must have heard somewhere along the line that there are bourgeois parties everywhere that have such links to trade unions. Christian Democratic trade unions have been around forever in Europe. As a London School of Economics article points out, they were bigger in the Netherlands than unions connected to the social democracy:

Unlike in the UK, trade unionism in the Netherlands has never been an exclusively left-wing operation. In fact, all current Dutch trade unions have part of their roots in Christian-democratic trade unionism. Until the 1970s there was a Catholic, Protestant and socialist trade union. Their members voted exclusively for the Catholic, Protestant and labour party, and the leadership of these trade unions and parties was strongly intertwined.

For that matter, although I don’t have much direct knowledge of European trade unions, I am quite sure that they have many more connections to the grassroots than American unions. Hilton refers to voter registration drives, etc. but working-class disaffection from organized labor is at an all-time high just as it is for the DP. What’s missing today is any sense of a labor movement. Proof of that was the wildcat teachers’ strikes that only took place because the union bureaucracy had left the rank-and-file teacher to his or her own device.

Finally, let me turn to the “New Politics” movement that is the subject of Hilton’s dissertation. I know a bit about this since I was forced to contend with the McGovern campaign in 1972 as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. In 1968 and 1972, the antiwar movement declined because many young people understandably acting on a pragmatic basis hoped that the election of a Eugene McCarthy or a George McGovern would end the war. Indeed, when I was facing the draft in 1966, I was praying that someone like Senator Fulbright would save the day.

The New Politics movement was launched by Fred Harris, who was the head of the Democratic National Committee. He convened a commission led by George McGovern and Minnesota Congressman Donald Fraser that would propose changes to allow greater membership control and officeholder accountability. These reforms were meant to assuage “segments of the civil rights, student, antiwar, and feminist movements, as well as the labour-left”, according to Hilton.

Certainly, there were such segments, most of all people like Sam Brown and David Hawk who set the Vietnam Moratorium in motion. Their intention was to organize protests that would sheepdog people behind “peace candidates” like George McGovern, as Bruce Dixon puts it. Unfortunately for them, the Socialist Workers Party and its radical allies shanghaied the Moratorium and turned into a mass action calling for Out Now.

McGovern promised to withdraw US troops within 90 days of being elected but Nixon’s withdrawal was set for only 90 days longer after being re-elected. Since he was an incumbent and had practically invented the demagogic tricks of Donald Trump, he had no problem beating McGovern. Would McGovern’s election made much difference on the ground? Speaking for myself, I saw the antiwar demonstrations and the Vietnamese resistance as the only guarantee of peace.

On the more fundamental question of whether the New Politics movement could have made much difference resisting the neoliberal turn that arguably began in 1973 with the overthrow of Allende, one has to see the last 45 years as a function of capitalist contradictions rather than the ill-will of party bosses who hated McGovern. It was not the dominance of centrist Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton that led to capitalist austerity. Rather it was capitalist austerity that made Carter and Clinton necessary.

Capital has a remarkable instinct for self-preservation. In his 1972 acceptance speech, McGovern stated:

We must also make this a time of justice and jobs for all our people. For more than three and half years we have tolerated stagnation and a rising level of joblessness, with more than five million of our best workers unemployed at this very moment. Surely, this is the most false and wasteful economics of all.

Our deep need is not for idleness but for new housing and hospitals, for facilities to combat pollution and take us home from work, for better products able to compete on vigorous world markets.

Better products to compete on vigorous world markets? What is that except another way of saying make America great again? In both the Democratic Party left and the Republican Party right, there is this mythology of a return to a Golden Age based on an expanding economy and rising wages. For the past forty years at least, the trend has been toward us returning to a previous era but one resembling the Grover Cleveland administration rather than the New Deal.

Combatting the two-party system is going to require much more than elections. It will require the kind of strikes carried out by teachers, the Black Lives Matter protests, the Occupy Wall Street movement and a thousand other types of resistance to the status quo. For that struggle to move forward, it will require a revolutionary party that can coordinate and defend the mass movements. As it advances, it will eventually run up against the brick wall of resistance that every ruling class mounts when it is pushed back on its heels. When push comes to shove, we will need an American Lenin steeled in struggle to lead the movement toward socialism rather than a Bernie Sanders whose socialism stops short of even making the simple statement that capitalism is the source of all our problems. Based on our traditions, it will certainly be a democratic socialism that no capitalist power would be emboldened to attack it. After all, Cuba’s tight controls were a function of the Bay of Pigs more than anything else.

It is doubtful that such an outcome can be gestated out of the Democratic Party. Nay, precluded.

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