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On 4/5/2017 3:33 PM, Fred Murphy via Marxism wrote

Thought experiment: Let's say Sanders and Warren succeed beyond their
wildest dreams and either rout the neoliberal wing of the DP altogether or
break with the DP and successfully organize a new formation - in either
case, would it then be a working-class party? What else would have to
happen to make it so? While I see a lot of broadly reformist,
quasi-social-democratic ("progressive") programmatic points on the Our
Revolution website, I see nothing to indicate any aspiration to be a
working-class or social-democratic party.  And Google searches on "trade
unions" and "labor movement" on that site come up effectively empty.

* * *

I think this response to me is based on our experience in the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (that both Fred and I belonged to). The SWP had a schema that a working class party is either:

a) Programmatically proletarian, in other words, the SWP,
b) Based on the unions, or
c) One of the traditional currents in the workers movement, like Stalinism and Social Democracy.

Yet in the Communist Manifesto and other writings, Marx and Engels very clearly reference one party as the first worker's party, the English Chartists of the end of the 1830s and 1840s, even though it is on another planet from the criteria. And they were intimately familiar with it, especially Engels.

I'm going to go over this in a little bit of detail because I think many people haven't thought through that a workers party is not mainly an organization but a social phenomenon arising from a class movement.

The first thing to understand is that the Chartists weren't a centralized, structured political organization.

Then there's the program, which was strictly limited to electoralist bourgeois-democratic reforms, like universal male suffrage and parliamentary districts of equal population.

And the Chartist supporters included not just clubs organized by working-class activists but quite prominently also a wing of the middle class (bourgeois) radicals, including several members of parliament.

In what sense were the Chartists a "party" then?

First political parties were just being invented back then, and other meanings of "party" were all meshed together with it. In this context, it means, first and foremost, a side to a dispute (like a "party" in a lawsuit) and in this sense a self-and-other recognized "interest group," so to speak, not necessarily organization.

In this sense, Occupy was the embryo of a worker's party, a movement conscious of what it represented ("the 99%") fighting a recognized enemy ("the 1%") that controlled the economy, the government and the media. And, yes, because of its origins with a bunch of weirdo anarchists and then everyone copying Wall Street, it was a very strange movement.

Marx and Engels called the chartists a worker's party for many reasons, including that the London Workingmen's Association played a key role in starting it, the composition of the couple of national assemblies they held, reflecting the composition of their base, the tactics they used or were associated with even if not officially "Chartist" actions (including mass petitions, rallies, marches and strikes), and that the central leaders and the newspaper they started spoke as representatives of the workers in defense of the interests of the working people.

Marx and Engels were very much for getting involved in this kind of thing.

In criticizing the attitude of the German Marxists in the United States in the 1880s in relation to the labor-sponsored Henry George candidacy for NY City mayor, Engels wrote:

   Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of
   evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect
   that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the
   theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the
   impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own
   theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in
   for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische
   starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical
   level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse
   suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views
   in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist
   Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement
   of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate,
   do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse
   confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present
   they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn.

I think that is fully applicable to the current U.S. situation even if the next sentence in what Engels wrote is not: "A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform." [And please note: this has nothing to do with small propaganda campaigns: there were 11 million vote for president in the following election, so Engels is talking about a party with a mass following].

In that piece by Engels and many other writings, Marx and Engels stress that their theory is one of development, a description of social forces and classes in motion, with the Marxists looking to the working class beginning to cohere as a distinct group with common problems and interests that bind it together. And then though a series of issues and struggles, realizing that what it needs to do is take over the government.

So, from the point of view of class evolution, where are we in the United States?

We are emerging (I hope!) from well over half a century where the working class as a class was simply not a thing.

The victory of the United States over its enemies AND its allies in WWII led to an unprecedented 25-year period of rapidly rising living standards and job stability. Even after the general, average wage levels started to decline, many working people continued to have an improving situation.

This because of age-stratified wage structures. The apprentice who started at the equivalent of $15 an hour in the early 70s was earning say $30 by the early 90s. Of course, the guy who held the higher-paying position in the 70s made $40 an hour, and by the 90s the apprentice wage had been cut to $12. But the *individual* was better off even as wages declined.

That began to change for some in the 80s in the "rust belt" and in mining, but I believe it was when Bush the lesser took over in 2001 that it started to become generalized, and then the 2008 depression had a catastrophic impact, especially on people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.

Occupy marked the crystallization of consciousness in an over-saturated solution of class resentment on a mass scale that had built up in the previous decade. Young people especially were mad as hell that after doing everything they were supposed to do, they were tens of thousands of dollars in debt and has jobs flipping hamburgers or making coffee at Starbucks.

Occupy's "We are the 99%" was the first slogan expressing class consciousness that caught on with masses of working people in my entire life.

Just think: by then every kind of "identity politics" had been discussed and disected EXCEPT for working class identity politics. Why? Because there was no working class identity. Now it started to emerge.

The phenomenon was not just that workers did not recognize that they had common interests as workers. Many workers did not even consider themselves part of the "working class." They though that term in no way defined or described them or the circumstances of their lives.

And if you think of the 1950s and 1960s contrasted with the 1930s, it makes sense that an avalanche of borugeois propaganda was able to convince them that they were now "middle class." (One delicious irony in all this is that "rebuild the middle class" has now become a working class demand.)

The crystallization of class consciousness among many thanks to Occupy had a tremendous political impact. Remember in the summer of 2011, right before, all the talk was about deficits and cutbacks and Paul Ryan's brilliance. After Occupy, it changed to growing economic inequality and how to remedy it.

Various groups on the left talked about how Occupy "changed the conversation" but I don't recall any that really analyzed the magnitude of the social force needed to effect such a change in American politics. That force was simply the working class beginning to cohere as a "class for itself," i.e., conscious that it is a thing.

I think the Sanders campaign was a second stage in the awakening working class consciousness, and in some ways it was more explicitly political. You might argue it was fool's gold, but at least the fools were looking for gold.

Fred remarks that he went on the "Our Revolution" web site and he saw no clear class message. But I think the whole Sanders campaign was very strongly class-identified, even though what he would say were summarizing his message were things like that the economy should work for "everyone," not just the rich.

That was what was so striking to me about last week's Boston rally: His NOT saying something like that the Democrats have to become the party of everyone not just of the liberal elite but INSTEAD he said that the Democrats had to STOP being a party of the liberal elite and become a party of the working class.

*  *  *

I believe that the Sanders movement represents class motion among working people, especially millennials, in the direction of intervening in politics collectively as working people, i.e. towards becoming "a class for itself." I think that is quite simply undeniable.

Marx explains the process in The Poverty of Philosophy:

   Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of
   the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for
   this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus
   already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the
   struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass
   becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The
   interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of
   class against class is a political struggle.

I can't think of any reason why, if motion towards class political consciousness can supposedly be advanced by supporting a bourgeois imperialist labor party based on unions run by scoundrels with the likes of Tony Blair as ring leader, it can't be advanced by relating to something like the Sanders phenomenon, a movement born in the framework of a bourgeois imperialist party which is being powered by rank and file working people from below rather than some bureaucracy and that is organizing around immediate economic and social demands that have arisen in the economic and social struggles of working class and oppressed people.

I know it is unprecedented and there's nothing analogous in the last century and a half and so on. But theory is gray and life is green.

I don't think previous experiences of wings within bourgeois parties help that much. The consciousness working people here are emerging from is unique, I think, and my point is that this is all about consciousness.

At any rate, I don't think you can argue that nothing is happening. I think very, very clearly it is.

You can argue that Sanders is simply leading these people back into the Democratic Party, derailing the movement, undermining their consciousness or whatever you believe.

But I think turning a blind eye to this motion is a mistake.

JoaquĆ­n

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