Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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As someone campaigning for single payer locally before the Board of 
Supervisors and the Health Care District, this suggested much to me 
about Senator Bernie Outreach the reform Democrat and his ties to the 
Senator from Wall Street:


http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/03/27/thunderous-applause-welcomes-sanders-call-medicare-all:

'The senator from Vermont also tweeted 
 on Saturday, 
"Right now we need to improve the Affordable Care Act and that means a 
public option."


But corporate crime watchdog and single-payer advocate Russell Mokhiber 
warned against embracing the public option 
 
as a stand-in or even a stepping stone for Medicare for All.


In a piece published Sunday, Mokhiber quoted pediatrician and PNHP 
member Margaret Flowers, who co-directs the group Health Over Profit for 
Everyone. She said:


   Introducing a public option will divide and confuse supporters of
   Medicare-for-All. Senators who should co-sponsor Medicare-for-All
   will be divided. Sanders seems to be urging a public option to
   please the Democratic Party, but Sanders cannot serve two
   masters—Wall Street's Chuck Schumer and the people. Sanders must
   decide whom he is working for.

   While it might seem politically pragmatic to support a public
   option, it is not realistically pragmatic because a public option
   will not work. Senator Sanders knows that and he knows that the
   smallest step toward solving the healthcare crisis is National
   Improved Medicare for All. This would fundamentally change our
   health system that currently treats health as a commodity so that
   people only have access to what they can afford to a system that
   treats health as a public necessity so that people have access to
   what they need. Medicare-for-All achieves the savings needed to
   provide comprehensive coverage to everyone.

"We look to Senator Sanders to act on what he promised during his 
presidential campaign, a national improved Medicare-for-All now, not 
tomorrow," Flowers said. "Tomorrow never comes. It is not up to him to 
decide if single-payer can pass in Congress. That task is for the people 
to decide."'



The people have already decided, polling 70% in favor of Single Payer. 
What we need and are not getting are Senators and Representatives who 
are respectful of that decision. We insure against accidents and 
disasters elsewhere, everywhere, of people, property and nature, often 
affordably, but this fundamental imperative to protect human health 
affordably is barred by a powerful medical complex, who conceal from us 
the glaring fact that we are the only major country on earth not to 
guarantee healthcare to all people as a right.



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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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But to answer Fred's thought experiment, neither Sanders nor Warren have
themselves shown any indication of any interest in either trying to rout
the neoliberals in the Democratic Party or of breaking with it.

And, if they did, I don't know what influence we could have over it, given
the character of the DP.  And I don't primarily mean less the old (but
legitimate) question of the class character of its political positions or
power structure but its essential character.  That is, since it isn't a
membership party, no current in the voter base has any real definitive
voice over anything the party does or says . . . and only a limited
consumer satisfaction kind of voice in who the candidates are going to be.
So, there's no mechanism for effectively challenging the dominant powers in
the party . . . which is why those who try to do so eventually either give
up or get absorbed into it.

What this means is that--looking at the other alternative--if you did have
a break from the Democrats, what would we be breaking?  Not members.  At
best, perhaps, a handful of progressive figures could lead those non-member
voter consumers into shifting their consumer preference to another party
formation in which they will not be members and over which they will
exercise no power.

The Green Party has already provided an example of what this would look
like.  It's surely better than what we have and anything that breaks down
the peculiar madness of the American two-party system with a non-capitalist
option is welcome.  Supporting the Greens for where it might lead might
have made sense at some point, but--after long years of it--we've probably
seen how far it can go.

And if we already have one, why would we build a strategy around
constructing another Green Party?

Believe me, I wish we had a clearer answer.  But I"m confident that we have
long known what has not provided us an answer.

Solidarity!
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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If you see us getting "a bourgeois imperialist labor party" out of the
Democratic party somehow, you're welcome to it.  I can't even pretend to
know what it is without guessing, but I don't see us with another century
to conjure the Bernsteins and Kautskys.

And--stinking cynicial aside--working class politics haven't made a
revolution here, but--when history permits it enough purchase--it has
changed things.  So it's not at all like electing Democrats. Or we could
talk about the physics of all this.  The massive gravity of Jupiter draws
in comets and we've never really seen it spit them out.

But here I am wasting time trying to talk sense.  Of what use are such
things to socialism in the age of Trump?  Sure, maybe comets levitate right
out of Jupiter when we're not looking.  Maybe all that chanting to levitate
the Pentagon worked but the Pentagon only decided to levitate in the middle
of the night when nobody was around.

So, based on the idea that anything might happen,let's rationalizing doing
the one thing that we know has never ever worked.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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On 4/5/2017 2:09 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism wrote

If experience matters at all, we should not encourage people to do what 
has never worked well for us to see if it might be different this time.


*  *  *

1. Trying to do and finally achieving what had never been done before 
... isn't that not entirely unknown in the history of the human race. 
The wheel and fire come to mind.


2. If experience should guide us, why waste our time with working class 
politics in the United States? Past experiences have not been happy ones.


OK, those are wise-ass answers. But I just wrote a reply to Fred that 
explains in painful detail my point of view: it is not *at all* about 
trying to reform the Democratic Party (which I believe is impossible) or 
splitting this layer away  (which i hope will be the end result) but 
about relating to the evolution of motion towards class consciousness 
among tens of millions of people. It is about the protagonists, not the 
goal.



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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism]

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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 

Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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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.

https://ourrevolution.com/about/
https://ourrevolution.com/issues/


On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 2:09 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> The idea of making the Democratic Party a vehicle suitable for change
> favorable to the workers goes back to the very origins of the party .
> ​..
>
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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The idea of making the Democratic Party a vehicle suitable for change
favorable to the workers goes back to the very origins of the party . . .
when Andrew Jackson babbled about "the common man," while he was doing
ethnic cleansing on the native peoples and Latinos--and encouraging full
employment among African Americans by expanding the cotton plantations.

If experience matters at all, we should not encourage people to do what has
never worked well for us to see if it might be different this time.

Solidarity!
Mark L.
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Re: [Marxism] Sanders: 'Make Democrats a party of the working class, not liberal elite'

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 4/4/17 4:06 PM, Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism wrote:

This might cause a shitstorm here, but I'm going to send it anyways:

"Bernie has now projected "Our Revolution" as, in essence, the start of
a different party even while operating in the Democrat framework by
counterposing the idea of a working class party to a party of the
liberal elite

"I think that Marxists need to recognize the movement towards something
akin to a social-democratic party that the 'Our Revolution' faction of
the Democratic Party represents, and figure out how to relate to it."

[For my part, I'm in despite the capitalist so-called nature of the
Democratic Party, partly because I don't believe that things have a
"nature" or "essence" or some other invisible dimension that makes them
what they are.]

Full:

http://hatueysashes.blogspot.com/2017/04/sanders-make-democrats-party-of-working.html




What's so new? You used to post pro-Obama crap in 2007 just like Fred 
Feldman.


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