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Thanks Louis and Joaquin for the quotes from the classics on this issue. I believe we can also use our own living brains to relate such principles to the actual situation in the U.S. and fairly quickly see through to the nub of the issue: 1) The Democrats, like the Republicans are not simply capitalist parties, but as Obama is demonstrating beyond all possible doubt, the former, like the later, is an utterly reactionary rightwing party, albeit more "moderately" rightwing, while the latter is the party of the radical right. In no way is the Democratic Party a liberal party. 2) It is reasonable to see intervention in bourgeois elections as a tactic only so long as this is not divorced from strategy. Middle class progressives and workers who vote for the Democrats - even inconsistently as "independent swing voters", another generally reactionary category as they will often "swing" to the Republicans as well - are per #1 above themselves the "rightwing" of the masses of the workers whose revolutionary mobilization is the strategy. They are therefore the *last* sector of the working class or of radicalized petit bourgeois (this latter admittedly an oxymoron since progressive Democrats are by definition not radicalized) to be appealled to in pursuit of the strategy. It hence makes no tactical sense to open a conversation with this sector via the electoral system as presently constituted in the U.S., rather, the electoral system - as opposed to the particular rightwing parties mentioned in #1 - should be used to open a channel with the excluded sectors of the working class and radicalized petit bourgeois, of the former probably comprising a majority of the class. Note that this is a bit of an inversion of the old socialist adage that there was nothing progressive about working class non-participation in the electoral process. By the same token in the U.S. at least there is nothing necessarily progressive about working class participation in support of a completely reactionary party regime. This includes the growing oscilations between the two rightwing parties by this sector which though a measure of a growing crisis does not yet mark a qualitative break with the whole set of regressive policies and ideologies of the regime. This includes the Obama election. "Reagan Democratic" workers swung from Republicans to Democrats under the inpact of the economic crisis. The implication is that radicalized splinters could emerge from even this most conservative sector of the working class under conditions that would radically differ from the present, and in that case this conservative sector should be related to in a way analagous to that of the petit bourgeoise. But in the U.S. there will be a sector of the working class that will side with counterrevolution down to the bitter end. Don't kid yourselves here. -Matt ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
