In Discussion Bulletin #103, the group called New Democracy, contrary to its usual habit of ignoring political criticism, has done us the honor of responding to our denunciation of their bourgeois character and counter-revolutionary politics. In its reply ND, behind a renewed attack on Marxism, has tried hard to defend its supposed revolutionary intentions, but perhaps unknowingly what it really has done is to corroborate our charge that they are a bourgeois organization. By ND’s own account its two founding members are ex-militants of a now defunct maoist leftist organization, the Progressive Labor Party, who split from this organization to form another "Party" and later on ND. These individuals, whatever their intentions, instead of breaking with their political past in counter-revolutionary Stalinism, have simply moved from the defense of leftist bourgeois ideology to the forefront of the bourgeois attacks on Marxism, with the addition of a sort of democratic bourgeois rubbish developed by their guru David Stratman, the main ideologue of ND.
New Democracy distortions of Marxism
For former maoists, the ND crowd are quite unsophisticated in their distortion of Marxism. In their writings one can find all kind of nonsense, like the one which af nonsense, like the one which affirms that "for Marx whatever increases economic production is good; whatever fetters it is bad" or the one that says that "Marxism turned into a method of increasing productivity," and similar other trash. However, ND actually contributes very little that is original to the slanders that the bourgeois ideologues have often heaped against Marxism. Thus ND’s main line of attack is to make Marxism responsible for the bloody state capitalist regimes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites of Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and so on. For ND, as for the rest of the bourgeoisie, the regimes of these countries were/are "Marxist dictatorships" because the dominant class there and all over the world says so.
And, if revolutionaries, armed with the tools of Marxism, show that in those countries there has never existed anything but capitalist production relationships, while their dominant class regimes pretend to cover their brutal exploitation of the working class with the most trivial "marxist" phraseology, then according to ND revolutionaries "miss the point entirely." But ND is not satisfied with simply repeating its bourgeois mentors –that would show their true capitalist colors too obviously. While the latter denounce Marxism to oe latter denounce Marxism to obliterate any idea of working class revolution, ND swears that it does so to put "revolution in the agenda." In their own words: "we don’t criticize Marxism to attack the idea of revolution; we criticize it to put the idea of revolution back in the public agenda in a way that can inspire millions of people to build the revolutionary movement and make it succeed where the old movements failed."
This may sound like a commendable intention, but… the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As Marx used to say
"as in private life one distinguishes between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, still more in historical struggles must one distinguish the phrases and fancies of the parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conceptions of themselves from their reality" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, emphasis ours).
And the reality of ND, its real function, its raison-d’etre, as shown by its whole activity is to contribute to the mystification of the working class through the spreading of lies against Marxism. It is on this basis that we have denothis basis that we have denounced ND as a bourgeois group, regardless of how their members may earn a living; whether they are workers or petty bourgeois, or police agents, or whatever, is not an important issue. The central issue is what is the nature of the political positions and activity of the organization.
Marxism and New Democracy’s "revolutionary" ideas
According to ND, the "fundamental problem" with Marx is his view "of people and class struggle." Marx, the say, "thought working class people and capitalists are both motivated by the same thing –self interest. Marx understands the conflict between these classes as a conflict between the self interest of people who exploit others versus the self interest of people who are exploited." Next, ND begs to disagree with this "fundamental problem" and declares its ‘alternative": "working people object to exploitation not out of self interest but because they think it is wrong for anybody to be exploited." Thus for ND "class struggle is a struggle over what values should shape society, not a tug of war over competing self-interest." This is why the upcoming revolution will be the result of evolution will be the result of the victory of a an already existing "working class culture based on the values of solidarity, equality and democracy …against the capitalist values of inequality, competition and top down control." ND’s arguments are so contorted that one finds it difficult to choose where to begin to respond.
For a start let’s clarify marxism’s view "of people and class struggle," which, if it means anything, is marxism’s materialist conception of history. The whole view of world history up to the beginning of XIX century was based on the conception that the ultimate causes of the historical changes of society were to be found in the changing ideas —what ND calls "values"— of human beings, and, that of all the changes, political changes are the most important, and are dominant in world history. It was only after the French revolution that bourgeois historians began to recognize that the since at least the Middle Ages the developing force in European history was the struggle of the developing bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy for social and political domination. Marx, for his part, proved that the whole of previous history is a history of class struggles, a struggle for the social and political domination of social classes cr domination of social classes created by the material conditions in which society at a given point produces and exchange its means of subsistence
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives an integral formulation of this conception in the very well known passage, which despite its length, we will quote in its entirety as it succinctly presents the essence of the Marxist view:
"In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundations on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the materiof their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before.
From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…In broad outlines, we can designate Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois forms of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.
The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of one arising from the social conditions ofng from the social conditions of life of individual; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material condition for the solution of that antagonism…"
This materialist conception of Marx, together with his discovery of surplus value –the demonstration of how within present society under the existing capitalist mode of production, the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist takes place — was and is of supreme importance for the working class communist movement. It allowed the working class for the first time to understand the reason for the historical division of society into classes, into exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, oppressors and oppressed, and put in firm theoretical ground its movement for its own emancipation, which contains the uprooting of the economic conditions in which the existence of classes and class rule is based.
For Marx, the working class revolution was based on the fact capitalist relations of production would become too narrow, a "fetter" for the progressive development of society, and reaching that point would sink humanity in an ever-growing barbarism — a projection that the history of most of last century so brilliantly confirmed. Certainly this revolution, or the class struggle which leads to it, have nothing to do with "what values should shape society and who should rule it" (ND). In making its revolution the working class, as Marx said when analyzing the uprising of Parisian workers during the days of the "Commune", "have not ideals to realize…" in the sense of the ready-made utopias –or ND’s "values based on love and equality and solidarity" — set to be introduced by decree. Foreshadowing ND over a hundred years ago Marx would write:
"In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility." (The Civil War in France).
We cannot conclude without saying a few words about ND’s "critique" of the "Communist Manifest," which they pompously pronounced previously, but also maintain in their recent text inmaintain in their recent text in Discussion Bulletin. In its response to our denunciation of its politics in Discussion Bulletin, ND states that the Communist Manifesto’s "dominant theme" is "whatever increases economic production is good; whatever fetters it is bad" and, full of sentimental indignation, protests about Marx speaking of "capitalists as a positive force in its early years.".
The first affirmation is nothing but a stupid slander of Marx and Engels, and as regards the second, we claim its absolute validity. In describing the historical development of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels recognized the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie –as the bearer of large scale industry and the world market — in contrast to feudal aristocracy which struggled to keep their social position and the obsolete relations of production of feudalism. This is an historical fact –that ND likes it or not matters little — just as it is that that today bourgeois rule has become together with the relations of production that it represents not only a hindrance for the development of society, but a menace for its very existence. Furthemore that the bourgeoisie has become "unfit to rule" has absolutely no to rule" has absolutely nothing to do with changes in the ideology of the bourgeoisie or in ND words "with any change in capitalist values." In fact over two hundred years after the bourgeois French Revolution, bourgeois ideologues continue to hold fast to its historical ideological motto: "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" —spiced today with the catch word "democracy."
That this motto coincides almost word for word with the ND "model of social change and revolution" based on the "values of equality, solidarity and democracy," should surprise no one; it proves, if it were still necessary, the bourgeois character of this group and how misplaced are its militants when they say: "we don’t trace our thinking to any particular individuals from the past." Despite their claims of being new thinkers, so reactionary are the politics of ND, that their analysis of ideas or values as the motor force of history dates back to the 18th century, and their revolutionary watchwords are a throwback to the French Revolution at the end of that century.
Eduardo Smith.
As we pointed out in Part I of this series, Daniel De Leon unquestionably played a pivotal role in introducing Marxism to American revolutionaries, and exerted considerable influence early in this century not only over members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), but also the left of the Socialist Party (SP) and the early Communist Party, as well. Unfortunately this influence wasn’t always beneficial. In Part II, we focused on De Leon’s mistaken adherence to Lassallean economic conceptions (see Internationalism 114), which rendered De Leon incapable of comprehending the relationship between the immediate struggle and the historic goals of proletarian struggle. This failure had profound implications for De Leon and his followers in terms of their political intervention in the class struggle.
Rejection of revolutionary work within the mass organizations of the working class
De Leon contended that strikes could be successful only in the early stages of capitalism. In his view the development of machinery and the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed had undercut the ability of workers to wage successful strikes. Following the failure of the Buffalo Switchmen’s strike in 1892, De Leon wrote, "Once more it has been shown that no strike couldshown that no strike could succeed in industries that reached a high degree of capitalistic concentration" (People, August 28, 1892). This view, consistent with De Leon’s Lassalleanism, was completely at odds with the Marxist understanding of the workings of capitalist economy and the class struggle. As Marx insisted,
"The historical or social element, entering into the value of labor, may be expanded or contracted, or altogether extinguished so that nothing remains but the physical limit…the value of labor itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant…The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labor" (Value, Price and Profit).
The failure to see that workers could struggle to improve their living standard – to increase wages and wrest durable reforms during the period of capitalist ascendancy had catastrophic consequences for De Leonism’s intervention in the class struggle, leading directly to a rejection of revolutionary work within the mass organizations of the proletariat during that period. For De Leon unions made sense only if they advocated the destruction of capitalism, and ignored tn of capitalism, and ignored the immediate struggle. In the early 1890s, De Leon had had illusions about the possibility of revolutionary socialists gaining control of the American Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor, but after several years of "boring from within," De Leon became completely disenchanted with the mass unions. In 1894, De Leon enunciated his hallmark positions on revolutionary trade unionism and revolution at the ballot box, in an article about the failed Pullman strike:
"The union of the workers that expects to be successful must recognize 1) the impossibility of obtaining a decent living while capitalism exists, the certainty of worse and worse conditions, the necessity of the abolition of the wage and capitalist system, and their substitution by the Socialist or Cooperative Commonwealth, whereby the instruments of production shall be made the property of the whole people…and 2) the necessity of conquering the public powers at the ballot box by the vote of the working class, cast independently."
Frustrated by the failure to capture control of the unions, De Leon denounced them as useless and dead, and called upon socialists to withdraw and adopt a dual unionist policy. In 1895 the SLP established the Soc1895 the SLP established the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (ST&LA), which an SLP resolution written by De Leon hailed "as a giant stride toward throwing off the yoke of wage slavery." In 1900 the SLP formally dropped support for immediate demands in workers struggles, and in 1902 in "The Warning of the Gracchi," De Leon wrote,
"The characteristic weakness of the proletariat renders it prone to lures…The essence of this revolution – the overthrow of wage slavery, cannot be too forcefully held up. Nor can the point be too forcefully kept in evidence that short of the abolition of wage slavery, all ‘improvements’ either accrue to capitalism or are the merest moonshine."
This rejection of the possibility of fighting for immediate demands, of winning gains or durable reforms, was absolutely dead wrong in the period of capitalist ascendance, in which De Leon lived, a period when capitalism was still an historically progressive mode of production, still expanding, and favoring a development of the productive forces, and therefore making durable reforms a real possibility. But it would be wrong even if advocated today in the period of capitalist decadence, when the system is no longer hie, when the system is no longer historically progressive, but rather has become a fetter on the further development of the productive forces and therefore incapable of granting reforms, because it grossly fails to recognize the link between the immediate struggle of the proletariat and the historic struggle to overthrow capitalism (see Internationalism 114 for a fuller explanation of capitalist ascendance and decadence). Even if reforms are impossible under decadent capitalism, the immediate struggle of the proletariat to defend its interests against capitalist attacks poses the possibility of transforming struggles that begin even as simple economic disputes into a political confrontation with state capitalism, which holds the seeds of the revolutionary struggle.
De Leon’s confusion on revolutionary work within the mass organizations of the proletariat was at odds with the repeated interventions in the American socialist movement by Engels, who urged participation in the existing unions, which,
"whatever their shortcomings and little absurdities, whatever their platform and their constitution…are…the only national bond that holds them (American workers) together, that makes their strength felt to themselves not less than to their enemies: less than to their enemies: (Marx & Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848-1895, The Labor Movement in the United States, p. 289).
Engels also called upon socialists to form
"a core of people who understand the movement and its aims"
within the unions, and warned that if socialists
"stand aloof, they will dwindle down into a dogmatic sect and be brushed aside as people who do not understand their own principles" (Letter for Frederick Sorge, Nov. 29, 1886).
Proving Engels prescience, the SLP withdrew from the mass unions, retreated into its ST&LA front group, which shrank from 15,000 workers to 1,500 in the decade of its existence, and cut itself off from the masses of the working class.
De Leon’s foolhardy withdrawal from the mass organs of the proletariat triggered considerable opposition from within party ranks, which led to a wave of splits and expulsions, after which the SLP was reduced to a small isolated group, losing half its membership, including long time and leading members of the organizatiog members of the organization. In 1900, one significant group split to regroup with Eugene Debs and others to form the Socialist Party, which quickly developed into a mass socialist party during the first two decades of the 20th century. The splits and expulsions had reached such epidemic proportions that in 1902, Lucien Sanial and Hugo Vogt, high ranking party leaders who had sponsored De Leon for membership in the SLP in 1890, issued an appeal for an end to "the inquisition in the SLP," and then shortly left the party themselves. Rudolf Katz, an SLPer who left the party at the time of De Leon’s death in 1914, reported that so many comrades had left the organization in such a short period of time
"that De Leon remarked that he had to look at himself in the mirror at least once a day to find out whether he had not gone with the others" (quoted in Reeve, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon).
Confusions on the development of class consciousness
Mesmerized by bourgeois democracy, a serious political confusion that will be addressed in the ion that will be addressed in the next installment of this series, De Leon sorely misunderstood how class consciousness develops in the course of class struggle. For him consciousness was measured by means of the political thermometer of elections, and developed pedagogically, one worker at a time, as a voter at the ballot box, not as a collective phenomenon among workers at the point of production in the class struggle.
True, De Leon said he found
"the attitude of workingmen engaged in a bona fide strike…an inspiring one. It is an earnest that slavery will not prevail. The slave alone who will not rise against his master, who will meekly bend his back to the lash…that slave alone is hopeless. But the slave, who…persists despite failures and poverty, in rebelling, there is always hope for" (What Means This Strike?).
But his view of class struggle is erroneous. It sees struggling workers as noble savages, blindly rebelling. However, workers are not the slaves of the ancient world, who could only engage in blind rebellion, a noble act against injustice. In slave society, the slaves did not hold the future of the world in their hands. They were not the key to a society without exploitaey to a society without exploitation and oppression. De Leon may have found the attitude of struggling workers "inspiring" but he did not understand that this struggle was the key to the transformation of society. In the same text, "What Means This Strike?" he developed his views with these words,
"Look at the recent miners’ strike; the men were shot down and the strike was lost; this happened in the very midst of a political campaign and these miners, who could at any election capture the government, or at least, by polling a big vote against capitalism announce their advance towards freedom, are seen to turn right around and vote back into power the very class that just trampled them."
What a mass of confusion. First there is the bourgeois conception of the workers gaining control of the capitalist state, a position abandoned by Marx on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871. And then, instead of pointing out the necessity for workers to organize and defend themselves, to arm themselves against the state and the pinkertons, to recognize the necessity for class war, De Leon called upon the workers to forsake the class struggle for the terrain of parliamentarism. What De Leon did not understand is t De Leon did not understand is that consciousness is a collective phenomenon. It cannot be measured by what an individual, atomized "citizen" does in a polling booth; it must be judged by what workers do together as a collectivity in confrontation with the bosses and their state. There is a concrete reason why every union bureaucrat knows that if he really wants a sellout contract rammed through, he has to hold a mail ballot ratification vote, where the workers alone in their living rooms will cast their ballots, rather than risk a mass meeting of the workers, where they can influence each other and react collectively to the issues before them.
In the period in which De Leon and the SLP were involved in the IWW, De Leon opposed what he disparagingly called the "bummery" who wanted to engage in direct action against the employers and the state. After the 1908 split between the anarchists and the SLPers in the IWW, the De Leonist controlled splinter-IWW organized one important strike, among silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1912, which gives a glimpse of De Leon’s conception of class struggle. This silk strike of 1912 is not to be confused with the famous struggle of 1913, led by the "bummery" IWW, which made working class history. No, the 1912 strike was doomed by the De rike was doomed by the De Leonist leadership which insisted upon legality and decorum in the course of the struggle. According to a contemporary newspaper report, "’Peaceful means’ is the slogan," meaning that workers could use only peaceful, legalistic forms of struggle under the SLP leadership.
"All forms of disorder and even peaceful picketing are barred. The strike-leaders notified the strikers that if any of them took the law into their hands the union would not help them out of trouble with the police" (St Paul Daily News, March 31, 1912, cited in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in he United States, Vol. 4).
It is precisely in those struggles that De Leon could appreciate only as the noble, blind rebellion of hapless slaves, that class consciousness develops. It is precisely these struggles, especially in decadent capitalism, that can lead quickly to a direct confrontation with the capitalist state, and hold the seeds of decisive class confrontations. Revolutionaries must intervene in these struggles to help generalize the lessons of past struggles, pointing out the need to organize independently of and against the unions, and the necessity for the violent overthrow of the capitalist state. Revolutionaries must not follow the example of De Leon, intervening in these struggles to tell the workers to abandon the class struggle for the ballot box in capitalist elections. In the next installment we will address De Leonism’s total confusion on the question of bourgeois democracy.
– JG
If there were no conjunctural factors pressuring the bourgeoisie to abandon the left in power strategy, neither was there any necessity to resort to an alternation in power to revitalize the democratic mystification. The left has been in power for only eight years, and the Republicans have controlled congress and a majority of state governorships, so there was no monopolizing of political powerolizing of political power for an overly long period of time to put in question the democratic mystification. After all, the right had held power for 12 years under Reagan/Bush, and was removed from office not to revitalize democracy, but rather because of imperialist preoccupations, following Bush’s indecisiveness to intervene in the Balkans and consequent squandering of American imperialist capital built up by the Gulf War in 1991..
Consequently, a Gore victory seemed most sensible for the bourgeoisie. As we noted in Internationalism 114, at the same time, to protect themselves against an "accident" the bourgeoisie installed the younger Bush as the candidate of the Republicans on the right. Despite all the campaign rhetoric, and despite their different party affiliations, both Gore and and Bush adhere to the same, identical faction of the bourgeoisie, with no significant divergences on imperialist policy, and essentially identical positions on all significant domestic policy questions. Whoever won, the bourgeoisie was assured that basically the same orientation on domestic and international policy would be pursued.
The campaign was manipulated to generate interest and enthusiasm in the election, to present it as "close" in order to bolsterlose" in order to bolster participation by largely apathetic electorate, to rejuvenate the electoral mystification. The propaganda stressed over and over that the campaign was too close to call, that every vote would count, etc. etc. The polls portrayed Gore as trailing even until the very eve of the election, prodding working class and liberal voters to come out to the poll to prevent the triumph of the right.
So, what happened?
In large measure the strategy prevailed. Despite being portrayed as trailing in all but one of the national polls by three to five points, Gore won the popular vote, achieving 49% of the vote, a greater percentage than the vastly more popular Clinton received in 1992 or 1996. In fac, Gore received more actual votes than Reagan did in his landslide victories over Carter and Mondale, respectively in 1980 and 1984. The political accident that threw the electoral circus into turmoil was due to two factors 1) the loose cannon actions of the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, and 2) the fact that for the first time since 1888, indeed for the first time in epoch of capitalist decadence, the results in the popular vote were contradicted by the results in the anachronistic Electoral College, which appeared to give the election victory to the candidate who came in second place.
The Nader Factor
Unlike the Perot campaigns of ’92 and ’96, which were designed to siphon off votes from the Republicans, and facilitate the victory of the left in those elections, the Nader candidacy was not designed to impact the current election. The script called for the Green Party to develop a political presence so that it might 1) prepare play a crucial role in the future as a means to control radicalized workers and petty bourgeois elements, as the crisis deepens and work class discontent becomes more pronounced, In this sense the Nader campaign was designed as a electoral reference point for the Seattle-type anti-globalism movement, as well as traditional environmentalists and "progressives." The immediate goal was to post 5% in the popular vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal campaign funds in the future. However, Nader made a deal with the established environmental groups and the Democratic Party that he would not seek to impact the result of the election, and promised not campaign in states where it might effect the outcome. For whatever reason – some of his critics in the left of the Democratic party and the environmental movement charge egomanial movement charge egomania – Nader reneged on this agreement and concentrated his campaign in key battleground states that were crucial to a Gore victory but were also most receptive to Nader’s "progressive message" attacking big business, . Realizing that Nader was poised to threaten the Gore victory, about two weeks before the election the environmentalists and the left of the Democratic party began an all-out campaign against Nader for reneging on the deal, urging him to withdraw from the election, and calling upon his supporters not to "waste" their votes and help elect Bush. The New York Times joined this campaign, denouncing Nader for "electoral mischief," and tv journalists joined the chorus as well. This campaign was in sharp contrast to the situation with Perot, who never received such criticism and was never asked to withdraw in ’92 and ’96 – precisely because his campaign was designed to effect the election results in the Clinton races..
Even though the bourgeoisie was successful in scaring off more than fifty percent of the people who were supposedly intending to vote for Nader, and achieved a Gore victory in the popular vote, the Green party candidate managed to screw up the electoral college vote on the state level in at least three states: New Hn at least three states: New Hampshire, Oregon and the all important Florida, with its 25 electoral votes. For example, in Florida, where Bush had a 1700 vote popular vote margin on election day (before the first recount which brought him down to 330), Nader got 96,000 votes. While undoubtedly a good number of the voters who cast ballots for Nader were people who were so alienated from the mainstream parties that probably wouldn’t have participated in the election had Nader not been a candidate, if only 3 percent of the 96,000 had voted for Gore, Bush would have been easily defeated on election day.
The anachronistic electoral college
The unforeseen accident that produced a situation in which the electoral vote did not match the popular vote was caused by Nader’s reneging on the deal, and aggravated by the electoral college, an anachronistic, anti-democratic -- even by bourgeois standards – historical relic created in 1787 as a check against "popular passions." In today’s conditions this institution is weighted disproportionately in favor of rural, small population states, and it was these states that Bush won heavily.
The bourgeoisie’s strategy provided protection against arovided protection against an accidental defeat at the polls, but not for a contradictory and indecisive result at the polls. For the American bourgeoisie, no matter how much they pay homage to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the constitution they created over 200 years ago, an election in which the guy who lost the election is declared the winner is a tremendous political embarrassment and liability. All the rhetoric about the "will of the people" and "the people decide" rings empty. Despite the fact that the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie could certainly live with either Gore or Bush as president with no problem, each of the candidates, and their entourages, genuinely want to be president, and this has led to never ending political soap opera since election day. All the bickering, posturing and rancor by the two candidates camps is in complete contrast to the normal unifying, mutual support and coming together that normally marks the conclusion an American electoral circuses.
The goal of the current recount, and the legal challenges by the Gore staff is designed not simply to satisfy Gore’s personal ambitions, which are real, but also to produce an election result in Florida so that the final Electoral College results will coincide with the popular vote, though the final outcom vote, though the final outcome is still in doubt. The ruling class is trying to put the best "spin" possible on the current situation, stressing how this election proves that every vote counts, and that the melodrama we are witnessing is a simply a stupendous civics lesson for the American public. But in reality both sides expose the pettiness and corruption of the highly touted American electoral political system, in which each side is shamelessly trying to cheat and manipulate the vote counts in their won favor. Senior "statesmen" in both parties, including former presidents Carter and Ford, are already pushing for a resolution that will somehow salvage the authority and legitimacy of the presidency and American democracy following the settlement of the current stalemate. And indeed the current squabbling in no way threatens the stability of American society – whatever jitters there are on Wall Street have been there for over a year and are not caused by the inconclusive election, the working class is not engaged in open struggle, and the imperialist strategy of American imperialism is not in question. In this sense the so-called "sharp political division" in the American electorate couldn’t come at a better time for the bourgeoisie, even if it is unplanned. While not having the left in power might create certain prob power might create certain problems for the ruling class in terms of justifying overseas military interventions or in potentially provoking oppositional actions by the unions and the Jesse Jackson/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrats, the situation will not be insurmountable. Once the election is decided the bourgeoisie will try to foster a reconciliation, and a strongly divided Congress and White House will somehow find the statesmanlike wherewithal to rise above partisan divisiveness to continue to attack the standard of living of the working class, and begin to repair the tarnished image of the democratic mystification. --
JG11/18/00
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/13/marxism-theory-revolution
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/leftism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/de-leonism
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections