[Marxism] On the Democratic Party question

[Louis Proyect]

Joaquin Bustelo wrote:
> I think this position is wrong. How and whether you vote in bourgeois
> elections --bourgeois electoral farces-- is strictly and solely a tactical
> question. Marx voted for bourgeois parties, Lenin voted for bourgeois
> parties and Fidel was the candidate of a bourgeois party for political
> office. 

When did Marx or Lenin vote for bourgeois parties? With respect to 
Castro running as an Ortodoxo candidate, I am not sure whether this is 
that meaningful. If he continued running as an Ortodoxo candidate in the 
way that Harold Stassen used to run in election campaigns in the USA, 
nobody would have ever taken notice. We study his early history as a 
guide to understanding the limits of bourgeois politics and the need to 
find another route.

> The SWP especially cooked up this cockamamie "theory" about what was really
> a "workers" party and what wasn't by which you could determine what was
> "permissible" or not, from a "class" point of view. So for example, if you
> wanted to vote for some disgusting Stalinist hack or social-democrat traitor
> to the workers movement, that was OK, but calling for a vote for Fidel in
> the 1952 Cuban elections, or for comrade sister Cynthia McKinney in the last
> several elections to the House of Representatives in Georgia's 4th
> Congressional District --which has been my district for almost 20 years--,
> THAT would be "crossing class lines." Go figure!

Because without the Cynthia McKinney's, the Democratic Party would cease 
to play the role that it does. You need some concessions to labor, to 
Blacks and Latinos, and to women in order to keep the contraption 
together. They are critical to keeping the Nation Magazine, moveon.org, 
the DSA, the CPUSA, and the rest of the soft left in on the 3-card monty 
game. They are desperately hoping that the face-down card will turn up a 
Democrat who will do the right thing. When the SWP urged a vote for Gus 
Hall or whoever, the idea was to make inroads on its opponent. I doubt 
that it ever considered the CPUSA as a vehicle for change in the way 
that Atrios.com or the UAW views the DP.

> But things are not that simple. The reality is --and this is especially
> BLINDINGLY obvious in the South-- that Black people, the Black community,
> has channeled its fight for the democratic right to political representation
> in and through the Democratic Party. That is just a fact.

Joaquin should go back and reread his old posts to Marxmail, where he 
argues that the overwhelming tendency of working and poor people in the 
US is to ignore elections altogether.

> I do not believe it can be justly said that Black people made a mistaken
> choice in doing this, because historical development and social conditions
> left them few other good choices. It isn't good, fair or just that this is
> the way things turned out, but it IS the way they turned out.

In fact Blacks got screwed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Here's 
what one well-known Black once said in an interview to a magazine that I 
used to sell at antiwar demonstrations:

Young Socialist: What is your opinion of the Democratic Party?

Malcolm X: The Democratic Party is responsible for the racism that 
exists in this country, along with the Republican Party. The leading 
racists in this country are Democrats. Goldwater isn’t the leading 
racist—he’s a racist but not the leading racist. The racists who have 
influence in Washington, D.C., are Democrats. If you check, whenever any 
kind of legislation is suggested to mitigate the injustices that Negroes 
suffer in this country, you will find that the people who line up 
against it are members of Lyndon B. Johnson’s party. The Dixiecrats are 
Democrats. The Dixiecrats are only a subdivision of the Democratic 
Party, and the same man over the Democrats is over the Dixiecrats....

full: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/070.html

> This last election (2006) Pedro faced a serious fight in the primary. If
> there had been a socialist organization here substantial enough to have had
> to concern itself with politics at this level, I think it would have been
> duty-bound to support Pedro WITHIN the Democratic Party primary, simply and
> solely on the basis of the democratic right of the (my guess) one and a half
> million Latinos in this state to political representation.

Why bother with socialism if the goal is to elect good Democrats? I 
think that Joaquin's fulmination against socialism for the past 6 months 
or so sort of answers that question.

> On that more generalized sort of level, presidential or overall senate/house
> general elections, what is striking about the discussion on this list is
> that no one as far as I can tell advocates the use of Lenin's tactic of
> "critical support." If you read Lenin's pamphlet on ultraleft and similar
> writings, you will see that Lenin considered parties like the British Labour
> Party, etc., to be essentially bourgeois parties masquerading as workers
> parties. And the tactic is simply pretend "support" as a way of getting a
> hearing for unmasking the true bourgeois nature of these parties, as a way
> of OPPOSING and COMBATING them. 

Of course Lenin viewed the Labour Party as a bourgeois party, but he was 
dealing with the problem that millions of workers viewed it as a vehicle 
for socialism. He argued that it was a sectarian mistake to oppose 
Labour as long as workers had such illusions. Does anybody think that 
the Democrats are a vehicle for the socialist transformation in the US 
besides Rush Limbaugh and David Horowitz?

> And for this reason, Lenin's CRITICAL "support" is JUST as applicable to
> individuals within a party or to wings of a party, because what drives the
> tactic is the clash between the *illusions* that working and oppressed
> people have in some individuals or political formations and the
> bourgeois/oppressor interests that those individuals or political formations
> really serve. 

Except that Lenin wanted to expose the failure of Labour to follow 
through on its campaign promises. Your recommendation that socialists 
work in progressive Democratic Party campaigns sounds more like the sort 
of thing I've heard from Medea Benjamin or Stan Goff. It is just their 
hope that it will rid us of the evil Republicans. No thank you.

> IMHO, there has never been a finer and more supple application of this
> tactical idea than in the brilliant tactics followed by Fidel and his team
> in 1959, in insisting that all the heroes of petty-bourgeois democracy take
> the "power" which allowed them all to be exposed as essentially
> anti-national and counter-revolutionary in the space of a few months. 

What in the world does this have to do with socialists passing out 
campaign literature for some Democrat? Castro had smashed the old state 
and was trying to move Cuba in a more revolutionary direction. In the US 
today, we are not ready to take power. Nor will we be in 20 years at 
least. Fidel Castro said 400 years, but that seems a tad pessimistic to 
me. I think the planet will be left to the rats and the pigeons and the 
cockroaches by then.

> There is no law that says you can't apply a tactical of critical "support"
> in fighting the influence over the masses of Democrat bourgeois politicians
> ("Support," as Lenin said, like a rope supports a hanging man). It is not
> "unprincipled." It's precisely what Stan Goff, for example, advocated prior
> to the November 2006 elections for Congress, although for a number of
> specific reasons I did not think the tactic had as wide an applicability as
> he did. 

Of course. Stan Goff also announced that he was no longer a Marxist as 
well. For myself, I will stick with the stodgy doctrines of the 19th 
century that brilliant thinkers keep telling us are outmoded.

> Yet it is a variant completely absent from the discussions on this list,
> even though Lenin's MOTIVATIONS for applying critical support as a tactic
> certainly are relevant.

You know something, Joaquin, for somebody who spends so much time 
lacerating socialists on a Marxism list, you have a lot of gumption 
invoking Lenin's good name.