[Marxism] On the Democratic Party question

[Louis Proyect]

Joaquin Bustelo wrote:
> Louis: When did Marx or Lenin vote for bourgeois parties?
> 
> Perhaps "vote" isn't the right verb in Marx's case -- although I'm sure he
> would have if he could have. He not only spoke favorably about, but hailed
> the election of the bourgeois Republican candidate in the 1864 U.S.
> elections. 

Yes, this is the same argument I used to hear from John Lacny. How 
depressing to hear from somebody who should know better.

> Lenin formed blocs with bourgeois parties in the tsarist elections. I
> believe Marx, Engels and their friends ran in common slates in 1848 with the
> left wing of the bourgeois democrats, but Marx came to the conclusion this
> was a tactical error.

Citation please.

> This overlooks the fact that the Democratic Party --the real one-- was
> rather desperate to drive McKinney out of office, whereas Louis views her
> role as some sort of de-facto conspiracy aimed at "keeping the Nation
> Magazine, moveon.org, the DSA, the CPUSA, and the rest of the soft left in
> on the 3-card monty game." 

Yes, they also did the same thing to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic 
Party. They also ostracized Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The Democratic Party 
elite is always kicking Black Democrats in the teeth, but that 
unfortunately doesn't seem to make much difference. Well, there was a 
push to launch a Black political party in the 1970s but it never went 
anywhere, just as was the case with Tony Mazzochi's Labor Party. The 
American landscape is strewn with the wreckage with such quixotic 
enterprises, so I guess some people must draw the conclusion that it is 
better to go with a winner. Electability becomes paramount. I don't want 
to deny people such consolations but at least respect our desire to tilt 
at windmills.

> When Louis and I were growing up, there were exactly zero Blacks in
> political office in the South. Today there are thousands. This is the result
> of the fight of Black people for the right to political representation. We
> can decry all we want that it took the form of Blacks running in and through
> the Democratic Party, but that is the REALITY.

Well, the DP is very good at this.

 From the earliest days of the American republic, Irish immigration to 
the United States had caused political division. The 'wild Irish', a 
term that invoked images of both 'semi-savage' Catholics and political 
rebels who were sometimes Protestants, excited particular concern among 
conservative Federalist politicians. Defense of immigration by the 
Jeffersonian Democrats helped to create a lasting  preference for the 
Democracy among newcomers, though party lines blurred considerably.40 In 
any case, how immigrants voted was of small importance nationally 
through 1830, when only one ballot in thirty could come from the 
foreign-born. By 1845, that figure was to rise to one in seven, with the 
Great Famine exodus still to produce, between 1845 and 1854, by far the 
greatest decade of immigration in antebellum American history. 
Immigration largely meant Irish immigration, with between 43 percent and 
47 percent of migrants each year between 1820 and 1855 coming from 
Ireland.41

By the early 1830s, the pattern of a strong Catholic Irish 
identification with the Democratic party, and with Andrew Jackson 
specifically, had strongly taken hold in urban centers like New York 
City. Although the existing urban Democratic political machines took 
time to inch away from the suspicion of immigrants felt by many of their 
artisan followers, Irish Catholics were welcomed as voters, party 
members and political muscle, though not typically as officeholders, by 
Democrats before the Civil War.42 The Catholic Irish, the immigrant 
group most exposed to nativist opposition, accepted protection from 
Democrats. Lacking a nationalist tradition of agitation for land 
redistribution in Ireland, too poor to move West and perhaps soured on 
farm life after the famine, the Catholic Irish were particularly immune 
to late antebellum Free Soil criticisms of Democratic opposition to 
homestead laws. Democrats and Irish-American Catholics entered into a 
lasting marriage that gave birth to new ideologies stressing the 
importance of whiteness.43

 From the 1830s, Democrats appreciated the ways in which the idea that 
all Blacks were unfit for civic participation could be transmuted into 
the notion that all whites were so fit. Pennsylvania Democrats, for 
example, solidified white unity by initiating the movement to codify the 
disfranchisement of the state's Blacks via constitutional amendment. 
Conflict with Mexico, and to some extent the rise of Chinese 
immigration, made it possible in the 1840s and 1850s for leading 
Democrats to develop racial schemes unequivocally gathering all European 
settlers together as whites against the 'colored' races. At a time when 
most Democratic theorists were coming to accept polygeniticist ideas 
regarding the separate creations of the 'black' and 'white' races, they 
were also defining 'white' in such a way as to include more surely the 
Irish and other immigrants.44 Thus, James Buchanan contemptuously 
branded the Mexicans as a 'mongrel' race unfit for freedom but was glad 
that 'Americans' were a 'mixed' population of English, Scotch-Irish, 
French, Welsh, German and Irish ancestry.

David Roediger, "Wages of Whiteness"

> it is. I hope you can take it like it is. WE PROPOSE TO SUPPORT AND ORGANIZE
> POLITICAL CLUBS, TO RUN INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES FOR OFFICE, AND TO SUPPORT
> ANY AFRO-AMERICAN ALREADY IN OFFICE WHO ANSWERS TO AND IS RESPONSIBLE TO THE
> AFRO-AMERICAN COMMUNITY.
> 
> "We don't support any black man who is controlled by the white power
> structure." (EMPHASIS added)
> 
> Got that? "Already in office."

Except for Adam Clayton Powell Jr., there was not a single Black elected 
official with any power when Malcolm was alive. Perhaps Malcolm X would 
have put all his efforts into electing more Adam Clayton Powell Jr's. if 
he hadn't been shot down. Who knows. If he had, then you can say that he 
would have been Jesse Jackson Jr. before his time. For myself, I think 
that he would have had little use for people like Maynard Jackson Jr. 
but even if he had, that wouldn't budge me from my own sectarian belief 
that the DP is the enemy of Black people.

> Louis really has nothing to say about the situation in Georgia in relation
> to Latinos and the state legislature. 

Look, if you want to fight anti-immigrant racism by working in the 
Democratic Party, be my guest. Just don't try to run the jive by me 
about it being "Leninist" to do so.