[Marxism] An analysis of the DP convention that works better

[Marvin Gandall]

Mark L. writes:

> There is no entry possible in a something that isn't really a
> membership party.  The nature of the American parties as "caucus
> parties" leaves power in the hands of officeholders, the committees
> they appoint, etc.   This is not the same as branch parties in which
> you have membership.
>
> The idea of being a "Democrat" in the US essentially means that you
> vote Democratic.  You have no voice in the party.  And no mechanism
> through which to express your opinion on much of anything.  This isn't
> to say that both major parties don't have various kinds of primary
> meetings, etc. in which ordinary citizens can participate, but only an
> infinitessimal portion of the electorate does so, largely because what
> these bodies do will just get set aside when they are inconvenient to
> the real party.
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I'm unable to refute what Mark is saying about the DP on the basis of my own
experience, but I'll repeat that it is in contradiction to what American
friends who are active in the Obama campaign have told me about the
possibilities for meeting and discussing with local supporters of the party
during election campaigns, and using these opportunities to explore
collaboration in other areas.

Less impressionistically, Mark's point also seems to be in contradiction to
the many accounts I've seen of the unions and representative organizations
of  women, blacks, Hispanics, students, gays, environmentalists, religious
pacifists, etc. moblizing their members by the hundreds of thousands to
staff committee rooms and phone banks and to canvass and draw their
neighbours and workmates into the campaign. In doing so, they bring all of
the particular issues which concern them - the economy, Iraq, health care,
restrictions on union rights, falling real incomes, amnesty for immigrants,
the right to choose, global warming, etc. - into the campaign. There seems
to me to be no basis for the argument that that bourgeois- democratic
election campaigns serve to "distract" working people from the issues rather
than focus attention on them, nor was that the position held by the
socialist movement.

I do know from my own experience that the criticisms Mark makes about the
Democratic party being controlled by "officeholders (and) the committees
they appoint", of "having no voice to express your opinion on much of
anything", of party activists comprising only an "infinitessimal portion of
the electorate", and of democratic decisions from below being "just set
aside when they are inconvenient" are precisely the complaints frustrated
Canadian leftists like myself, both inside and outside the party, used to
make about the NDP. I expect those complaints are still there. Having had no
encounter with social democratic parties, Mark seems to me to be idealizing
"branch parties in which you have membership".

The bottom line is that the problem is not chiefly organizational, but
political.

If the left finds it difficult to make gains in the unions and in political
parties like the NDP and the DP, where the organized workers and movement
activists congregate, it is because the liberal political consciousness of
the working class still lags their own, and because events have not yet
decisively shaken the values of working people or their confidence in their
leaders. This is why regular outbreaks of militancy and discontent are
easily contained and coopted by the leaders, not because of the lack of
"mechanisms" for the left to communicate to the workers. Of course, the
leaders will work to isolate dissidents, including through control of the
apparatus, but I've also experienced this in far left organizations, and is
to be expected. When the majority is ready to break with their leaders - in
the larger society as well as within it's organizations - the organizational
impediments to it doing so are overcome.

What's required is the patience for that to occur, and that's a more
difficult matter, as I've personally experienced. So I wouldn't counsel
others on what to do, but hope my observations will be useful in helping
move the discussion forward. I think it's also true that engaging in
political activity in or around the DP is much harder to do than in the NDP
for at least two reasons: a) the NDP is farther from power and the
differences between it and the governing parties more pronounced. As the
case of the German Greens demonstrated, the closer a party gets to power,
the greater the pressures to blur its program and to isolate and destroy the
party left, and b) the Democrats, like the British Labour Party and French
and German social democrats in an earlier period, share responsibility for
the bipartisan administration of an imperialist state, so it's only natural
that ideologically committed Marxists, as well as many DP rank and filers,
would feel themselves compromised by the party's foreign policy positions.