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

[Louis Proyect]

Marvin wrote:
>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.

But Marxism has never been about a long-term orientation to social 
democratic electoral parties. Lenin urged voting for social 
democratic parties in Europe in the 1920s in cases where they had 
never become the ruling party. Workers who had illusions in such 
parties would not listen to Communist workers who railed against 
their leaders. In other words, Lenin proposed what amounted to a 
ruse. Once the social democratic party was in power and began to 
demonstrate its class collaborationism, it would be much easier to 
persuade workers to break with reformism.

In the late 1920s, the CP's under Stalin's direction pursued a path 
of attacking the SP's as "social fascist", which was far more 
destructive than the more innocent ultraleftism of the early 1920s 
that Lenin was polemicizing against. In Saxony, for example, the CP 
backed a Nazi-initiated referendum to unseat an SP politician.

After Hitler's rise to power, Stalin lurched rightwards and proposed 
electoral alliances with the SP in the name of the Popular Front. In 
the US, it was carried out as an orientation to Roosevelt. This 
support for a long-standing bourgeois party was even harder to 
justify in Marxist terms than the European alliance with the SP's.

In chapter six of Harvey Klehr's admittedly reactionary "Secret World 
of American Communism", he reports on an NKVD document on 
communications between Earl Browder and Franklin Roosevelt. FDR 
congratulates Browder and the CPUSA for conducting its political line 
skillfully and helping US military efforts. Roosevelt is 
"particularly pleased" with the battle of New Jersey Communists 
against a left-wing Labor Party formation there. He was happy that 
the CPUSA had been able to unite various factions of the Democratic 
Party against the left-wing electoral opposition and render it ineffectual.

When pressures for a class-based party became too great for the CP to 
withstand, it oriented to a "Labor Party" that it could control. Its 
most famous elected official was Vito Marcantonio. As it turns out, 
the Labor Party was originally created by the SP so its members could 
support Roosevelt's reelection without having to cast a vote for the 
Democratic Party. This was during the period when the SP had a vocal 
leftwing. After the Trotskyists pulled off their "entryist" tactic, 
they cannibalized the SP and rendered it ineffective.