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

[Marvin Gandall]

Artesian writes:

> How do you work inside the Democratic party and not support Democratic
> candidates for office like-- for example-- Pelosi?  Feinstein?  Richard M.
> Daley? Schumer?  Clinton?  any number of Kennedys.

Louis writes:

> 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.

Mark writes:

> Marvin is certainly correct that people who vote Democratic can go to
> events and talk to each other.  I've  gone to PDA stuff around here
> and talked to people.  There's absolutely no reason you have to vote
> Democratic to do it.
=======================================
Yes, that's the tradeoff - gaining access to workers in their unions and
parties while opposing some, most, or all of the policies and leaders they
presently support. Mark is wrong to suggest that such access can come
cost-free from the outside. I sometimes neglected to vote for the NDP, but
was never under any illusion that I could gain a sympathetic hearing
standing outside NDP halls and committee rooms as I could by being seen to
be actively supporting the members' struggle against the Liberal and
Conservative parties to their right.

As for Lenin, none of us can say what Lenin would do today. He wrote LWC:AID
as a polemic against Sylvia Pankhurst and other British Marxists who raised
the same qualms, moral and otherwise, about entering the Labour Party - what
all agreed was a bourgeois workers party. Louis is right that the Bolsheviks
thought such entry would be a short term thing because of the revolutionary
nature of the period. The Boshevik program as a whole rested on that
premise. But more than 80 years later, in a much less favourable period,
when the USSR and international socialist movement have both disappeared,
when workers are much less inclined to leave their existing bourgeois
parties and leaders then they were then, when there are no longer mass
Communist parties with parliamentary representation which they can look to
as an alternative, how can we be so certain Lenin, in these circumstances,
would move further to the left to embrace Pankhurst's uncompromising stance
against any participation in these reformist parties?

I think it was Lenin who said "the only principle is that which moves the
struggle forward; all else is tactics", or something along those lines. If
he didn't say it, I can imagine him doing so. There is every possibility,
then, that he would concur today with Fred's statement that the Democratic
party is "ALL THERE IS" and with Joaquin's that individual leftists have
been thrown back to a period when socialists lacked a political home of
their own - and draw his political conclusions from that. The choice
socialists also faced in that earlier era was political abstention or
supporting bourgeois liberal parties against reactionary ones. The fact that
the liberal bourgeoisie no longer plays a progressive role in the broad
historical sense seems to me to be beside the point, which is that, in terms
of contemporary politics, the liberal DP and SD parties and the forces they
represent are "all there is" to block the conservative and reactionary
parties to their right who want to rollback the historical gains of the
masses and weaken their organizations. Louis derides such analysis such as
"TINA", as if mockery settles the issue. But his solutions - that "the
alternative is us" (TAIU) or, in his own version of stages theory, an
intermediate left-liberal way station without mass support like the Green
Party - hardly seems to me to settle the matter either.