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

[Mark Lause]

Why I asked for the difference between the two parties, Marvin replied
that workers voting Republican "are conservative workers who oppose
unions and the rights of women, blacks, Hispanics, and other minority
groups, and are the most infected by pro-capitalist and
pro-imperialist ideology."

It's just not this simple.

Union workers who vote Democratic might favor unions for themselves,
but they've collectively done almost nothing to organize the rest of
the working class.  Indeed, abandoning the drive to "organize the
unorganized" has been historically part of the domestication of the
labor movement here.

Both parties allegedly favored the Equal Rights Amendment, but, while
the Republicans drifted right under Reagan, it was really the
Democratic Party in the state legislatures in places like Illinois
that brutally and cynically throttled  the ERA.

Listen to Clinton and Obama, even superficially, on the subject of
health care and it's explicitly clear that the cornerstone is
profitability for private business rather than health care for the
masses.

Racism was, rhetorically, the Republican issue well into my youth,
because the Democrats were the party of segregation (and, of course,
slavery before that).  When the Nixon and, later, Reagan
administrations began breaking the legs of the civil rights
enforcement (excepting the institutional cosmetic of affirmative
action, which was shaped more by Nixon than LBJ), the administrations
of Carter and Clinton did nothing to restore things.  Now, I know how
the issue is perceived, but that perception itself is part of the
game.  And if we make perception the cornerstone, then we should have
been with the Republican party before 1964 or certainly before 1938.

ML