Where Hope Collides with Reality

The electoral failure of Center and Center-left parties in Europe and the US has brought forth a tentative turn to the left and a modest renaissance of the “socialist” option. With the marginalizing of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, France’s Socialist Party, and Italy’s Democratic Party by voters angry at the parties’ rightward turn, it was inevitable that some shocked party leaders would consider a new, somewhat leftward direction. Whether that sentiment is genuine or will be implemented is yet to be seen. Consistent with that sentiment, the Labour Party in the UK and Spain’s Socialist Party have made popular gains based on a left posture. In most cases, the content of the changes reverts back to the mid-twentieth century social democratic formulae.

In the US, the reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election generated both left rhetoric and a significant, moderate social democratic faction within the Democratic Party. Driven by energetic and youthful veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign (so-called “Sandernistas” gathering around Democratic Socialists of America), the new-found left in the Democratic Party is seeking to transform the party. Its limited, but surprising electoral successes serve to underscore their program for revitalizing the Democratic Party.

Opponents of this leftward tendency from both within and outside the Democratic Party have attacked it, resorting to everything from crude red-baiting to derision. The less scurrilous objections revolve around electability-- the supposed disconnect with mass sentiment.

Most recently, that argument draws upon a comparison with the failed 1972 Democratic Presidential run of Senator George McGovern, defeated handily by Richard Nixon. As Gerald Seib, The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor, reminds us: “Richard Nixon, a Republican figure [was] as despised on the left as President Trump is now.”

Seib relies upon the odious Dick Morris-- a former close confident of the Clintons-- to underscore the danger: “The election of 2020 is showing distinct signs of being similar to that of 1972.” Morris adds that the Sanders and Warren “candidacies [are] energized by the same kind of rage as animated that of McGovern in 1972.”

For Seib and others, “[t]he question is whether Democrats are about to repeat that unhappy history.” Seib skillfully draws parallels between the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party before 1972 and the rise of a left within today’s Democratic Party. He calls upon top Obama advisor, David Axelrod, to affirm the comparison. However, “Mr. Axelrod thinks that Democratic voters’ top priority this time isn’t likely to be ideology, but rather the ability to defeat Mr. Trump.” Axelrod counts on the oft-repeated warning that electability must outweigh any and all ideological considerations, the same mantra that drove the center and right forces in the 1972 Democratic Party to oppose McGovern.

Similarly, the former communications director for the Democratic National Committee, Brad Woodhouse, doesn’t fear the rise of the party’s left: “I don’t think the discussion we’re having in my part of the Democratic Party has lurched way far to the left… Our primary electorate has tended to favor more establishment, more pragmatic, more mainstream candidates. I trust our primary process to sort this out.” Like Axelrod, Woodhouse is not overly concerned with the left-leaning candidates and their ideology.

Establishment figures submit that the McGovern comparison demonstrates that a similar left candidate today would be overwhelmingly rejected by voters. They see the 1972 election as foretelling that Sanders and the Sandernistas are out-of-touch with the electorate.

Democratic elites are taking no chances. They are counting on the primary process to sink any insurgency from the left. The fact that nearly 25 candidates have stepped forward avoids any head-to-head face-off between Sanders and, say, the establishment’s Joe Biden. The sheer number of candidates guarantees that delegate counts will be diluted going into the convention, allowing for the moderate, centrist candidates to throw their votes behind a “safe” Joe Biden after the first ballot.

Normally in an election against an incumbent, a party tries to discourage a multi-candidate blood-letting. But for this election, the Democrats are threatening to mount open, retaliatory opposition to only one candidate-- the most radical candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. They are counting on a diffusion of votes and superdelegates to stop Sanders.

But that stop-the-left-at-all-costs stance is also the explanation of the 1972 election sweep. Democratic treachery, and not mass antipathy, best explains McGovern’s resounding defeat.

While McGovern and his team made harmful blunders and moved persistently rightward during the course of the campaign, betrayal by Democratic Party elites contributed most to his defeat. George Meany and other top labor leaders held back support. Big city mayors like Chicago’s Richard Daley either cut-- worked against-- or gave only tepid support to McGovern. 

New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 17, 1972—The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.

CHICAGO, August 24, 1972-- Timed to coincide with Senator McGovern's peace overtures to Mayor Daley, the luncheon was designed to open communication with campaign contributors friendly to the Mayor. Only two representatives of the regular Democratic organization showed up, and, a source close to the situation reported, they were there only to observe and report back to the Mayor.

Certainly the South was moving away from the Democrats and out of the traditional coalition, but, as the 1976 election shows, the Democrats were gaining liberal, suburban bedroom communities. 

While the McGovern candidacy makes for an easy, but misleading comparison for Democratic Party leaders bent on smothering the left, the truth is that they are so completely owned by corporate interests that they would rather risk defeat than accept a candidate minimally challenging to their capitalist sponsors.

It is worth noting that in the McGovern era, the Democratic Party had a sizeable bloc of leaders still wedded to New Deal politics, still associated with Lyndon Johnson’s reforms. Yet McGovern was too radical for them.

Now, after several decades of a persistent rightward drift, the Democratic Party establishment is far more hostile to left ideas and far more dependent upon Wall Street and other capitalist institutions for support.

It is not a question of whether voters are ready for left politics. Rather, it is a matter of whether the Democratic Party’s corporate masters will allow left politics to live in the house that they own. I think the answer is that they will not. The left may visit, but it can’t stay.

This, of course, raises the question of where does the left go. In the US, the failure to secure deep roots for an independent, principled, internationalist, and revolutionary socialist movement that is not totally absorbed with two-party electoral politics means that genuine left politics must suffer through the next 17-18 months of the two-party circus with a guaranteed unsatisfying outcome. And with the distractions of the backwash of the absurd RussiaGate, impeachment-mania, twitter wars, and celebrity missteps, the fate of ordinary Venezuelans, Iranians, Palestinians, and many desperately poor and exploited here will be left to the crazed Trump policy team, a group that the Democratic Party is shamefully reluctant to tackle.

But it’s never too late to plant the seeds of a new politics-- a politics that we need and not the one we have.

The political soil needs to be prepared by drawing lessons from the past. Certainly the McGovern campaign of 1972 speaks to the corruption of the Democratic Party and its leadership. Answers will be found elsewhere.

But there are useful lessons from the European experience as well. The trajectory of the powerful Italian Communist Party (PCI) of the 1970s-- by membership, the largest CP and, arguably, the largest left party in Western Europe-- affords a useful lesson, a caution. By committing without reservation to the course of bourgeois politics-- parliamentarianism, coalitions or alliances across classes, “responsible” governance-- the CPI exposed a Paradox of EuroCommunism and Social Democracy. Writing in 1981, two US academics, Larry and Roberta Garner, took note of “the limits of structural reformism” as exhibited by the PCI in 1978.

Despite their sympathies and hopes for the PCI, they noted that the reformist defense of workers before capitalism’s ravages requires that “moves to bolster the public or national interest must become moves to bolster the functioning of the capitalist firm… Moves that narrow capital’s profit margins, that reduce capital’s ‘space,’ run the risk of precipitating failures or flight within the capitalist sector… Specifically, structural reforms-- if they are genuinely structural-- weaken capitalism and contribute to a crisis… Individual firms fail, large firms have lowered profits, reinvestment does not take place, and, finally, deliberate political actions are taken by capital, such as flight abroad and investment strikes.”

Thus, under the weight of the crisis endured by capitalism in the mid-1970s, the PCI felt compelled to “call for restraint in pressing the traditional working class demands” that are portrayed as contributing to the crisis and jeopardizing job security and capitalist growth. 

In other words, the PCI was caught between advancing the “national interests”-- determined by sustaining capitalism’s health and capacity to supply jobs and benefits-- and advancing the cause of the working class at the expense of capitalism. The PCI, under crisis conditions, could deliver neither the short-term interests of the working class (structural reforms that burdened capitalism) nor the long-term interests of the working class (socialism). The party’s commitment to bourgeois institutions denied it an escape from this contradiction. As the Garners note, pressing forward with structural reforms would mean that the PCI would be blamed by its petit-bourgeois coalition partners for deepening the crisis. To not do so would disaffect its working class constituency.

Today there is neither socialism nor the PCI in Italy.

This should bring to mind the governance of SYRIZA in Greece. The “left” party folded its boasted militancy and joined the mavens of austerity to guarantee the survival of capitalism, while shirking the duty to defend the working class from its enemy. They choose reviving a dying capitalism over hastening its demise.

Managing capitalism, as the Greek Communists insist, betrays the working class and blocks the path to socialism. The tragic collapse of the once powerful PCI demonstrates the fate of social democratic movements that plan to dance with multiple partners and to sing different tunes.

History provides many invaluable lessons. They are ignored at our peril. They allow us to move forward without any illusions. They remind us to choose our political friends and our tactics carefully.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Lemming Effect and the Left

 With two weeks before the mid-Presidential-term US elections, the number of Democratic Party political solicitations in my e-mail inbox now approaches fifty a day. The curious-- “cynical” might be a better word-- thing is that none mention a genuine issue, none suggest an argument for a cause. All come with a folksy tone, an easy familiarity (from Bob, Chuck, Nancy, or Michelle) and all presume that I’m on their “team’  with cash at hand. The cheap emotional card is pulled frequently-- “Do you want to wish President Obama/Michelle Obama/Nancy Pelosi a happy birthday?” or “You didn’t respond to our request, do you HATE Bob Mueller?” Some are scolding: “TRAGIC ENDING. I [Nancy Pelosi] e-mailed yesterday. Barbra Streisand e-mailed. Harry Reid e-mailed. Now I’m e-mailing again…” And some are foreboding: “This is bad news…” One of the hilarious best: “Hi Friend, I just got off the phone with Senator Menendez, and he asked about you specifically.” Sure, he did...

But not a serious issue, an urgent cause, or a principled stand revealed.

Despite the lack of issues, not to mention a program, the Democrats fundraising tactics are working: ActBlue reports that Democrats raised $385 million in the third quarter alone, more than they raised in the entire 2014 midterm effort. Clearly, Trump-hating, even in its most visceral form, pays off.

However, the fund-raising orgy comes with a cost to democracy. Over 60 contested house seats sought by Democrats drew over a million dollars in campaign-fund donations in the third quarter alone compared to only 3 in the same quarter of 2014. The price of running a competitive campaign has risen dramatically (Source: WSJ, 10-16-2018).

Texas Senate Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke, a frequent solicitor appearing in my inbox, raised $38 million in the third quarter.

To date, Democratic House candidates have scheduled $122 million in TV commercials (Republicans $67 million) (WSJ, 10-16-18). It should be obvious that such fund raising is beyond the reach of truly independent candidates. The financial bar is set far too high to forego support from corporations, other well-heeled organizations, or wealthy contributors and expect to wrest power from Democratic or Republican incumbents. Accordingly, democracy is further stifled.

The notion of an authentic grass-roots campaign has nearly disappeared from the arsenal of the two major parties.

While posturing as a “people’s party,” the Democrats have largely substituted emotion for issues. Hatred of Trump and fear of Russia have served as the catalyst for the 2018 campaign. The Democrats have crudely sought to fold the two emotions into a brew disconnected from the sinking living standards, growing insecurity, and uncertain future of working people. A truly meaningful assault on Trumpism would necessarily target Trump’s pro-capitalist measures, cast light on betrayals by the Democratic Party, and underscore the failings of the two-party system, consequences that Democratic Party leaders dread.

It is no wonder that some commentators are describing political behavior today as “tribal.” In place of principled differences, the two parties have urged an amalgam of brand loyalty and blind faith. Stoked by a corporate media with its own interest in masking class-based issues and promoting imagery of class harmony, personal invective, anonymous charges, rumors, and internet gossip constitute the substance of political debate today. We have a reality TV-star President for reality-TV political theater.

After many decades of rightward drift by the two-party monolith, it is exceedingly difficult to find even a glimmer of hope that either party can be wrested from its corporate mooring. Yet hope does spring again and again with large sections of the US Left which attempt to pry open a door and commandeer the “people’s party,” a task now embraced by the youthful veterans of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Our Left

With the last Presidential election, growing dissatisfaction with centrism found a home with Trumpism, a process that previously fueled the Tea Party movement for the Right. The Left experienced a similar distaste for centrism, a counterpart process that fueled the Bernie Sanders campaign-- a candidacy quickly subverted by the Democratic Party leadership.  

After the election, disenchanted young Democrats found expression in the nominal political residence of their pied piper: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA provided an organization; its burgeoning numbers provided energy and impact; but it left the youthful activists in ideological limbo, torn between a slapdash socialism and a decadent Democratic Party.

Like endless numbers of their predecessors, the youthful idealists are preparing to exhaust their principles and vision on the bastion of hypocrisy, the Democratic Party. Inexperience may excuse this illusion, but older veterans of the Left know no similar excuse. They have witnessed the subversion of George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, rallied around an exciting 1976 Democratic national platform, only to see the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter quickly run away from it. They have observed the Democratic Party leadership wilt in the face of right-wing reaction, abandoning the New Deal gains piece by piece. They have supported “insurgents” like Jesse Jackson or Howard Dean, only to see the dissidents pacified and escorted back into the fold.

It is a long and tortured history of failure, Don Quixote-like journeys to wrest the Democratic Party from the grip of its corporate owners. Sadly, many who embarked on these journeys were lost by the Left; disappointment bred inaction and cynicism.

Beyond the socialists (DSA), the US left is a small, largely electorally irrelevant motley mix, stretching ideologically from center-left liberals disenchanted with the Democrats to committed Marxist-Leninists.

Despite the fact that their endorsements or support will have virtually no effect on the outcome of the interim elections, the predictable stampede to support the Democrats has begun. Grandiose exhortations to stop Trump will serve as coded messages to support Democrats in the interim election. The ideological bankruptcy that fails to put promoting third parties, independent candidacies, anti-monopoly coalitions or advocating for socialism ahead of unconditional support for Democrats guarantees that the rightward two-party drift will continue, Trump or no Trump.

Unconditional support for Democrats reinforces the two-party stranglehold in two ways:

1. It acquiesces to the already prevalent view that there is no other route to progressive change.
2. It thwarts the development of third parties or actions that will disrupt the grip that Democrats have upon the Left.

That grip is continually strengthened by the insidious material influence (money!) spread by foundations, nonprofits, think tanks, right-wing labor organizations, etc. that enables the Democrats to capture the Left. And of course many reluctantly support the Democrats because they fear the ire of their allies in the broader mass and labor movements.

For decades, Leftists have explained their support for Democrats through a clumsy, misappropriation of Marxist-Leninist theory. Many have advocated a “United Front” tactic in the face of what they perceive as the threat of fascism. Specifically, Republican Presidential candidates-- Nixon, Reagan, Bush II, and now Trump-- are seen as harbingers, if not bearers of fascism. It is a bitter irony that much of the 1968 Nixon-era Republican platform would appear largely acceptable to today’s Democratic Party leadership.

But the fascism of the first half of the twentieth century does not figure in the crises facing the US today. Fascism was a ruling-class response to a dire challenge to its rule spawned by disillusionment from a bloody, but meaningless World War, crushing economic crises, and, especially, the political challenge from a powerful revolutionary Left.

Those conditions simply do not coalesce in the US at this time.

Instead, the ruling class in the US (and many other countries) faces a crisis of the legitimacy of the centrist parties that have ruled throughout the Cold War until today. Opinion polls in the US (and many other countries) show nearly non-existent confidence in the long-standing ruling parties. The Trump phenomenon and the Sanders experience demonstrate that dissatisfaction, no matter how imperfectly. The electoral successes of non-traditional parties in many other countries equally demonstrate a popular desire for a new course, a new direction.

One can bury one’s head in the sand and refuse to recognize the mass shift in political allegiance; one can continue to slavishly tail the Democratic Party or the now-discredited, corrupt parties of social democracy; one can choose to embrace the myth of containing the barbarian hordes; but this moment is different, demanding different strategies.

The Left must discard the unproductive, out-of-touch approach of defending the left flank of capitalism and begin an earnest search for a new, independent politics. The growing mass rejection of the old politics demands it.

The Left cannot grow in size and influence if it continues to attach itself to a rotting Democratic Party.

Paradoxically, continuing to support the discredited Democratic Party and failing to offer a credible alternative will only encourage more people to look rightward for inspiration and answers.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?

With both the Italian elections and the German effort at a so-called “Grand Coalition” in the recent news, much attention has turned to political developments in Europe. For those of us in the US, interest comes not only from the impact of European politics on our own affairs, but also from the fact that US and European trends have often traveled parallel tracks.

For example, in much of the post-war period, governance in Europe has revolved around two centrist political poles that can be roughly characterized as Christian democracy and social democracy. Insofar as both poles defend capitalism and oppose Communism, support capitalist institutions, and are content to peacefully alternate rule, they mirror the US two-party system without the stricter institutional backstops that preserve the electoral system for the Republican and Democratic Party in the US.

Certainly, the Western European political systems were nominally multi-party after the war, but the dynamics of those systems steered political developments toward the center. The far right was appropriately neutered by the discrediting of Nazism and fascism as a consequence of World War II. The revolutionary left-- the Communists-- were overtly and covertly thwarted by the Cold War, the NATO consensus. Where the Communists enjoyed formal legality, the centrist parties, the US, and the NATO allies worked hand-in-glove to deny participation in government.

While both European Christian democracy and social democracy were firmly committed to the capitalist course, social democracy wittingly served as a buffer against the attraction of a workers’ state by advocating a kind of faux-socialism, a socio-economic safety net. As an insurance policy against the ascendency of European Communist Parties, Christian democracy tempered the right’s conventional economic liberalism of minimalist government, unfettered markets, and austere budgets, grudgingly accepting social spending and a more “humane” social contract.

Frustrated with the de facto barrier against Communist parliamentary success, many European Communist Parties began a process of concessions, of shedding revolutionary principles and prospects, creating a left-social democracy dubbed “Euro Communism.” A few Parties resisted this opportunistic path.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states proved to be a watershed for European politics and, particularly, the left. The Euro Communist left, stripped of its untenable raison d'être-- Communism without Communism-- collapsed, leaving a void to the left of social democracy. Social Democracy, in turn, cast off faux-socialism for public-private partnership under the direction of monopoly capitalism: markets, and not social policies, were to provide for the masses. And, without the threat of Communism, the right returned to its fundamental character, aggressively pressing unrestrained class politics: anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and chauvinism.

Without the fear of Communism, capitalism found no need for an accommodation with the working class.

In the 1990s, Continental Europe followed the path blazed in the UK and US over a decade earlier by the Thatcher/Reagan axis. Faced with shifting alignments and the 1970s failure of Old Labour/New Deal policies (specifically, the Keynesian economic framework underlying both approaches), a new consensus began to emerge in both countries.

From the mid-1980s into the next decade, the new consensus spread to nearly all major political parties and around the globe. In its essence, it was a return to Whiggism, the political, social, and economic ideology of the bourgeoisie: parliamentarism, negative rights, and the economic liberalism of minimal regulation, preference for private over public initiative, and markets as decisive of all matters and in the last instance.

Pundits are fond of labeling this development “neo-liberalism,” a statement of the obvious. But the superficiality of that term obscures the fact that the turn is more than a mere policy. In fact, it is a response to the failings of the previous consensus and it constitutes the capitalist norm when the specter of Communism does not loom large over the future.

Social democrats in the US and Europe promoted the notion of a “third way” to mask their capitulation to classical capitalism and its totalizing influence over all aspects of society, over every global nook and cranny. In fact, after the demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist neighbors, there was the one way in the US and EU.

With capitalism marching triumphantly into the twenty-first century, most of the US and European left conceded that capitalism was resilient and here to stay. An inflated memory of a kinder, gentler capitalism might be the best that could be imagined.

But the triumphant project ran aground, crashing on the rocks of economic crises. The capitalist accumulation process imploded in 2000 and, again, even more severely, in 2007-2008. “Recovery” re-established accumulation, but left millions of broken, desperate people in its wake. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, insecurity, and alienation afflicted millions in the US and the EU (and, of course, the rest of the world). Capitalism recovered, but the people did not. For the people, the entrenched ideological options of conservatism and social democracy offered only the thin gruel of austerity.

Mesmerized by rising equity values and restored profitability, and impressed with the growing wealth and well-being of the bourgeoisie and the visible and vocal petty bourgeoisie, ruling elites labor under the illusion that all is going well. In Europe and the US, the never-changing meal of celebrity-worship, sports, anti-social social media, and other distractions nourish a false sense of security and satisfaction.

But in towns and villages, neighborhoods and suburbs, people are suffering. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictions are taking a demographic toll, unseen by high-income, physically segregated elites. As insecurities and dysfunctionality grow, millions feel a growing difference-- an often poorly expressed class difference-- between the beneficiaries of the capitalist economy and themselves, the losers.

Anger seethes.

Without the compass of a revolutionary ideology, without the vision of socialism, this anger remains unfocused, directed vaguely at government, the media, existing political parties, and, too often, convenient scapegoats.

As the anger emerges politically, it is met with elite derision, contempt, or condescension. It is seen by their “betters” as a product of the uneducated, the backward, the uncultured. As Hillary Clinton so famously put it: “the deplorables.”

The insularity of US and European elites-- divided from the masses by culture, social practices, power, status, and wealth-- leads directly to the political crisis that spawned Brexit, Trump’s election, the rise of “populist” or alternative political parties, and most decidedly, the discrediting of historically centrist parties. This last week’s desperate attempt to preserve a coalition of the center in Germany and the collapse of the center left and the shocking success of the Five Star Movement and extreme right in Italy only underscore the distance between the masses and the political parties carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie to contain the aspirations of those masses.

Behind these political developments lies a stagnant, sputtering global economy. It is apparent that segments of the ruling classes are uneasy with or reject the globalist ideology of open markets and are moving towards economic nationalism. The failure of growth to return has led many in the capitalist class to call for a change in direction: protectionism. The emergence of support for nationalism and protectionism has energized the Euro-skeptics, the extreme right, and Trump.

Of course, the other side of this political coin is the failure of the left, especially the left that is yet untainted by the stain of ineffectual social democracy. For the most part, the non-establishment left has failed to deliver a militant, persuasive message to the working people in Europe and the US. And where there is a still a credible militant Communist left, the waters have been muddied by false prophets-- for example, SYRIZA in Greece.

In many countries, the retreat from Marxism became a rout after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, ideologies like anarchism, utopian socialism, and cooperativism-- ideologies that had long been discredited by Marx himself-- are revived. The peculiarly North American mania for procedural democracy-- the view that justice will flow spontaneously like a natural spring when we unleash a radical version of Robert’s Rules of Order-- has returned to prominence as shown by to the now collapsed Occupy movement. And of course, left-lite liberals immerse themselves in the battles for self-identity and against “micro-aggressions” while minority identities are actually ravaged by the macro-aggressions of class war and capitalist exploitation.

In light of recent poor electoral showings, some have sought to explain the sorry state of the US and European left as a result of structural changes in capitalism. They see a new working class, the “precariat,” as superseding the traditional proletariat (even The Wall Street Journal has fancied the term). The “precariat” notion derives from the realities of a changing workplace of part-time, contract, temporary, and dispersed employment, an optimal realization of the classical liberal economic dream. This trend in employment has made organizing workers difficult, certainly more challenging than with the world of the traditional worker engaged in one lifetime or semi-lifetime job under a factory roof.

Of course, the structural changes cited are, to a great extent, the result of the failure of trade unions and political parties to defend the interests of workers against predatory capitalists. Moreover, the difficulties that these changes bring forth are obstacles to union organizing, less so to political parties. And history teaches that establishing militant political parties precedes organizing militant trade unionism. No task before the union movement today presents greater impediments than was the task of building industrial unions in the US in the 1930s. The challenge of establishing the CIO was only met, was only possible, because of the leadership and effort of Communist and socialist workers.

Needed is the return in influence of historically informed workers’ parties that draw upon the social theory of Marx and the organizational insights of Lenin (that is to say, parties that reject the backward Cold War dogma of Anything but Communism), Without the strong option of Communist or Workers’ Parties, the European and US working class will continue to face the repellent choice between decadent, rotting centrist parties and a host of new charlatan parties offering fool’s gold policies, magic elixirs, and vulnerable scapegoats. 

Only an independent, working class-oriented movement informed by Marxism-Leninism can provide a “third way” apart from the disaster of free-market globalism or the trap of economic nationalism.

The old saw that workers deserve their own party is more true today than ever-- an authentic anti-capitalist party that returns to the revolutionary legacy surrendered to opportunism and parliamentary illusions.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Where the Money Leads

'Traditionally in American history, politics is like a seesaw: When one side is up the other side is down,” said Peter Wehner, a former aide to President George W. Bush. “Now it's as if the seesaw is broken; the public is distrustful of both parties.” Wall Street Journal (11-04-14)

“Follow the money” is a seemingly simple, but telling popular prescription for discerning people's motives, a slogan made popular by literature and movies.

But it is more than that. It is also a useful key to unlocking the mysteries of social processes and institutions. In a society that affixes a monetary worth on everything, including opinions, ideas, and personal values, tracking dollars and cents becomes one of the best guides to our understanding of events unfolding around us.

Take elections, for example.

Every high school Civics class teaches that elections are the highest expression of democratic practices. Apart from the direct democracy of legend-- the New England town meeting or the Swiss canton assemblies-- organized secret-ballot-style elections count as the democratic ideal deeply embedded in every US school-age child's mind.

Let's put aside the arrogant high hypocrisy of US and European politicians and pundits who deride secret ballots when they result in the election of a Chavez, Morales, Maduro, or Correa. That will make for a juicy topic on another occasion.

Instead, let's examine what the flow of money tells us about the gold standard of democracy as celebrated in Europe and the US.

Surely, no one would deny that money has a profound effect upon election outcomes. That comes as old news. Even before the dominance of party politics, even before the evolution of party politics into two-party politics, money played a critical factor in advantaging issues, campaigns, and candidates.

To the extent that mass engagement-- rallies, outreach, canvassing, etc.-- could match or even trump both the corrupting and opinion-changing power of money, electoral democracy maintained an aura of legitimacy. To be sure, buying elections seems a nasty business, but as long as elections remained highly contested extravaganzas drawing interest and engagement, credibility remains intact.

New and changing technologies cast a lengthening shadow over the electoral process. News and entertainment media, like radio, were only too happy to take advertising dollars to promote electoral campaigns. At the same time, these technologies eroded the efficacy of traditional campaigns reliant upon campaign workers' sweat and shoe leather.

With television and now the internet, the power of media and media dollars has grown exponentially. It has hardly gone unnoticed that these shifts have amplified the power of money and diminished the traditional get-out-the-vote efforts of unions, civil rights, and other people's organizations.

Most recently, the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has opened the spigot of unregulated cash into elections, further overwhelming any counter forces to the outright purchase of candidates and election results.

Readers may find nothing new here. The sordid story of money's corrupting and deflecting influence has certainly been told before, as has the pat remedy offered by reformers. To return to the halcyon days of US electoral democracy is simply a matter of establishing financial limits on campaigns and campaign contributions. By leveling and limiting the electoral playing field, we can restore the legitimacy tainted by money.

Unfortunately, this idealistic solution will itself be overpowered by the power of money. The traditional forces in US politics are not unhappy with buying and selling political power, except insofar as their own money is not put at a disadvantage.

But the reformist panacea would not work even if it were implemented. Advocates of campaign financial reform fail to see that capitalism and informed, independent, and authentically democratic electoral processes are incompatible. Capitalism, unerringly and universally, erodes and smothers democracy. Eliminating, even significantly, reducing the power of money in politics under a capitalist system is an impossibility. The historical trajectory goes the other way.

A Broken System

Since the New Deal era, political partisanship and the accompanying flow of money was linked to Party politics. Corporations and the wealthy gave generously to opponents of the New Deal, the Republican Party. To a great extent, the people power (and significant independent money) of unions and other progressive organizations served as an adequate counterweight to the resources of the rich and powerful. The Democratic Party enjoyed the benefits of this practice.

The television and money-driven election of JF Kennedy in 1960 marked a watershed in both the diminution of issue relevancy and the maturation of political marketing. Money and the advertising and marketing attention that money bought moved to center stage. Key chains, buttons and inscribed pens were replaced by multimillion dollar television advertisements in the buying of election outcomes.

In 1964, the organic link between the money of wealth and power and the Republican Party began to stretch with the campaign of Barry Goldwater. So called “liberal Republicans” of the East Coast establishment recoiled from what they perceived as extremism, leaving Goldwater's campaign treasuries to be filled by the extreme right's wealthy godfathers in the Southwestern and Western US (The looney right rebounded to Goldwater's loss by investing heavily in rallying and expanding the 26 million Goldwater voter base and by buying a broader, louder, but less shrill voice in the media; that project paid off handsomely by 1980).

While it is understandable that donors would spend to their interests-- support candidates of shared ideology-- things began to change with the Democratic Party's retreat from New Deal economic thinking, the general decline of traditional Party politics, and the rise of the politics of celebrity and personality. With advertising and marketing domination of electoral campaigns, constructing an attractive personal narrative replaced issues and accomplishments-- contrived image replaced content.

Today, the two-party system holds electoral politics in its tight grip. And issue-driven politics has been replaced by the politics of flag pins, winning smiles and a “wholesome” family.

Undoubtedly, the decline of substance in politics further encouraged the activity of sleazy lobbyists and influence peddling. Politicians are not faced with the conflict of principles against powerful interests because electoral politics have turned away from principles.

We see the cynicism of principle in the Republican Party's rejection of its ideological zealots. So called “Tea Party” radicals sat well with the Republican corporate leaders when they were energizing electoral campaigns, but the zealots were challenged after setbacks in 2012. Today, the Republican corporate god fathers are making every effort to temper party radicalism in order to insure the only important principle: electability.

The Democratic Party, on the other hand, simply ignores its left wing, treating it alternately as an embarrassment or a stepchild. It is this trivialization of principle and ideology that channels the flow of money today.

Barren Politics

I wrote in 2008:

This election cycle has revealed something new: Democrats are raising more money from corporate interests for their campaigns than the traditionally dominant Republicans. This process began before the 2006 elections, accelerated sharply in the Presidential elections, strengthened in the early primaries and continued into 2008. In March, 2008, McCain gained somewhat on his Democratic rivals, but still fell well below the total raised by the two Democrats.

Within the Democratic camp, Clinton dominated most corporate contributions until 2008, when Obama enjoyed big gains, pushing ahead through March especially in the key industries of finance, lawyers/lobbyists, communications and health.

Wall Street has strongly supported the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. Through the end of 2007, seven of the big 8 financial firms (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and Credit Suisse) showed a decided preference towards the Democrats. Only Merrill Lynch gave more to Republicans, though they gave the single most to Clinton. The Wall Street Journal (2-3/4-08), while noting that Obama receives a notable number of contributions from small donors, pointed out that “…even for Sen. Obama, the finance industry was still the richest source of cash overall…”

Through February, Obama led the other candidates in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and was in a virtual dead heat with Clinton with respect to the energy sector.

These numbers strongly suggest that candidates, especially Democratic Party candidates, are unlikely to challenge their corporate sponsors in any meaningful way.

Clearly, Corporate America was not afraid that Obama or Clinton would step on their toes or even stand in their way. While the Republican message and program were more overtly and adamantly pro-business, big business was not trying to swing the election their way. While they may have differed on social and even foreign policy questions, wealth and power understood that the Democrats would not challenge them on any matters relevant to their business agenda. Six years after, they appear to have been right.

Another way to illustrate the uncoupling of corporate money from party ideology is through the trend in corporate PACs to shovel money to incumbents of either party: In 1978 corporate PACs gave 40% of their contributions to House incumbents; in 2014, that number had leaped to 74%.

Corporations are not trying to deliver a message; they are outright buying all of the candidates.

With respect to this year's November 4 interim election, corporate PACs have shifted their support-- sometimes dramatically-- from Democrats in key races to Republicans over the last 18 months (WSJ, 10-29-14). Obviously, neither the corporations nor the candidates have changed their agendas greatly. So it's not about issues, but electability.

It should be transparent that two-party politics in the age of extreme concentrations of wealth and media influence is far from a rousing example of democratic process. Consequently, we should surely not expect the results of the tainted process to be democratic. Like the commercialization of commodities, the commercialization of politics results eventually in the domination of the market by a few products (parties, candidates) and the minimizing of their differences. We no more pick our leaders than we pick the products offered in the showroom. Corporate America picks them both.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Looking Back: Five Years after the Obama Election

By 2008, the US electorate was fed up with George Bush. In fact, the US ruling class was fed up, too. Internationally, US prestige was at a low point, thanks to the Bush administration's brazen and failed military aggressions. Domestically, the bottom had fallen out of the US economy. It was time for him to go. His failings cast a shadow over the system's legitimacy.

Anyone with even a passing understanding of US history understood that “regime change” was in the cards. That is, it was the moment for the two-party juggernaut to spit out a fresh face untainted by the previous administration, vigorous, and promising a new direction. It was essential that new leadership appear different, self-confident, and representative of policies contrasting with the old regime.

We saw this before.

Franklin Roosevelt was such a figure. He came forward as a clean, untainted alternative to the failed Hoover administration. Disgust with Hoover was so great, that merely by avoiding large, looming issues, FDR was able to capture the Presidency with a virtual carte blanche to rescue the sinking capitalist economy. Yet he was, as a leading commentator of the time, Walter Lippmann, observed before Roosevelt's election, “... an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is not the dangerous enemy of anything. He is too eager to please.... Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." All historians agree that Roosevelt was, first and foremost, practical. If policies worked or were popular, he supported them.

Over time, a myth arose that Roosevelt was a savior, a messianic figure who arose and smote the rich and powerful. Those who organized the bonus marches, the unemployment councils, the general strikes, the tenant and share cropper actions of the Depression era, like those who built the industrial unions that made up the powerful CIO, were swept under the historical rug. Acknowledging that they were the source or driving force for New Deal reforms was an inconvenient truth. That said, Roosevelt's pragmatism, his respect for new ideas in desperate times, marked him as an uncommon political leader.

The New Deal myth sustained the Democratic Party for decades, even though Party leaders began a retreat from the New Deal upon Roosevelt's death. After 1944, the “New Deal” label fell into disuse as both political Parties rallied around anti-Communism and a relatively benign social compact. Political leaders willingly conceded a modest social contract with labor for cooperation in the anti-Communist campaign and business unionism.

Anti-Communist excesses (so-called “McCarthyism”), overt and institutional racism (segregation), setbacks in foreign policy (Cuba, the U-2) tarnished the US reputation internationally and stirred discontent at home by the end of the 1950s.

Once again, a new face, representing religious diversity, youth, cosmopolitan life style, and change, emerged as an alternative. John Kennedy, like FDR, injected vigor into a two-party landscape driven by the now dominant medium of television. Again regime change was in order and the appearance of regime change was achieved. Despite the mythology of the Kennedy Camelot-- and sealed by his assassination-- Kennedy's administration was ruled by the continuation of the Cold War and lip-service to domestic discontent. While some opportunistic adjustments were forced on his administration, Kennedy largely sought to construct a more compassionate, tolerant face to US capitalism; his assassination obviously shows that this was not acceptable to many important, powerful members of the old club.

Months after the Kennedy assassination, left pundit I.F. Stone captured Kennedy's role: “ ...Kennedy, when the tinsel was stripped away, was a conventional leader, no more than an enlightened conservative, cautious as an old man for all his youth, with a basic distrust of the people and an astringent view of the evangelical as a tool of leadership.”

Less than a decade later, with the criminal implosion of the Nixon administration, the credibility of the US political system was undermined. Resignations, criminal charges and Impeachment bred an unprecedented cynicism and challenge to two-party legitimacy.

A fresh face entered from the wings: Jimmy Carter, neither a Senator nor a corporate attorney, but an obscure Southern Governor and a peanut farmer. Like Roosevelt, Carter brought a fresh, unstained image to the political game, a much-needed contrast to the sleaze of his predecessors.

I wrote in 2008 of the 1976 election: “Most citizens looked to the then forthcoming elections with a profound desire for a new course. The Democrats chose a political outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Carter promised to make the government 'as good as the people.' Pundits hailed Carter as a departure from the old politics and a fresh, honest voice for change (e.g. The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, Howard Norton and Bob Slosser, 1976).”

I went on to note that Carter proved to be a prophet of false hope and absent change. He quickly turned his back on the most progressive Democratic platform since the New Deal and ushered in economic policies that were soon to be dubbed “Reaganomics.”

It was this historical backdrop that prompted me to suggest that candidate Barack Obama might well be another postured savior at a moment of crisis in the two-Party system, a carefully crafted, groomed alternative to a bumbling, embarrassing regime.

There are some striking and illuminating parallels between this election season and the Presidential election campaign of 1976... Like the eight years of the Bush administration, the eight years of Nixon/Ford produced an unparalleled collapse of support for the Republican Party. The Watergate scandal coupled with the failure of the US military in Vietnam and an economic crisis left the Republican Party wounded and regrouping.

Similar to 1976 Presidential candidate J. Carter, his presumptive 2008 counterpart, Barack Obama, is viewed as a Washington “outsider”. He has campaigned as a candidate of change. Pundits hail him as a fresh voice untainted by the vices of the establishment.

Obama must contend with similar issues: a brutal military adventure, collapsing mass living standards, and an economy exhibiting more and more of the symptoms of “stagflation.” Like Carter, his campaign is geared to appealing to the mass base of the Democratic Party: the working class, liberals, and African-Americans. His campaign strategists will likely recommend - as Carter’s advisors did - that the candidate tack to the right to garner center-right and independent votes going into the general election. Every Democratic Party Presidential candidate since has employed a similar strategy. Despite this maneuver, Carter managed to lose his huge lead in the polls and eke out a narrow victory in the November election. Nonetheless, this failed approach continues to seduce Democratic Party tacticians. (ZZ, 2008: A Reprise of 1976? Fall, 2008)

Obama represented a constant of modern US politics: political crisis or threat to legitimacy spawning a face-lift, cosmetic changes, and a re-kindling of “hope” and “change” in the form of a vigorous, youthful, well-spoken Democrat. And Obama, as an African American, had the special appeal of breaking through racial barriers and perhaps sharing some common sensibilities with diverse peoples outside of the US.

While contemporary history taught that appearance generally belied actual change, liberals and most of the US Left succumbed to the allure, putting aside their picket signs, marching shoes, and petitions to open their pocketbooks and enthusiasm to the Obama campaign.

With the November, 2008 victory under his belt, Obama's unprecedented campaign contributions from the financial sector, his lame, discredited cabinet appointees, and his blatant, shameless, scandalizing of his home-town pastor, Reverend Wright, left the adoring Left unfazed.

By fitting Obama with the mantle of progressive change, the leadership of the broad left - much of the peace movement, liberals, environmental social justice activists, etc. - surrendered their critical judgment, independence, and influence to a blind trust in a fictitious movement for change. In the history of social change in the US, every real advance was spurred by independent organization and struggle, unhampered by the niceties of bourgeois politics. From the Abolitionist movement to the Civil Rights movement, from the Populist movement to the Great Society, from the Anti-imperialist League to the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the initiative for change sprung from committed, independent activists who defied the caution and inertia of elected officials. Why have these lessons been ignored? (ZZ, Let Obama be Obama? December 29, 2008)

Yet everyone from the Hollywood liberal set to the Communist Party USA hailed Obama as the Second-coming of FDR, if not Lincoln.

Over the top, but representative of the self-delusional moment, one hopped-up “progressive” wrote in a widely disseminated 19-page homage to the election of Barack Obama: "...hundreds of millions-Black, Latino, Asian, Native-American and white, men and women, young and old, literally danced in the streets and wept with joy, celebrating an achievement of a dramatic milestone in a 400-year struggle, and anticipating a new period of hope and possibility."

Leaving aside the hyperbole (less than 130 million people voted for BOTH candidates and 400 years takes us back to well-before there was a USA), this screed correctly captured the unjustified euphoria that swept through the Left.

Seemingly, every generation of the Left surrenders to the false hope of the Democratic Party; every generation repeats the same mistake.

Tragedy? Farce?

Today, the Obama administration owns the betrayal of the EFCA promise to labor, an untenable healthcare system borrowed from Mitt Romney, 800 hundred deaths a month in the failed state of Iraq, an Afghani nation that may kick the US military out before it plans to leave, the destabilization of Libya and Syria, a broken promise on Guantanamo, widening income and wealth gaps, crumbling infrastructures, a host of unfulfilled promises, a legacy of corporate coddling, and cowardly and illegal (drone) murders. The shattering of a racial barrier-- the election of the first African American President-- has shamefully served to cover the criminal neglect and decline of the well-being of African Americans.

And everyone knows it. In 2013 alone, Obama's approval rating dropped nine points to 43%; the percentage believing that Obama is honest and straightforward has dropped ten points to 37%.

And this is the candidate embraced by the broad Left in 2008?

With three years left-- two years before the 2016 Presidential campaign begins in earnest-- Democratic Party influentials are pressing Obama to establish some kind of legacy to energize the base, to charge up the “respectable” Left and labor for future elections. As a lame-duck, he will likely make numerous gestures towards the social, life-style issues valued by the upper-middle strata-- the petty-bourgeoisie. There may even be a highly publicized, but feeble attempt to raise the minimum wage. But expect no serious changes in ruling class foreign or economic policy. Liberals have demonstrated that they will not hold elected Democrats to any promises on these questions.

Will this herd the sheep-like liberals and soft-Left back into the fold? Will they repeat again the slavish loyalty of the past? Will they drink the Kool-aid?

Or will people finally recognize the Democratic Party trap and begin to construct a movement towards independent politics, perhaps rallying around Jill Stein and the Green Party? Will there be a long overdue departure from bankrupt ideology and shameless opportunism? Will the idea of people power and the companion notion of socialism take root?

We have a new year to find out...

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com