Carl, looking at both the GOP and the Democratic parties, or for that matter
any political party in U.S. history; they all started as "the party of the
people". However, the wanna-be leaders allowed their own greed to corrupt the
entire political body. The same thing will happen to the 3rd party or the 4th
party or the 5th party, etc etc. It doesn't matter if we have 2, 3, or 50
political parties as that isn't the problem. The problem is capitalism itself.
It is a failed experiment that only leads to wealth and resources being pushed
either towards the top by birthright or to the bottom by hand-outs. The working
class is dwindled down to the point where the system collapses under its own
weight.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2020 4:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: jamesjarvis98 <jamesjarvis98@xxxxxxxxx>; delores selset <dselset@xxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Should Progressives Work in the Democratic Party?
What a brilliant article! Written over 60 years ago only the names have been
changed, to protect the guilty. But the basic question remains the same today,
should Progressives join and attempt to change the Democratic Party, or should
Progressives work to build Union Membership and begin a Political Party
organized by, and for the Working Class.
In other words, is our nation's present political/economic system able to be
salvaged, or should we support a total social/economic reformation?
Carl Jarvis
On 4/15/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2020/04/14/should-progressives-work-in-the
-democratic-party/ Should Progressives Work in the Democratic Party?
Socialist Action / 13 hours ago
By GEORGE BREITMAN
Here we reprint part of a 1959 debate between a revolutionary
socialist and a social democrat. George Breitman, a member of the
Socialist Workers Party and longtime editor of The Militant newspaper,
argued the No side.
I shall begin by defining what I have in mind by the terms
“progressive,” “work in” and “Democratic Party. ”
By “progressive” I mean two things: First, the great social forces
that have the power to decide the future – the working class and its
allies, the working farmers, the Negro people and the youth. Second, I
have in mind the smaller, radical groups and individuals who are
repelled by the capitalist system, its anarchy, militarism,
depressions, regimentation, inequality and debasement of human and
cultural values, and who favor the replacement of this system by one
based on cooperation, planning, brotherhood and promotion of the
interests of the majority. In short, I use the term “progressive” for
those who are pro-labor or anti-capitalist, who are anti-war,
anti-fascist, anti-Jim Crow, pro-socialist,
By “work in” I mean belong to, become a member of, vote for, support
or endorse.
Now, about the nature of the Democratic Party.
Socialists say that political parties represent, express, reflect
class interests. This doesn’t mean that parties necessarily say they
represent class interests; nor that all their members think they do;
nor even that all their members come from the same class. (The truth
of this proposition doesn’t depend on what socialists say, or what
anti-socialists say. It can be tested by facts, the evidence of
history, objective analysis.)
When socialists say the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, they
don’t mean that most of its members are capitalists. Obviously not. If
the capitalists had to depend on their own numbers, they couldn’t
elect a justice of the peace, for they are a tiny part of the population.
Actually, most supporters of the Democratic Party are workers, farmers
and members of the middle classes, But they aren’t the ones who decide
the real aims of the party.
Nationally, the Democratic Party is a coalition – of capitalists and
union leaders, of Southern white supremacists and Northern Negroes, of
corrupt machines in the cities and unorganized or loosely organized
farmers on the land, of conservatives and liberals, etc.
This coalition explains why the Democratic Party says the things it
says, why it writes the platforms it writes – for it appeals to
conflicting interests and tries to hold them together. It also
explains why the Democratic Party sometimes says different things than
the other capitalist party, the Republican Party, for the Republican
Party has a somewhat different composition and following, making its
major appeal for support to the middle classes and non-unionized
sections of the working class.
But it doesn’t determine which interest controls, dominates, runs and
uses the Democratic Party. We say it is dominated, as the Republican
Party is dominated, by a minority of its members – by a small group of
monopoly capitalists who also control the economy, the government, the
means of communication and the educational system.
It doesn’t matter what the Democratic platform says – the chief
function of this party, as of the Republican Party, is to protect the
interests of the monopoly capitalists at home and abroad. It doesn’t
matter what the candidates of this party say during election campaigns
(they usually say what they think will win votes, not what they think)
– what counts is what its office holders do about the important issues of the
day.
Only a few examples are possible now:
The overwhelming majority of the people of this country, and of the
members of both capitalist parties, want peace, the relaxation of
international tensions, a ban on nuclear explosions, and so on. But
what do they get? Wars, war crises, preparation for war,
militarization, the draft, a permanent arms economy and crushing taxes
to maintain it, the continuation of the Cold War and Cold War
propaganda. And the Democratic Party’s chief complaint against the
Republicans is that they don’t appropriate and spend enough for these
purposes! On this issue the Democratic Party surely serves the
interests of the ruling class faithfully and consistently.
The Democrats differ from the Republicans occasionally on what to do
about unemployment, because the Democrats usually have greater support
among the unemployed and want to retain that support. But their
differences are minor, sometimes insignificant. They agree on the
basic
things: That the present economic system must not be reorganized to
abolish unemployment. That when workers are laid off through no fault
of their own, they should suffer cuts in their living standards,
rather than the employers. That jobless compensation should not be
paid for the duration of unemployment. That the work week should not be
shortened.
These are things the capitalist class thinks too.
The Jim Crow system in the U.S. is the scandal of the world.
Nevertheless, the American ruling class shows no intention of
abolishing it within the time of anyone now living. In the South, the
Democratic Party is a one-party dictatorship dedicated to maintaining
white supremacy. In Congress, it provides the bulk of the votes
against meaningful civil rights legislation. Northern Democrats have
to make some gestures to keep the Negro vote, but their liberalism is
rarely more than skin deep on this question. If you elect liberals
like Hart and McNamara, who swear undying devotion to the civil rights
cause, the first thing they do when they get to Washington is vote to
elect the Southern Democratic enemies of the Negro people to the key
Congressional posts, which are used to block civil rights and all
other progressive legislation, Liberals like Governor Williams will
make impassioned speeches about injustice to Negroes in the South, but
no one has ever heard him utter a single word about the most Jim Crow
city in the North right on his own doorstep, Dearborn, whose mayor
boasts that no Negro can live there. So it would be putting it mildly
to say that the Democratic Party’s policy on civil rights is in accord
with that of the ruling class, which always benefits from hatred and
discord among the workers.
My final example is civil liberties. We are still suffering from the
effects of the witch hunt launched to silence all opposition to the
Cold War. The record shows that the Democratic Party served the
capitalist class just as zealously in this witch hunt as the
Republicans. The Democrats passed and enforced the Smith Act to gag political
dissent.
Democratic presidents transformed the FBI into a political police force.
The Democrats started the misnamed government “loyalty program. A
Democratic president initiated the “subversive” blacklist. Democrats
spearheaded the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950. Liberal
Democrats took the lead in passing the Humphrey-Butler “Communist
Control” Act of 1954. We tend to think of this as the era of
McCarthyism, but the Democrats, liberal as well as conservative, were
in there doing their fair share of gnawing away at the Bill of Rights,
And not only in Washington, but in Lansing too. The Trucks Law of 1952
was the worst and most repressive law ever passed in Michigan. All the
Democrats in the legislature voted for it. Williams, begged by the
civil libertarians to veto this bill to turn Michigan into a police
state, said he could see no reason not to sign it, and sign it he did.
For the next four years he ignored all appeals that he call for its
repeal. It would still be on the books if it had been left up to him,
rather than the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally struck it down.
Having given an analysis of the Democratic Party, for better or worse,
I want to indicate now why it is wrong from just about every
conceivable angle for progressives to work in it. I’ll take up the
labor movement first, the radical groups second.
Unions are created in the first place because there is a fundamental
clash of interest between workers and capitalists. A necessary
condition for the effective functioning of unions is that they be
independent of the capitalists; as we all know, a company union, an
organization dominated by the employers, does not and cannot defend the
workers’
interests. I believe it can be stated as a law – the more independent
a union is of capitalists, of individual capitalists and of the
capitalist class as a whole, the better able it is to defend the workers’
interests. Or if you don’t care for the word “law,” let me put it this
way: Independence of the labor movement is a first principle,
recognized and expounded by the best union leaders like Debs and Haywood.
This has always been true, but it is especially true today, when the
monopoly stage of capitalism expands the role of the state and gives
all struggles, including labor struggles, an openly political character.
What labor in our country needs above everything else is a party of
its own, which can fight for the needs and aspirations of the workers
on the political field as unions can on the economic field…
But instead of having a party of its own, the labor movement is
dependent, in the political sphere, on a party controlled by the
capitalists and promoting the interests of the capitalists. It is a
tail to the Democratic kite, as one union leader put it.
This must be designated as a violation of the principle of
independence on the basis of which the union movement was created.
It is not only wrong in principle, however. It is also harmful in
practice, and the cause of most of the ills besetting the labor
movement today.
It was reported not long ago that the unions spent more money on the
last congressional election than the Democratic campaign committees did.
What have they gotten in return? UAW secretary-treasurer Emil Mazey
said about a month ago: “We won an election last November but until
now we have not received a single thing from this victory.” This is
true after every election.
The present Congress, controlled by the Democrats the unions helped to
elect, has refused to end the filibuster. It has refused to extend
jobless compensation for a year. It has refused to enact a federal
standard for jobless compensation. It is on the verge of passing the
Kennedy-Erwin bill to further restrict the independence of the unions
by subjecting them to government control, a bill which becomes worse
and worse every time Congress takes it up. And at the recent
conference on unemployment in Washington, all the AFL-CIO could get
from the leaders of the Democratic Party was a promise to study the
question…
[Teamsters Union president Jimmy] Hoffa is not our idea of a model
labor leader, any more than Reuther is. But sometimes they tell the truth too.
I think Hoffa did that in a recent interview with the Detroit Free
Press. Asked to comment on the alliance between the UAW and the
Michigan Democratic Party, he said: “The UAW has less power that way.
If I got you, I don’t have to worry about you. The Democrats control
the UAW in Michigan. Reuther has got himself into a trap and doesn’t
know how to get out.” Reuther knows how to get out all right, but
except for that, I think Hoffa’s statement comes close to the truth,
which I would put this
way: That, thanks to this alliance, the Democrats have much more
influence in the labor movement than the labor movement has in the
Democratic Party.
The Democrats can take the unions for granted, because they feel they
have them in their pocket; because the unions, having sworn not to
create their own party, have nowhere else to go. Who can deny this?
Dixiecrats get more concessions from the Democrats than the union
leaders do because they threaten to bolt and form their own party. The
union leaders not only have become dependent on the Democratic Party,
they have become its captives. And this is one of the reasons why the
Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the right year after year.
So labor’s support of the Democrats is wrong in all respects – from
the standpoint of principle, from the pragmatic standpoint of results.
What the labor movement and its allies need is to make a clean break
with both capitalist parties, and form an independent labor party
dedicated to winning control of the government and putting into effect
a program that will meet the needs of the majority of the people,
For radicals and socialists, the situation is even more clear-cut. Our
goal – the creation of a new society through working class political
action – requires that we help the labor movement to break away from
capitalist parties and capitalist politics; and to expand the
influence and organization of radical and revolutionary groups and
parties fit to provide leadership to the workers in a fight for a better
society.
Neither of these objectives can be served by working in the Democratic
Party. Again, it is wrong in principle and wrong in every other way
that can be measured. The highways are littered with the political
corpses of radicals and socialists who entered the Democratic Party
with the idea of making it radical, and who ended up by becoming mere
liberals or even conservatives themselves.
The main function of the radical movement today is educational and
propagandistic, pending the time – not as distant as some radicals
think – when it once again can lead the people in great actions and struggles.
To educate means first of all to say what is, to tell the people the
truth. What good is a radical, what right has he to any hearing, if he
doesn’t meet this minimum condition?
But you can’t be in the Democratic Party and tell the truth to the
people. The first thing demanded of you in the Democratic Party is
that you support its candidates, that is, help spread the propaganda
that the election of Democrats is in the interests of the people. If
you do this, you have to lie, you have to cover up the fact that the
Democratic Party stands for the Cold War, more armaments, little or no
help to the unemployed, racial oppression, restrictions on the Bill of
Rights, retention of the Taft-Hartley Act, maintenance of the status quo
generally.
In short, the condition for working in the Democratic Party is that
you must abdicate the primary function of the radical. If everyone did
it, it would mean the death of all organized radical opposition to capitalism.
The final test of a policy is in its results. The policy we are
debating tonight is not a new one, and it has been tested for a long
time. The labor movement has been working in and supporting the
Democratic Party for the last 25 years: Isn’t it true, Brother
Haessler, that the Democratic Party today stands to the right of where
it stood 25 years ago, and not to the left? The main sections of the
radical movement have been supporting the Democratic Party, directly
or indirectly, with only a few lapses for over 20 years: Can you
claim, Brother Haessler, that radical influence in the Democratic
Party is greater than it was 20 years ago? Can you claim that radical
influence in the country is generally greater today than it was in the
days when the radical parties, considered it their duty to oppose the
Democratic Party at the polls?
Supporting the Democratic Party is at best an exercise in futility for
radicals, and one of the causes contributing to their decline. At
worst, it is a betrayal of anti-capitalist principles that are at the
heart of radicalism, and without which it must decay and die.
It is also a repudiation of the whole past of American radicalism. If
it’s right to support the Democrats today, if it’s wrong to oppose
them at the polls and to work in every other way to expose their
reactionary character, then everything the old socialist movement did
in its best days was also wrong and should be renounced rather than
pointed to as an inspiration for the future. If it’s right to support
the Democrats today, then [Eugene] Debs was wrong in helping to
organize the Socialist Party, in running those magnificent election
campaigns, in teaching that it is unprincipled for socialists to
support capitalist candidates; then Debs was just a hopeless
sectarian, whose example has little to offer us today. (Which,
incidentally, is what William Z. Foster and the Communist Party now
are saying.)
Speaking of Debs reminds me of the question that people sometimes ask:
What happened to the old idealism of the socialist movement, the
self-sacrificing spirit of solidarity and militancy that the American
radical movement used to know? What happened to it was that the
leaders of the movement, lacking or losing confidence in the capacity
of the workers to change society and govern themselves, began to find
all kinds of pretexts and rationalizations for deserting the policies
of class struggle and embracing the policies of class collaboration.
One of the manifestations of this change was the change from the old
principle, that it’s the duty of socialists to oppose capitalist party
candidates, run independent candidates and use election campaigns to
expose the nature of capitalism and present the truth about socialism
– a change from this tradition to arguments that independent campaigns
achieve nothing, that you must not let yourself get “isolated,” that
you must adjust yourself to the politics of the labor bureaucrats
rather than fight them.
You can’t create idealism, you can’t maintain militancy and devotion
to the great goals of the socialist future through such maneuvers.
Take the workers into the Democratic swamp of opportunism, horse
trades and dirty machine politics, where any piece of filthy work is
justified if it helps win the next election, and you can’t expect
anything but that it will sap the workers’ militancy, devotion to
principle and class-consciousness – if they remain there and don’t
drop out of politics altogether demoralized.
The future lies with the youth – the young people just beginning to
recover from a decade of Cold War conformism. They’ve heard enough
lies to last them for a lifetime. What they need is the truth, simple
and direct. Only if they get it will they respond with those reserves
of militancy and bravery that are especially characteristic of the
young, that seem to be the prerequisite of every genuine revolution,
and that can revitalize American radicalism as an effective fighting force.
You’ll get nowhere telling the youth white lies or half truths about
the Democratic Party. You’ll be shirking your duty to them and to the
future if you tell them to go work in the Democratic Party.
Therefore, the policy dictated to progressives is to oppose the
Democratic Party, not to work in it or get others to support it. Those
of us who are workers should strive in our unions to bring about a
break with capitalist politics and the formation of an independent
labor party. Those of us who are radicals and socialists should do
everything we can to fight the two-party system, utilize election
campaigns to spread socialist ideas and influence, and run socialist
slates for office, if possible along the general lines of the
Independent Socialist ticket in New York in 1958.
That ticket, bringing together independent radicals, former
Progressive Party members and Socialist Workers Party members in a
united socialist campaign against both capitalist parties, was an
encouraging progressive alternative to the compromising, demoralizing,
self-defeating policy of working in the Democratic Party. The
Socialist Workers Party advocated similar united left-wing tickets
here in Michigan in the 1957 and 1958 election campaigns. The other
radical groups in the state rejected its proposals in those years. We
hope they will respond differently to proposals for a united ticket of
radicals, socialists and progressives in the 1960 campaign, nationally
and locally. If they don’t, we promise we will still try to act as
socialists should, by placing a socialist ticket on the ballot in
Michigan and running a campaign that will help promote independent
working class political action by openly telling the truth about capitalism
and socialism.
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Thomas Paine
“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
