Comments on a Phelps-Brenner-Luce article on the Democratic Party

 

posted to www.marxmail.org on May 11, 2004

 

An interesting but wrongheaded article by 3 leading Solidarity members has been posted to the Portside mailing list, which is moderated by the Committees of Correspondence. The authors are Christopher Phelps, editor of a recent Verso book containing Max Shachtman's early writings on the "Negro question", Joanna Brenner, a socialist feminist who has written both books and articles for Monthly Review, and Stephanie Luce, an economics professor at U. of Mass. The article can be read at: <http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portside/Week-of-Mon-20040510/005900.html>

 

While it makes a number of salient points about the Democratic Party, it tries to paper over the differences between those on the left--including Solidarity itself--who agree with those points and people on the left who advocate voting for Kerry. This would obviously include the Committees of Correspondence itself, a breakaway from the CPUSA that shares the party's umbilical cord relationship to the Democratic Party.

 

The authors claim that "Our position is that a reasonable case can be made for either of these left-wing responses to a baleful political situation that will not be resolved electorally."

 

In a spirit of reconciliation (or opportunism, for those less generously disposed), they try to analogize support for Kerry with Lenin's support for a Labor Party vote in the early 1920s:

 

"We hold a different view [from those who regard a vote for Kerry the way that most comrades on Marxmail do]. We believe that there are logical reasons why radicals or activists might vote Democratic, reasons that in no way entail illusions about the reliability of Democratic politicians. Most simply desire, viscerally, to see Bush and his cronies suffer a humiliating defeat. Others believe that social realities are more clearly laid bare when the kinder, gentler bourgeois party is in power, noting that there are fewer illusions about the nature of the system's workings when Democrats administrate austerity and war than when Republicans do. (Lenin made parallel arguments about the British Labour Party.)"

 

But there are important differences between the Democratic Party of 2004 and the Independent Labor Party of Great Britain in 1921. This is what Lenin said in "Leftwing Communism: an Infantile Disorder":

 

"On the contrary, the fact that most British workers still follow the lead of the British Kerenskys or Scheidemanns and have not yet had experience of a government composed of these people—an experience which was necessary in Russia and Germany so as to secure the mass transition of the workers to communism—undoubtedly indicates that the British Communists should participate in parliamentary action, that they should, from within parliament, help the masses of the workers see the results of a Henderson and Snowden government in practice, and that they should help the Hendersons and Snowdens defeat the united forces of Lloyd George and Churchill. To act otherwise would mean hampering the cause of the revolution, since revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone."

 

In other words, Lenin urged the British Communists to help the Labor Party to get elected *for the first time* because it would expose the differences between the party's socialist verbiage and its willingness to accommodate to the ruling class. It was a process that was critical for the self-education of the working class that made up the rank-and-file of the party.

 

And so what does this have to do with the Democratic Party in the USA? In a word, absolutely nothing. The Democratic Party's record in office goes back nearly 200 years. It was the party of slavery and the Yankee mercantile class. It was superseded by the Republican Party during the civil war, but made a compromise in the 1870s that left blacks exposed to racist violence in the South. Until the civil rights era, it remained the party of Jim Crow. It has also been in power for some of the most savage imperialist wars in the 20th century, including WWI, WWII and the Vietnam war.

 

While there might have been an excuse for the British working class to hold illusions in a party that it had built with its own sweat and blood, there is no excuse for Marxists to foster illusions in the Democratic Party--no matter if it is done in the spirit of keeping peace at the dinner table.