Comments on a Phelps-Brenner-Luce article on the
Democratic Party
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
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
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
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.