A democratic national convention: “NOT!”
The DNC made for a prime time, feel good festival of Zoom faces of America as the convocation of the so-called Anti-Fascist United Front sans a workers party but uniting the forces of the workers movement with wide swaths of the techno-managerial caste and the corporate bougeoisie from both sides of the aisle. We saw a layer of Republicans, building the mythology of the centrist consensus. Meg Whitman and Colin Powel, two exploiting thugs and heroes of US imperialism, bourgeois feminism and bourgeois “black liberation” in their own right are welcomed by the DNC to build the big umbrella trapping the workers under the yoke of capitalism and imperialism for the united task of defeating Trump.
While the rats jump from the sinking ship of the Republican party, we note the Yachts for Biden showing the class nature of the party. Supine acquiescence in class society and wage labor and capitalist dictatorship is all they offer the workers and oppressed.
While the Democrats pretend they are fighting the “fascism” of the Trump regime, the workers, oppressed and youth of Portland are fighting the fascist Proud Boys, Boogaloos, and Patriot Prayer gangs who are ‘outside agitators’ flown in for weekend rioting funded by the extreme right and protected and abetted by both the federal and local militarized police. Don’t be fooled! The Democratic mayor of Portland, just like the Democratic mayor in Chicago and other cities line up squarely as militarists who provoke police riots against the #BLM protests and do so nationwide. It is not just Trump and the fascist thugs, it is the Democratic party which sends the cops. Even to question and possibly snatch you at home!
Sophisticates of the academic set and punditry are telling us that the Biden who gave us the Biden Plan for the partitioning of Iraq and author of the racist 1994 Crime Bill and Kamala Harris the “top Cop” of CA under Jerry Brown have somehow both been pulled to the left by the current events following the racist executions of George Floyd, Bryonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others. The left liberals and pacifists lap this up as if they are winning the hearts and minds of the Democratic centrists…but the Blue Dogs are not moving toward the center and sit on their haunches protecting the bourgeoisie from any ‘progressive’ legislation from making it past their oversight. As for Joe and Kamala all of a sudden becoming social justice warriors, let alone anti-imperialists or even rainy day champions of the oppressed at home and in the super-exploited semi-colonies, we dismiss such fantasy with a yawn. We tell the workers expect austerity, Larry Summers ‘economics’ in place of Kudlow/Navarro, and attacks on Social Security from the self-styled “Lunchbox Joe,” who is still the senator from DuPont.
Workers want to know who will provide a healthy and safe workplace and jobs for all? Who will protect our kids and teachers and provide safe quality education for all? Not anyone on the ballot in November! Waiting for November or January 21 is as foolish as waiting for the publication of the unredacted Muller Report! The ruling class parties have no solution to the capitalist crisis, the environmental melt down, or the pandemic. “Intersectional” academics are thrilled. Oh the places you’ll fill! Get your resume ready! The next layer of sycophant enforcers of imperialism and state terror will look just like you!
Revolutionary Marxism does not hide the facts that only class struggle methods and political independence form the foundation for the fight for power. We say every retreat into the capitalist party or even the de facto class collaboration popular front with the Democratic party is a step backward, not toward our liberation. First and foremost because the workers’ class consciousness and workers’ party is not being built or advocated for, and is taken off the agenda for not just this moment but the foreseeable future. Ask yourself why and who took it off?
How does the left explain that ‘anarchist’ Noam Chomsky, ‘communist’ Angela Davis, labor leaders and Republican Meg Whitman (ex CEO for Hewlett-Packard) are in the same Biden boat? To those who fight for political independence of the working class, much of the left (from the Nation to Counterpunch and Truthout) explains their positions like this: 1) Defeat fascism at all costs, 2) the Democrats are better 3) it will be easier to push the Democrats to the left than it will be to push Trump 4) Bernie, AOC, The Squad, etc., and the fake promise of the “democratic socialist” sheepdog appendage.
They claim they are in a tactical bloc to defeat fascism. Yet all history has shown that fascism does not go down without a fight. Fascism is defeated in bloodletting on a massive scale and at this point all the bloodletting is against the poor, Black, Brown and oppressed people, while gun toting black shirts are trying to claim their corner on the streets, in the dialogue and as part of the “democratic norm,” sneaking the swastika into congress in November via QAnon.
We know that to defeat fascism the workers and oppressed cannot depend on the forces of the state to defend us; we see them defending the fascists at every street action; now we need our own organizations, our unions, and community centers to organize Labor Black and Brown Self Defense Guards. Nancy Pelosi will welcome the Class of 2021 with its fascist QAnon members as part of the norm. We say no platform for fascists!
They claim the Democrats are better. We say they are better at hiding the rule of the capitalist class from the exploited and oppressed. They throw just enough crumbs from the bosses’ table to put the masses off the streets and back into the electoral booth while the bread lines and soup kitchens mushroom on both sides of the election day calendar. The Crisis of capitalism is structural, not something that is easily modulated, never mind repaired by tweaking the tax code or increasing or lowering the prime interest rate. Between quantitative easing (printing funny money) and lowering interest rates, the ruling class has exhausted all its solutions from A to B! If you want to get to C you need communism.
They claim it’s easier to push the Democrats to the left than it is to push Trump. This is also a version of the Zizec vs. Garza conundrum from 2016. Zizec said the battleground for the workers and oppressed would be better for us with a Trump victory, while Alicia Garza (founder of the BLM) claimed the battle ground would be better under Hillary Clinton! This is just the next of the seasonal attempts by the misleaders of the workers and oppressed make to sell virtues of class collaboration. They do this EVERY FOUR YEARS! They refuse to fight for the political independence of the working class and for the class struggle methods that build independent workers organizations and self defense power year after year. Then they get within months of the election, shrug their shoulders and say we have nothing to offer you except a better battle ground after the election! Campaigning to elect the Democratic Party goes hand-in-hand with their legalistic pressure politics, to pressure the Democratic Party to the left and the capitalist state for reforms. This is divorced from organizing the working class and oppressed to fight for socailist revolution.
These wanna-be Sun Tzus forget one thing! The battle is already raging and you have no army because you refuse to fight for labor and the oppressed to break from the capitalist overlords, either programmatically or organizationally. At every event on the streets you strive to find “progressive” Democrats to promote and you isolate those who fight for class independence. Thus they set the class up for failure and defeat.
Also they do not recognize that it is the popular front itself that paves the way for fascism because it will never win socialism, exactly as it is based on peace with a wing of capitalism and imperialism. Social chauvinism is the name of the game that unites Meg Whitman, Colin Powel with Bernie, AOC and “the Squad” with the likes of the Third Camp from the League for a Revolutionary Party and to the lost and homeless wanderers whose ISO collapsed in 2019 and the other fakers and opportunists like Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party and the real CPUSA and its offshoots.
What will change in November? Actually nothing, except it may signal the last, desperate 10-11 weeks of Trump doings. If he loses, there is real worry that he will not leave office, and about what to do if he won’t. We will call for a General Strike and workers to power, no confidence in the state or the Democrats. The only means of resolving the racist police culture, economic and pandemic crises and the coming austerity in favor of the working class is through socialist revolution, for the workers to take state power and rule society. And for that we need our own working class party. The Democrats have shown they are not capable of defeating the vestiges of the 3/5th clause of the Constitution and the compromise struck with the Slaveocrats that produced the electoral college. America’s original sin has not been eradicated by generations of ‘progressive’ parliamentarism and now is not their time nor will it ever be, because the wealth of generations of the ruling class depends on the power it affords them in law to enforce the system of wage slavery.
