Election 2020

[Bob Butler 54]

(11-17-2020, 02:15 PM)Einzige Wrote: As an actual Marxist, I see very little difference between the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Both are ultra-capitalist, ultranationalist parties of the bourgeois and their bootlickers among the privileged sectors of the working class (the"middle-class", whose own relationship to the means of production is identical to the lowliest Third World laborer). Bill Clinton created the Imigration And Customs Enforcement agency weaponized by Trump with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996; Barack Obama was the Deporter-in-Chief. These parties are structurally and functionally identical.

Welfare programs, for example, are simply designed to facilitate the increased circulation of money. That's all. They are the products of a particular bourgeois economic theory which holds that economic crises are the product of under consumption (ironically, the same theory underpinning Republican supply side economics), which can be overcome endogenously without changes to the mode of production. "Crony capitalism" issimply capitalism which prioritizes the circulation of money to competition; it isn't some radically new mode of production.

The Green New Deal on the socdem Left is another example. It's nothing more than an attempt to solve a capitalist problem capitalistically- to heal Marx's "metabolic rift" with nature and perhaps to induce a Keynesian knock on effect in the process. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary, or even radical, in any of AOC's proposals towards this end. Green capitalism is garbage.

At the height of the unravelling, I could go with that analysis.  Both parties were more loyal to the elites than to the working man.  These days, things have shifted a little bit.  It is more that the Republicans are loyal to the elites and racists, the Democrats to the working man and minorities.  It seems possible that the conflict can be resolved through votes and legislation rather than violence.

The problem with Marxism is that the party becomes the new elites.  They own the means of production.  In all attempts a Marxism to date, the revolutionaries come to care more about the revolutionaries than the people.  As a result, the Marxist economies are unable to compete with the capitalists.  Until that problem is solved, Marxism is a non starter.

That leaves us trying capitalist problems using capitalist methods.  They may not be radical, but they have not historically failed enough that socialism has become a dirty word.