11-17-2020, 02:52 PM
(11-17-2020, 02:37 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(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 Democratic Party is not "loyal to the working man", lol. Even from a vulgar left-populist position (laborite capitalism - pro-unions, pro-welfare, etc.) the Democrats are loyal to specific segments of the working class- workers in the tech sector and finance, the actual Democratic base.
In reality, social democratic demands like "loyalty to the working class" are useless. What is necessary is nothing less than the self-abolition of the working class as a class.
Unions are useless in this struggle, indeed counterrevolutionary. Per Professor Paul Mattick:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick.../lebel.htm
Quote: Although the continued existence of capitalism, in either its private or state-capitalist forms, proved that the expectation of the growth of a new labour movement in the wake of the Second World War was pre mature, the continued resilience of capitalism does not remove its immanent contradictions and will therefore not release the workers from the need to put an end to it. Of course, with capitalism still in the saddle, the old labour organisations, parliamentary parties and trade unions, could also be maintained. But they are already recognised, and recognise themselves, as part and parcel of capitalism, destined to go down with the system on which their existence depends.
Quote: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.
The revolution does not require a formalized Party at all. I would suggest studying Amadeo Bordiga's views on the matter.