2-10-07, 9:23 am
The communist idea requires its adherents to analyze, understand and participate in class struggle as it is, not as they wish it could be. This is the spirit of thought and practice that should frame our understanding of the current battles between Congress and the Bush administration.
The Bush administration directly represents the interests of the ultra-right section of the ruling class. Its electoral support was snatched from working class voters, who, for the most part, went unorganized by labor or democratic movements or were frightened by administration-fostered terror and distortions of spiritual values. In a number of places votes were simply stolen.
Bush openly identifies his administration’s foreign and domestic goals with military-oriented sections of big capital, energy and pharmaceutical monopolies, corporate interests with aggressive, anti-labor overseas goals and finance capital. Meanwhile, he has given little more than lip service and in some cases fought against the needs of most domestically based industrial capital (such as transport, steel and auto). His open hostility to major industries like Hollywood, trial law, and the public sector are well known.
These divisions within the capitalist class have to understood and exploited. And need we, at this point, say anything of his sheer abuse of our class, of working families?
On the other hand, Congress, because of its more broadly representative nature, is a complicated terrain of conflicted interests, strata and movements, which have been sharpened by recent events culminating in the Democratic sweep in 2006. While most Democrats are beholden to the interests of sections of big capital, they are not free from the need to make concession to labor, the peace movement, environmentalists, progressive women’s movements, civil rights activists, racial and ethnic minority group organizations, and so on.
It isn’t possible to view the Democratic Party as whole as being independent of capital. But it must be dealt with as a potential ally in securing key reforms that will improve the lives of the people as a whole and strengthen the working class. In today’s climate, pretending that purely independent political forms are realistically the only way forward is merely playing at politics.
For their part, congressional Republicans, up to now, have enforced the discipline needed to achieve Bush’s ultra-right agenda and have reflected an adherence to the so-called imperial presidency, a velvet-gloved dictatorship under Bush. Only now has this discipline begun to fracture.
Let’s examine the Democratic agenda as it trudges its way through Congress for examples. Senate Republicans initially filibustered the Democratic minimum wage raise after tepid opposition in the House, but backed off when Senate Majority Leader Reid threatened to prevent Senate salary increases from coming to the floor. Student loan deregulation, a favorite Republican payoff to the SallieMae monopoly, may be countered in a small, but important way by interest rate cuts. Democrat-sponsored alternative energy programs and proposed repeals of subsidies for the energy monopolies signal an important step in the right direction on the environment. Prescription drug proposals and stem cell research funding, key health care provisions that will benefit working families, are likely to be sent to Bush. Senate Republican leaders, in a feeble effort to protect President Bush from criticism, trampled on 7 dissenting Republicans who support congressional expressions of disapproval of his escalation of the war. Congressional hearings are also exposing presidential abuse of power with regard to warrantless wiretaps, the abuse and misuse of intelligence to launch the invasion of Iraq, Bush’s pretense that signing statements exempt him from obeying the law, the administration’s torture policies and war profiteering.
While some regard these disputes as only conflicts within the ruling class, they should also be viewed in the bigger picture. The struggle to demolish Bush’s authoritarian and militaristic aims is in the interest of the working class and requires the broadest support. It is also crucial to understand that while the Democratic agenda reflects working-class interests only partially, it would not exist at all without the demands and struggle of the working class and the democratic movements.
The biggest issue, the war in Iraq, however, highlights the sharpest division in the capitalist class, and between the people and the ruling class as a whole. Seven of 10 Americans want the war to end. The ruling class is sharply divided on the matter, with a bare minority still holding out hope for a military victory that will protect their interests in the region. Most Democrats recognize that the issue ideally should go away in order to grease their path to power in 2008. Some oppose the war on principle. Still, these attitudes are coalescing in stiffening resistance to Bush’s war. For example, congressional Democrats are going forward with debate on a resolution expressing opposition to Bush’s escalation of the war. There has even been talk of revisiting the 2002 resolution that un-Constitutionally authorized illegal military action against Iraq.
Because the quickest end to the war possible is in best the interest of the working families who are sacrificing so much for it, we should not only put forward and support the strongest proposals that will end the war, but we should also support vigorously those proposals that exploit and sharpen divisions within the ruling class, such as the congressional resolution that would criticize escalation of the war. (Click here to write a letter to Congress or a letter to the editor on this matter.)
Because the war remains the top issue, and the Democratic Party is forced into an alliance with the working class and other politically advanced sectors, while under different circumstances some Democratic Party leaders would prefer to push the programmatic demands of such an alliance into the background. This makes a broad peace movement a natural ally of the labor movement, a fact more and more explicitly expressed in labor’s participation in antiwar activities.
Let’s be clear. The Democrats’ agenda is isn’t a wholly independent working-class platform. Working-class power is not its aim or intention. At the same time, the claim that such immediate policy changes somehow tranquilize the struggle for more is simply ridiculous. It is up to labor, the women’s movement, movements of racially and nationally oppressed people, the peace movement, the environmental justice movements, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organizations, immigrant rights struggles, and the solidarity movements to make the case for more advanced goals – and to win them. The Employee Free Choice Act, national health care with the , an immediate end to war, real alternatives to fossil fuels, meaningful protections of civil rights and liberties are among the reforms that could launch real qualitative change. In a united fashion, we should claim our electoral victory of November 7th and turn it into real progress.
