Democracy at the Crossroad by Rick Nagin--reviewed by Norman Markowitz

by: Tuesday 2 October 2012

                In the blizzard of online political advertising, and television analysis Democracy at Crossroads,  the Communist Party, USA’s educational pamphlet on the elections, both sums up the main issues best and does the work that Communists have sought to do since the Marx and Engels wrote the  Communist Manifesto in 1848.

That work is to fight the battles of the present, the battle for democracy while educating workers for the battles of the future, the battle for socialism.  Rick Nagin, whose experience as a CPUSA activist working inside and outside of the system in Cleveland goes back decades, is the author of the pamphlet.

Nagin begins with a simple easily documented truth. “The U.S. is the richest country in human history.” But instead of cheerleading for capitalism, as most media would with that statement,  the pamphlet then reaches the conclusion that logic and reason should lead anyone to reach—that with this wealth all Americans could have economic and social security, in economic terms at least rich and rewarding lives

But of course most of the wealth produced by labor is controlled by the “supercorporations” aka monopolies and “super rich” aka six figure millionaires to upper echelon billionaires.  A small fraction is returned to labor so that it can produce more wealth.

 That labor produces and capital expropriates wealth is nothing new, but the trend in recent decades, through the destruction of progressive income and corporation taxation, the deregulation of industry, and  the increase government supported union busting and the “outsourcing” of capital and jobs has led to an enormous rise in the unequal and maldistribution of income, assets, and all forms of wealth. 

                This capitalist offensive in the class war   was largely hidden from the majority of working people until the collapse of 2008, however much Communists and progressive sought to mobilize educate and organize working people to fight back against this long capitalist offensive. 

Now it is open class warfare and the forces of the extreme right, having lost the presidency in 2008, have sought to mobilize a ferocious counterattack based on “more”---more tax cuts for the corporations and the wealthy, more cutbacks on all social services, more support for transnational oil companies, more arrests and deportations of undocumented workers, more militarism and military spending,  more of the worst of the recent past as the “solution” to the problems of the present. 

As the pamphlet notes, quoting the President our ruling class wants most to forget, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.  That, in its essence, is fascism.”

                And that in essence is the danger the people of the United States face.  Of course the question that all political and social struggles ask is the question  that we must ask, that Lenin, in exile from the autocracy that was the Czarist Russian Empire asked and sought to answer 110 years ago:  “What is to be done.”

The pamphlet's answer is to build a coalition of all people’s movements, of the exploited and the oppressed which will “prevent a tiny handful of extremist billionaires from installing a rightwing Republican administration dedicated to escalating unrestricted class warfare.”

                This can only be done by concerted grassroots action of the kind that the AFL-CI0 has called for, hundreds of thouands of volunteers(the AFL-CI0 has called for 400,000) a large peoples army to prevent a rightwing restoration. 

 Such a people's army must fight  a “two front war” against both the big and little lies and hate politics of the right and the self righteous and self-defeating politics of the sectarian left, that is, things are always the same, and our worst enemy is always those who don’t except our ideology and program. 

 For the left enemies of the CPUSA in the 1930s, this meant not only that Franklin Roosevelt was a greater evil than Republicans like Alf Landon but the CPUSA leaders Earl Browder and William Z. Foster were the subject of sectarian attacks while outright fascists like Father Coughlin and his “Christian Front”  were largely ignored.  Today it means the Obama administration and Communists and progressives who understand the necessity of re-electing the President and defeating the right Republicans at all levels of government.

Democracy at the Crossroads is  available in  print and can be ordered in bulk(10 copies or more) from the CPUSA business office, 235 West 23rd St, New York, New York  10011.  The cost is .50 cents each plus shipping and handling.  Thepamphlet can also be downloaded as a PDF file in both English and Spanish  from both the Peoples World and CPUSA websites

 it should be widely  disseminated ,read, and passed on to at workplaces, in families and through communities.  It both educates and organizes for what in the interest of the working class in what will be one of the most crucial national elections in U.S. history

 

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  • This is a very timely, and one might say very correct, review of Democracy at the Crossroad.
    The democracy referred to is just that, "small d" democracy-democracy in general.
    This is the democracy Paul Robeson sang of in his and Frank Sinatra's THE HOUSE I LIVE IN: " A certain word-democracy-what is America to me?".
    This is the house we live in-the real one, not the phony world of right wing fanatics who distance themselves easily from half the humanity of the U. S.( Romney's 47%).
    This democracy is in the schools(all schools- segregated, all religious denominations, all creeds, all colors, all ethnicities-the whole, unadulterated thing. All homes, all playgrounds, all clubhouses.
    All income levels-without and especially without excluding the poorest of the poor.
    Work has been done by the workers and the communists, on the order of Lenin, in Russia by Lenin, and Du Bois in Europe(note the intellectual activity which was the rave of professors in Marx's U of Berlin, which came from W.E.B. Du Bois's pen and brain)and the U. S.
    A whole documented history has yet to be acted on(but it shall be) by the great numbers of people which justifies the revolutionary civil and human rights work of the William Pattersons, the Robesons, the John Hope Franklins, the Shirley Grahams(later Du Bois),
    the Gurley Flynns, and her buddies, the Joe Hills.
    This is the history of the immovable partisans of the working class.
    Just as in the song, sang unforgettably by Paul, Joe Hill "I never died said he".
    This spiritual impetus, this miracle, as in Du Bois's all too little known poem, at the opening of the 20th century, The Song of the Smoke-poetically of the hands of the ephemeral "Smoke King" of history states:
    Hail! great, gritty, grimy hands-
    Sweet Christ, pity toiling lands!
    I am the Smoke King
    I am black.
    The sweet Christ, the great hands, and the Joe Hill, along with the democracy, deeply embedded in our social milieu will never die, as our "democracy at the Crossroads" will not.

    Posted by peaceapplause, 10/04/2012 11:43am (12 years ago)

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