Karl Marx said famously while he was  living in Great Britain, with its Conservative and Liberal parties and gerrymandered districts (the American word, parliament) that every few years the working class gets to choose which representatives of the capitalist class will govern them for the next few years. A casual look at the “fiscal cliff” negotiations as mass media portrays them would probably bring a sarcastic smile to Karl Marx lips.

 The way out of that trap for many who advanced Marx’s ideas then and afterward was to build mass parties of socialism and labor, to have the working class use universal suffrage to win control of elected governments and legislate socialism into existence.

  And, when the parliamentary actions of those parties in Germany, France, Italy, and other mostly European countries  failed to go beyond reforms and, eventually, functioned to keep workers in line in the interests of the larger capitalist system, to become capital “labor lieutenants,” as Lenin said,  famously,  others followed Lenin’s ideas to build revolutionary vanguard parties of the working class, parties that would organize and coordinate the working class in electoral and non electoral struggles, in unions, mass organizations, everywhere the working class was involved to abolish  capitalism and replace it with socialism.

                I have provided this short outline of the mass social democratic and, following the Soviet Revolution of 1917 Communist parties that have been at the center of world politics since the late nineteenth century not to deal with their achievements and failures, or where they are now.

  Rather, I have started with this history because the U.S. sharply diverges from it  And because of that divergence the U.S., even though this strikes a nerve because so much of our multinational peoples national identity is connected to the concept of democracy, is at best a second division democracy, at worst a deeply deformed one.

First, the multi-party systems which are common through much of the world do exist here and with a few exceptions at a few times in a few places never have.

  The two party, winner take all model of electoral politics that long characterized British politics and the politics of other nations influenced by the British parliamentary system does exist here but with very important differences. 

First, the U.S. has never seen the establishment of a Labor party which became one of the two leading parties, as the British Labor party, however it may have fudged  its socialist commitments did after 1917.  Also, even with comparable forms of gerrymanding in Britain, restrictions on the use of money and media in elections along with a unity of the executive and the legislative functions of government, mean that parties that win elections outright can institute the policies that their constituents voted for, unless of course there is no majority and coalition governments have to be established.

                Here there is divided sovereignty between the legislative and executive and a judiciary with power to veto pretty much any legislation that emerged from the legislative and executive “branches.” 

 And there is no check on the use of money in elections or on the use of money in lobby industry that invests in candidates and in legislative policies for various, mostly business interests. 

 In no country which calls itself of a democracy would anyone dare to say that it is necessary to raise and spend conservatively tens of millions of dollars in order to have a “seat at the table” of elected public officials.  In fact, the use of much smaller sums for such purposes in many countries which call themselves democratic would be criminal and lead to jail time.

                I am not off and running on a rant, although it might sound like that, or am I saying that would should realize that we, meaning the broad left, are beating our heads against a wall(which we are to a considerable extent) and withdraw. 

 I am saying though that we must realize the limitations of pressure group politics, which in the absence of parties of socialism and labor, is the politics of the broad left in the U.S. and has been through most of U.S. history. 

 If we don’t elect Communists and Socialists to political office, either in Communist and Socialist parties or openly through existing parties, the way open abolitionists like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and others were elected first as Whigs and then through the new Republican party in the 1850s, we will spend our time even with the new technologies preparing petitions and participating in demonstrations as early abolitionists, women’s rights reformers, labor and land reformers did.  And we will see our votes and endorsements bought and sold and our policies delayed at all times, watered down at best, and denied at worst.

                Today pressure group politics is everywhere, openly on the left through Move on, Change.org, and endless social network connections, that involve some extensively, others like myself marginally, and some not at all.  But it is clearly not working by itself and this should be faced in reality, not on facebook.  To have effective answers, one must ask the right questions

In part two I will deal with  some possible effective answers.  Let me conclude with these points

First we must continue the struggles in the present and prepare for the future.  Now, when Social Security is under sustained attack from capital, must begin to educate ourselves and the people generally to reform social security by expanding it, paying for it at least partially with income and corporation taxes, beginning to  shift private pension plans out of the hands of Wall Street into the public sector. 

We must also reject the cuts in the COLA limitations and other maneuvers that will be forced down our throats and support candidates who will both repeal them and advance a reformed, expanded social security system.

We must begin to educate and organize for what most of the world would see as a democratic electoral process. 

Universal voter registration, the criminalization of what today is called voter suppression, fair election districts, strict regulation of the use of money in political campaigns and most of all access to the electoral process for minority parties and candidates.  That may sound almost revolutionary here but much if not all of it is standard in many developed capitalist countries.

And we must seriously begin to explore what can be done about what one Communist critic long ago called the political equivalent of a bad marriage—the relationship of labor and the left to the Democratic party.  Not necessarily a divorce, or even a separation, but some form of counseling to either positively change or end the relationship and seek new ones.

                This doesn’t mean that we should not continue to fight right down to the last minute against major concessions against the interests of the people. 

It does mean though that we should not go away from the end of this process with either knee jerk responses denouncing the Obama administration as no different than the Republicans or knee jerk reactions praising the administration for saving us from a worse fate.  It is a retrograde political system tied to a stagnating crisis ridden capitalist economy that we must face and change