ALB
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“Michael Albert of Parecon presents the Biden lesser evil argument, which now seems to coalescing around the case that fighting for reforms will be easier under Biden than Trump.”
Just read his article. The trouble with his argument is that it could apply not just to this election but to any election as you could always argue that you’ve got a better chance to get reforms under one candidate than under the other. It might lead to some counter-instinctive advice e.g. in England to vote Tory as the unions tend to pull their punches when there’s a Labour government !
There is an article in the Fall 2020 of the WSP of the US journal the World Socialist, expressing a member’s personal view, that even though Biden is the lesser evil (the author writes that he “clearly” is) that is not necessarily a reason for voting for him (because he will fail to reform capitalism as he promises and that this will lead to a backlash against reformism and a revival of the greater evil). It’s an argument. He ends the article:
“As for the choice between not voting, casting an invalid ballot, and tactical voting for Biden in order to oust Trump, let our fellow workers think things through and decide for themselves. They can manage without our advice. ”
Of course this will happen anyway whatever we say. Actually, the indications are that workers have begun to vote to kick Trump out and that this is likely to happen.
Yes outrageous. Whatever else he is Corbyn is not anti-Semitic. His “crime” was to be pro-Palestine. While MPs call for an enquiry into Russian influence in British politics, they let Israel, with the aid of their supporters in Britain, get away with a coup the Russian intelligence services would love to be able to do.
I think it may be the moment to wind up this thread. It’s a losing battle. The Zionists have been able to get it accepted that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-semitism and it’s difficult to see that changing.
We have more important linguistic battles to fight as over the meaning of the word socialism. That’s one we mustn’t lose.
When we have stood in parliamentary elections we get inundated with emails from their members to our candidate in support of some well-meaning reform. We don’t mind at all since it gives us hundreds of people to reply to putting our case, drawing attention to our website, etc.
Apparently this is why they call themselves 38 degrees:
”38 Degrees takes its name from the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche.”
We too are trying to start an avalanche even if we are far from being “snowflakes.”
Or maybe the socialist revolution will be more like a snowball than an avalanche, getting bigger and bigger as it rolls along. Who knows?
Ok I concede but the more you learn about the American political system the more and more undemocratic it is revealed to be.
”Faithless electors”, what next !
I bet you didn’t know this either. I didn’t till a couple of hours ago. Not all members of the Electoral College are mandated to vote for the candidate who comes first in their state. Seven didn’t last time, in 2016, including one who voted for Bernie Sanders:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election
Yes, interesting. What seems to have been voted for is the election of a Constituent Assembly to draw up a new constitution to put to a referendum. They will probably come up with something more democratic (politically) but might include a list of grandiose but unenforceable “rights”.
Today’s Times says referring to the present constitution;
”Critics say that the constitution prioritises profit over individual rights. The fundamental right to housing, for example, is not enshrined.”
No such “right” exists under capitalism not can exist (except on paper). And even if the new constitution doesn’t prioritise profits the capitalist economy will of course.
Now they have started to intimidate critics:
What’s wrong with them? Either they are nasty anti-democrats or they like shooting themselves in the foot.
Did somebody say “red fascism”?
Apparently the future Labour Prime Minister, Sir Keith Starmer, really was a Trot in his youth. I thought it was just a rumour but it seems not:
http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2020/04/when-keir-starmer-was-marxist.html?m=1 u i
In July 1874 Marx and his wife took a holiday in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Apparently there was a local election on there as Marx wrote to Engels ( who was on holiday in Ramsgate) on 15 July:
”Religion seems to thrive here among the NATIVES, but apart from that they are practical people. ‘VOTE FOR STANLEY, THE RICH MAN’, we found on posters all over the district.”
He could almost have been talking about the USA today.
The irony of this debate is that it is taking place in the context of an election for the chief executive of the state and to various law-making bodies, both of which are abhorrent to fascism and which in themselves show that the US is not a fascist state.
As to what is meant by “corporate state”, Leon, you are either just playing with words or naively assuming that this is the same as “Corporatocracy”.
Here is a dictionary definition of “corporate state”:
“A state governed by representatives not of geographical areas but of vocational corporations of the employers and employees in each trade, profession, or industry.“
See also this.
And here is an exposition of it by a well-known fascist:
https://www.oswaldmosley.com/the-corporate-state/
Of course all capitalist governments have to govern in the interest of the capitalist class, today mostly organised as corporations, and of course corporations lobby governments and elected bodies to make decisions in their favour — largely in the US to let them get on with profit-making with as little state regulation as possible.
The US is fascist neither in the political nor in the economic sense. That doesn’t make it good. It is capitalist and that’s enough to condemn it.
A lot of those characteristics of “fascism” are features of capitalism; which is what you would expect as fascism is a political system that operates under capitalism just as “bourgeois democracy” is.
But the one big omission from your definition is the single party. Fascism advocates and implements a one-party state.
And you have completely misunderstood what fascists meant when they advocated a “corporate state”. This doesn’t mean a state where “the economy, politics and the media” are controlled by capitalist corporations. It was the idea that each industry should be organised as a single corporation and that these corporations should be represented in a decision-making body as an alternative to a parliament elected by universal suffrage. This was just the theory ( derived from syndicalism) but was never implemented. In practice what characterised fascism was state control of politics and the media while industry remained in private capitalist hands but was subject to state control. In this sense it was a form if state-run capitalism.
Neither of these are features of present-day America. Politically it is not a one-party state and the last thing most capitalist corporations want is to be subjected to state control.
The capitalist class do not normally want to hand over formal political control to a single political party. They prefer the two-party system of ins and outs as this means that no set of politicians gets so entrenched in power that they escape from control and begin to line their own pockets at the capitalists’ expense. That was why Engels pointed out that the ideal capitalist political form was a republic based on universal sufffage.
The US is capitalist and that is bad enough as capitalism is characterised by a tendency to ever-greater inequality and governments which have to put capitalist interests first and a media that puts out ruling class propaganda.
The trouble with Trotsky was that the political system he advocated did have features in common with fascism like a one-party state and state monopoly of the media, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production while the workers remained wage-workers. Another form of state capitalism.
Chapter 13 on ‘War as an aid to the progress of the socialist movement?’ explains that, while we are a Marxist party, we don’t necessarily agree with Marx and Engels on everything and in particular not on this point.
“While we are at variance with Marx on the particular question we have been discussing, this does not affect our general acceptance of Marx’s social analysis and his theory of the class struggle. We are a Marxist party but we recognise that the conditions of the time, when Capitalism was relatively young and Feudalism had not yet been completely swept away, led Marx and Engels into a false position on war in the course of pursuing their pioneer work.”
Marcos has drawn attention to this article from News and Letters, a Marxist-Humanist group. It seems a bit alarmist, especially as they think that Trump will be voted out fairly decisively anyway, if only because people want a return to “normalcy”. But it does list various ways in which the election has been corrupted; all elections, in fact, since it’s not like here where elections are organised and run by neutral local government officials but by elected officials who represent one or other political party. Here’s a part of the list of corrupt practices:
- For years Republican state legislators, secretaries of state and judges have been making it harder to vote, limiting registration opportunities, absentee voting and early voting, closing polling locations and drop boxes, and adding requirements to present only certain IDs and to have witness signatures, sometimes notarized. One result has been people standing in line for up to 11 hours to vote. In the midst of a surging pandemic, all of these increase the risk of infection, and Black, Latinx and Native American areas are affected most.
- Native Americans living on reservations often have no street addresses, live far from voting locations and even mailboxes, and are confronted by impossible requirements to present IDs with addresses.
- More than 5 million people with felony convictions are barred from voting—a system introduced to disenfranchise Black people under Jim Crow. When Florida voters passed a referendum to lift that ban after sentences are completed, state legislators, backed by federal courts, gutted the law with the equivalent of a poll tax.
- Republican politicians, backed by federal judges, sustained restrictions on mail-in ballots that, during a pandemic, turned absentee voting into a death risk for many.
- Trump installed his crony Louis DeJoy as head of the Postal Service, which he has been sabotaging to slow down the mail. In some states, Republicans fought off measures to allow extra time for mailed ballots to arrive.
- States like Michigan and North Carolina throw out large numbers of mailed ballots because of arbitrary judgments that signatures don’t match or failure to follow pointless rules, using the excuse of fraud, which rarely occurs. As of Oct. 15, North Carolina had already rejected over 5,000 mail-in ballots.
- Slow absentee vote counting was engineered in some states, specifically to allow Trump to make false claims about vote fraud. Initial vote totals will not include mailed votes, which usually lean Democratic.
