Doug Henwood wrote:
> Who ever said the Dems were anti-capitalist? Not me
for > sure. They're a bourgeois party.
I don't know that adjectives such as "bourgeois" are analytically useful in this context.
The state is the form in which political organization is articulated in bourgeois society (the value-form being the form in which social organization is articulated, this separation between the political and the economic/social being constitutive for bourgeois society). It is a tautology to refer to an electoral political party as "bourgeois". What else would it be?
Within the history of the classical Social-Democratic
workers movement - and its various splinters: Leninism, Trotskyism, etc. - there were electoral parties which gave organizational expression to the political ambitions of the industrial working class. The mistaken assessment of traditional Marxism was in not seeing these movements as system-immanent struggles for recognition as wage-workers *within* the framework of value-form and state, and not movements for their abolition. Classical Anarchism, as the flip-side of Social Democracy, is only a partial exception. Anarchism stood in fundamental opposition to the state, but had no penetrating analysis of the realities of "civil society", hence the naive anarchist faith in an allegedly innocent sphere of commodity production, duly criticized by Marx in the Poverty Of Philosophy.
None of this is to argue against achieving system-immanent reforms; we all have to eat. The question is, how are those reforms achieved? Electoral parties are the graveyard of radical movements, never their successful consummation. The new Linkspartei in Germany emerged from the *failure* of the protests against Hartz IV (from which the WASG emerged) and the earlier crisis within the PDS, when it slipped below the five percent mark in the 2002 federal elections. The Linkspartei, like the American Democrats, is forced to sometimes "act otherwise" under pressure from its constituency, but we should be under no illusions concerning the usefulness of electoral parties.
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