[lbo-talk] Bipartisanship

Joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Wed Apr 21 19:58:14 PDT 2010


I thought the following was very clear and very true....from Waistline at PenL.

Joanna ---------------------

One can spend another 10 years arguing about "correct" strategy and "smashing the Dems and Repubs" - amongst the voting section of the proletariat, but why? For eighty years the sectarian left has screamed "screw the two party system." In the last presidential election the voting section of the proletariat rejected the "Country First" campaign. The voting proletariat will never break with the Democrats on the basis of liberal left fringe ideology. Rather break - rupture, will occur when both parties are undergoing splitting and fracture as they attempt to leap to a new political basis. This is taking place today at an accelerated pace under conditions where the reform of the system is impossible. That is the relations within and between classes cannot be reformed for another expansion of capital as was the case during the era of Roosevelt. The drive toward "bipartisanship" today is the political expression of something new taking place in the economy. The ruling class needs a political motion to clear the lumber out of the way so it can move forward. They are laying the foundations for a new political movement that is based on the interests of corporate power that is completely merged with the state. The fascist danger and impulse grows out of economic shift rather than fringe groups such as the ?tea baggers.? Obama role was and is not to divert the ? movement of the workers? but to realign the political establishment. His specific strategy is to fight for the political middle of both parties as a new political formation. It is within this political dynamic that one can glimpse the evolution of revolution and counter revolution as a unity. The author you reply to poses the issue as communism and fascism evolving as a political unity or "dialectically related." Such is his vision. Revolution and counterrevolution evolves as a unity no matter what the political/ideological form. The Obama campaign entire fight - strategic line of march, was to capture the break away of a huge section of the historic economic and political middle of the working class, or rather voting section of the working class. Thus, we are faced with something different today that does not lend itself to sectarian formula. The confusion we see in Congress and in politics in general is an expression of the changes that are taking place in the economy, and the need for the political relations in this country to be adjusted to the new situation. Thus, both parties are splitting between ?left? and ?right.? The trade union movement is splitting between ?left? and ?right? and the communist movement is going to split between ?left? and ?right? as a precondition for political reformulation of the political superstructure. A different form of the communist movement will be neither left or right but communist. Communism as a material movement of the proletariat is not a political category of left or right but a movement in antagonism with all the political phenomena of the epoch of the bourgeoisie. Such a movement cannot come into existence on the basis of demanding that the voting section of the proletariat stop voting for Democrats or Republicans. Conditions are slowly ripening for the formation of a broad class party of the proletariat as a class, rather than what was traditionally called a Leninist party. What is driving this motion is revolution in the means of production and the resulting dislocation of the economy. V. What is the meaning of these calls for bipartisanship? The American people didn't vote for Republicans and Democrats. The majority voted for a Democratic Party program. Today, the insistence on governing through bipartisanship is an expression of the spontaneous striving and impulses for the realignment of the political relations in this country in order to open the doors for the development of the economy. This is being expressed politically as the spontaneous merging of the center of the Democratic Party and the center of the Republican Party. In this process, the left and right wings of those parties are drifting away from them. By constantly demanding the merging of the center of the Republican and Democratic parties President Obama is leading this process of political realignment. Under today's conditions, bipartisan means a new idea. New ideas are scatterings of the old and they are parts of the new. A new idea or a new apparatus does not spring afresh. It is part of the old and part of the new, and it develops step by step ridding itself of the old. It is not as if something new all of a sudden occurs. We understand that qualitative development depends on the introduction of something new, that something new is always rooted in something old. It is a quantitative development of the new within the old that creates the crisis that allows for the sublation that creates what we call the new. Anything new begins with the destruction of the old forms. The Republican and Democratic parties are not dying, but we are seeing the actual formation of something new in Congress. When people hear the word bipartisan, they usually think of temporary alliances over specific issues. That is what the word has meant in the past. The bipartisan commissions that they are now attempting to form are a relatively permanent alliance between a sector of the Republican Party and a sector of the Democratic Party. These changes are to facilitate the thorough open domination of corporate interests over the U.S. political structure. Of course, there have been impulses in this direction before, but it has never been as open. The impulse of consolidation of American fascism does not arise as the opposition to ideological communism but from the economy itself and the needs of capital seeking to preserve itself.



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