16.12.2004

For the third republic

Martin Schreader, editor of Appeal to Reason, paper of the revolutionary Debs faction of the Socialist Party US

It has been over a month since the re-installation of George W Bush as chief executive of the United States, and the fallout from that devastating fact is still being felt.

The full implications of the massive fraud and disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the US is only now beginning to come to light. However, the ‘investigations’ into these incidents are being used as a way to allow people to blow off steam, while keeping them shackled to the existing system.

Meanwhile, the media-driven propaganda about the implications of the ‘election’ is being exposed for the lies they are. For example, after election day, almost every media outlet trumpeted the so-called ‘rightward shift’ of the voting public. But it has since been discovered that, based on polling data that was suppressed in the days following November 2, there was no ‘shift’ toward the Bush regime among the vast majority of people. On the contrary, Bush actually lost a lot of his traditional support. According to the data, not only did Bush lose ground among rural whites (a traditional Republican base); he also did so among his pet supporters, the ‘evangelical christians’.

So, where did his gains come from? Again, according to the polling numbers, Bush gained the most from elements of the capitalist class, and from the highest strata of ‘middle class’ professionals, managers and independent producers. Unlike in previous elections, where the capitalists split their votes between their two parties, this time the ruling class voted overwhelmingly (close to two-to-one) for Bush and effectively abandoned the Democrats. Bush’s no-holds-barred ‘class warfare’ paid off.

This, of course, has left the Democratic Party foundering. Shorn of its support from the capitalists, the Democratic leadership is scrambling to remake the party into something more acceptable - that is, more like the Republicans. Meanwhile, the ‘progressive’ Democrats are desperately trying to keep the base of the party - African Americans, organised labour and petty professionals - from jumping overboard and defecting to the Greens or other leftwing parties (including the Socialist Party).

Their cause, however, has not been helped by the actions of the Greens, and especially its presidential candidate, David Cobb. After the election, Cobb made an alliance with the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, Michael Badnarik, to demand a full recount of all ballots in Ohio. That alliance has brought both of these former ‘third party’ candidates into the media spotlight, and also into broader alliances with public figures traditionally aligned with the major political parties.

It was certainly a sight to see when the Rev Jesse Jackson, a long-time shill for the Democratic Party, referred to Cobb and the Greens as “guardians of democracy,” in the presence of his old friend and colleague, Democratic rep John Conyers. Tumultuous political times often yield such poignant moments, and we are certainly in such a time.

But this new alliance of libertarian capitalists, environmental radical-liberals and African American community activists is more than an interesting curiosity: it is the beginning of a new movement for democratic and civil rights in the United States. Or, more to the point, it is the core of a self-selected ‘official leadership’ of that movement. And it does not take a great philosopher or political theorist to figure out what kind of democracy this ‘leadership’ would advocate: a kind of ‘feel-good’ capitalist democracy, with some added sops to keep working people from getting too angry.

If the Cobb-Jackson-Badnarik alliance holds together, its effects will reverberate through the entire leftwing movement of this country. If they are able to hammer out a common agenda and platform, they could at once build a powerful alternative to the two main parties and, at the same time, further marginalise independent working class organisation.

Thus, it is necessary for revolutionary democratic socialists and communists to begin formulating a platform that can offer working people an alternative to the warmed over liberalism that will be put forward by politicians like Cobb or Jackson. The first place to start such a process is with developing a common understanding of what we have seen develop over the last period. Without that shared view on what has happened to the American republic, there can be no agreement on the tasks ahead.

From there, it is necessary to extrapolate demands of a political, economic and social character, which correspond to the objective needs of working people today and also link those needs to the struggle for socialism and the classless society. An essential part of this platform will be a set of demands that can resolve the outstanding democratic tasks existing in the US today.

This means not only demands addressing the objective needs of superoppressed peoples in this country, but also the general democratic demands stemming from, in this author’s view, the crushing of the old democratic republic. The transitional forms these democratic demands would take in the real world, including the convocation of a continental congress (a constituent assembly, in classical Marxist terminology) and the formation of a revolutionary provisional government, will have to be considered as well.

In the final analysis, whatever kind of platform that the revolutionary wing of the democratic movement develops, it will have to be formulated in such a way as to point toward a successful third American revolution and the third (workers’) republic.

Today, in the context of ‘globalisation’ and the so-called ‘war on terror’, the fate of the United States of America is indissolubly bound up with the fate of all humanity, and so you, the working people of Britain and the rest of the world, have as much at stake as my immediate brothers and sisters at home.

Your help and your support would be greatly appreciated.