I participated in a panel on Aidan Beatty's book, The Party is Always Right on Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024. Besides Beatty and myself other panelists included Peter Ross and Gerry Downing. Steve Zeltzer, who organized the panel, served as moderator of the online discussion. Arriving in the audience for the Q&A part of the panel were several representatives from the Socialist Equality Party, including David North, Tom Mackaman, Joseph Kishore and Evan Blake. The online newspaper of the Socialist Equality Party, the World Socialist Website, ran an edited version of the sound recording of the panel that only included the remarks of the SEP members and a brief response from the author. Missing from the WSWS version of the panel recording were Beatty's presentation, my remarks, the presentation of Peter Ross and Gerry Downing as well as the remarks of Steve Zeltzer. I am posting here the full video recording of the panel. Viewers can make up their owns minds who is attempting a serious investigation of the history of Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party and who is fearful of an accounting of an important episode in the history of Trotskyism.
- Home
- Polemics
- Objectivism or Marxism
- Utopia and Revolution
- WSWS launches smear campaign
- Shallow moralizing not Marxism
- Case of the disappearing letter
- Sterile flowers, poisonous weeds
- WSWS 'curious fumble' in Iraq
- PSG and the EU elections
- PSG and Berlin elections
- PSG: A case of magical thinking
- The deadweight of sectarianism
- Distorting history of ICFI
- David North and Soviet History
- North and Service on Trotsky
- A case of abandoning dialectics
- The gutter politics of David North
- Documents
- Recent Documents
- Empty place of psychology in Marxism
- From Alienation to Revolution
- Gender and materialism
- Freudianism in Soviet Union: I
- Freudianism in Soviet Union: II
- Freudianism in Soviet Union: Exchange
- Mental illness and American dream: I
- Mental illness and American dream: II
- Heidegger: Philosopher and Nazi
- Heidegger and Nazism: Comment Part I
- Heidegger and Nazism: Comment Part II
- End of Irony or the Irony of Ends
- Turkish economy: illustion and reality
- From the Archives
- Recent Documents
- Books
- History
- Languages
- About
- Contact
Thursday, November 28, 2024
Panel on Aidan Beatty's book, The Party is Always Right
Friday, October 18, 2024
The Crisis of Democracy and the 2024 Election
George Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention |
by Dan Lazare
10.18.24
The one safe prediction
we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result
in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.
This is not Marxist
boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is
always in its death throes. This is the real
thing. A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election
Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to
name just a few. But among the most pressing is an across-the-board
constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating. For example:
-- The Electoral College,
which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those
in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized
role. In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC
overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and
1888. But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may
well do it a third time next month.
-- The Senate is
more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1] Thanks to equal
state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in
just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other
forty. A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17
percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators
representing as little as eleven.
-- The House is so
heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a
16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice.
-- The Supreme Court is
increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but
structure. Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s
six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the
popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four
were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch,
Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas). Given that Clarence Thomas, the
oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship
will likely continue well into the mid-2030s. If Trump wins a second
term, it will continue even longer.
-- Federalism is in
shambles. Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of
the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San
Antonio. This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is
paralyzed.
-- Racial imbalances
are growing. More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the
ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural
and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College. The multi-racial
urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.
-- What makes this
even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional
amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each
house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as
a comma in America’s holy of holies. Thirteen states representing as
little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural
change, no matter how modest. The US is as frozen as the Celestial
Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.
The upshot is a perfect
impasse. All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due
to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with
it. But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as
ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a
mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude. It is the
equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering
engine. But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the
road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them
powerless. Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since
Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to
the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule. Wealthy minority interests
are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing
agenda. Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.
Powerless under the
existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.
There is a way out -- not
a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent
assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917. The
difference is crucial. Where one takes place under the Constitution,
which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place
over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements
– “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first
place. It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a
whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which
is to say those of direct democracy. If the assembly votes to ditch
the Second Amendment, then out it goes. If it votes to drop the
Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place,
then out it goes too.
This is not a
constitutional solution, since no such solution exists. Rather, it
is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or
re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis. Hence, it is
one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.
The US thus faces a
classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay,
authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist
democracy on the other. The founding fathers have done us the favor
of closing off all other escape routes.
As for the individual
candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis
rather than in any sense an answer to it.
Kamala Harris is the
candidate of the center-right status quo. While she claims to stand
for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House
policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face
of accelerating climate change. She represents the politics of
muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without
regard to long-term considerations. When vice-presidential candidate
Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris
campaign forced him to recant. Even mentioning the structural crisis was
more than Harris could bear.
Donald Trump, by
contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are
not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie
“Network.” They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull
in a china shop, but because of it. In their blind fury, they can
think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on
him to do it. His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a
political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.
For what it’s worth, this
writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a
20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead. But regardless
of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.
[1] Frances E. Lee
and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal
Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1999), 10-11.
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Farrell Dobbs speaks: The Minneapolis General Strike and the Teamsters Union
Farrell Dobbs 4 volume history of the Teamsters union |
Our first contribution to the new section are four segments of lectures by Farrell Dobbs. They provide important lessons on how revolutionaries can intervene in the class struggle. The lectures were delivered by Dobbs to a Summer Camp of the Young Socialists in August of 1964.
*Farrell Dobbs was one of the greatest leaders of the working-class upsurge of the 1930's. Shortly after being won over to Trotskyism through conversations with supporters of the Socialist Workers Party in Michigan, Dobbs became a leader and one of the key organizers of the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934. He was also the chief architect of the drive to organize over the road truck drivers into the Teamsters Union. That historic campaign resulted in the Teamsters becoming the largest union in the U.S. Dobbs accomplished this in the face of fierce opposition from the bureaucratic national leadership of the Teamsters Union. Dobbs achievement and his long-term impact on the American labor movement was nicely summarized in a New York Times obituary,
After the strike gained the union its recognition, Mr. Dobbs became secretary-treasurer of Teamster Local 574 and set out to organize the truckers of the Middle West into a body that spoke with one voice. By 1938 he led the drive that got 250,000 over-the-road union drivers a uniform 12-state contract.
Previously, the teamsters' union had deemed intercity truck drivers as not worth the bother, and the union's president at the time, Daniel Tobin, contemptuously referred to them as ''trash.'' The national teamsters organization was little more than a loose confederation of autonomous locals.
Mr. Dobbs went after the intercity drivers and organized regionally, before going full time into politics to do battle with the Stalinists. James R. Hoffa took over the regional council in the mid-1940's and expanded it into the South. When he replaced the discredited Dave Beck as the teamster president, Mr. Hoffa rapidly brought control by the central union to the West and East as well.
Mr. Hoffa, himself eventually convicted and jailed, remarked before his later disappearance that he could not agree with Mr. Dobbs's politics or his visions of unions as a political force. But Mr. Hoffa said Mr. Dobbs, using long-distance drivers to spread the word, was ''enormously beneficial'' to the American labor movement. (Wolfgang Saxon, Farrell Dobbs, Trotskyist, Dead, Sought the Presidency Four Times, New York Times, November 3, 1983)
He was one of 17 Trotskyists that were imprisoned during World War II for taking a principled position against imperialist war. In later years he ran for President several times on the SWP ticket. He became National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in 1953, succeeding James P. Cannon, a position he held until his retirement in 1972. He was the author of a four-volume history and memoir of the Minneapolis struggles. Dobbs died in 1983.
SWP leaders James P. Cannon, left, and Farrell Dobbs during Smith Act frame-up trial in 1941.Both were convicted, jailed for 13 months for opposing the U.S. rulers’ imperialist war policy. |
To start the playlist click on the image below.
To watch each segment individually select one of the following links:
Lecture 3 Trotskyist Leadership of Local 574 Part 1
Lecture 3 Trotskyist Leadership of Local 574 Part 2
Lecture 2 General Strikes and the Communist Party Part 1
Lecture 1 Overview and the Coal yard Strikes Part 2