Date: Fri, 11 Nov 1994 01:15:20 EST From: tgs-AT-cunyvms1.gc.cuny.edu Subject: Republican takeover of Congress Perhaps this is better put onto the Left-L, although I have desubscribed and have no intention of resubscribing. Perhaps somene would be kind enough to forward it? Have any of you Marxists been reading the papers lately? The Republicans have taken over Congress. President Bill now declares he will strive to find Common Ground--a misplaced phrase if ever there was one (I believe it came from Jesse Jackson originally, doing something far more hopeful. But perhaps the fact that he did it in the Democratic Party means that this is poetic justice). This is the first Republican Congress that I remember. Maybe there was one in the 1950's, I don't know. In the meantime, the New York Times is printing favorable book reviews on racist "scientific" tracts that would make Sumner and Carnegie, not to mention Goebbels, proud. Well, it's 12:30 in the morning, I'm not working tomorrow at my boring job as a full charge bookkeep, so it's time for Tom's Little Sermonette on what this all means. I think it means the total collapse of the Democratic Party. The working masses have absolutely no faith in it anymore. I think it also means we're heading for a period far worse than Reagan-Bush--something like the 1890's Gilded Age- Social Darwinism, when Sumner wrote a tract called, "What Do Social Classes Owe to Each Other?" His answer?--absolutely NOTHIN'. More importantly, I think it's a complete repudiation of every social democratic strategy on the left. Since the left is pretty much social democratic these days, that means that this represents the final revelation of the bankruptcy of the American Left in our time. I do not refer simply to the willingness of such organizations as the DSA and the COC to attempt to place themselves on "the left wing of the possible"--i.e., the Democratic Party. But let's examine why this is exhausted, for a moment. Michael Harrington used to say that as long as the Democratic Party was doing the nominating, he'd accept a random selection from the Manhattan telephone book. Just such logic encouraged the DSA to support Bill Clinton, who was obviously the arch enemy of Jesse Jackson and blacks in general within the "Democratic Leadership Conference" which Clinton created. Clinton, as governor of Arkansas . . . well, you know the rest. The point is, it was just such a telephone book nominee's Presidential Administratin that brought on the complete loss of Congress to the Republican Party. But in addition to the standing policy of the DSA to brazen class collaboration, there is also the phenomena of political correctness, "radical" feminism, and academics' and other leftists' capitulation to black nationalism. As I was walking down the dirty corridors of City College tonight (where both I and Leonard Jeffries teach), hearing a young woman describe the bathrooms as filthy, I thought seriously about the fine legacy that all these crackpot moralistic exclusivist groupings have had for the young generation, in facing the terrible onslaughts that will occur under George Patacki and Rudolph Guiliani. I remember the City College occupation of 91, when the four-man black nationalist junta (and I do mean "man", they actually took a vote on whether they wanted to coopt a woman, and this went down to glorious defeat), completely blew whatever chance they had at building something by telling all the students to go home, "classes are cancelled." I thought as well about a "left" that jumps up and salutes everytime any specially oppressed group labels itself a "nation" or a "class." And the need we have here in this country to organize a LABOR PARTY as an ALTERNATIVE seemed very very hopeless. Let's not forget the contempt that most "leftists" today now feel for the ideals of internal democracy and mutual responsibility once formulated by that hopeless anachronism, the Bolsheviks. Let's think about what this has led to: the slow but sure movement of the non-leaders of the left, to the right, to the swallowing whole of the ideology of "humanitarian intervention" foisted upon us by Bill Clinton and the bourgeois media. Let's pause now, sisters and brothers, to think about the utter confusion this has gotten us into, when we support murderous embargoes upon the Haitian people, smart- bombing of the Serbs, "liberation" of the Somalians,etc. Let's reflect a little that this confusion is only going to get worse--as President Bill finds "common ground" with his Republican buddies on the Defense Committees, in the form of more invasions, more bombings, more killing, starving, disease, and general destruction, a la Iraq. The time to build a Labor Party, with an integrated revolutionary vanguard leadership, is NOW. The wolves are at the door: please let's wake up from the lazy contempt for any and all "orthodoxy" which has plagued us since the 1960's. Thank you, my sisters and brothers, and good night. ------------------
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