Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is: Part III

This simple historical fact is mostly unknown today, even to Civil War historians, most of whom actually got degrees in Why The South Should've Won. It is tragically also mostly unknown to communists too. Marx' writings in the New York Tribune are his most neglected by subsequent theory. I say tragically, because it is additional evidence that our road to victory as a movement in America lies in the Republican Party.

It is because of these German-American revolutionaries and their founding influence, mostly airbrushed out of our history as an inconvenient fact to American capital, that I can make what will probably be the most controversial statement of this whole book: class analysis of the Republican Party should not treat it as a capitalist party, but as a degenerated socialist vanguard party long lost to worker control.

Am I justified in saying this? How extensive could this German immigrant revolutionary cohort have been, anyway? Just about every survey of the ethnic makeup of white America has determined that it is German-Americans that makes up the vast majority. Second to the German-Americans are Irish-Americans, and their emigration similarly picked up and declined in inverse proportion to conditions in Ireland. Germans emigrated afterwards too, but those were just as often relatives of these revolutionaries as they were people setting out to America to escape newer, different terrible conditions.

So if the largest single contingent of white America is descended from these revolutionaries, why did we forget about them? Well, they kept speaking German after they got here. Their history was recorded in German-speaking newspapers, but they mostly closed during World War I, when protofascist mobs terrorized German-Americans, denouncing them as Jews and communists and anarchists and pro-Kaiser dupes, and forcing them into ostentatious displays of American loyalty at gunpoint like kissing the flag. The end of the war didn't make anything any better for them; the xenophobia just turned to red-baiting and antisemitism and became the First Red Scare. German-Americans made their children speak English at home, and forgot their radical history in a hurry, for their own safety.

So that's how the GOP could have begun as a socialist party, and how we could have all forgotten that history anyway. But even so, one may wonder, so what? If it was once a socialist party, it's clearly not one now, so what difference does it make? The difference is the difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Gorbachev, weak-kneed liberal though he was, led a workers' state. It may have been degenerated and hollowed out by years of middle class rule, he may have sold the Red Navy to fucking Pizza Hut, but a workers' state it remained. The things it did automatically benefitted the workers, and had to be consciously and secretly diverted to corruption by the middle class, and this did not always happen, and when it did, it rarely happened systematically and completely.

Yeltsin, the man who took Russia out of the Soviet Union and thereby rendered Gorbachev irrelevant, led the first post-Soviet government of the Russian Federation. His administration is universally remembered as a time of misrule and misery, and to this day a majority of Russians want the Soviet Union back ("75% of Russians say Soviet era was greatest time in country's history - poll," The Moscow Times, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/03/24/75-of-russians-say-soviet-era-was-greatest-time-in-countrys-history-poll-a69735). He was just as personally weak and liberal as Gorbachev, with his drunken decadence shocking even the Clintons. But unlike Gorbachev, he didn't rule a workers' state. His Russian Federation's institutions' basic assumptions were not to benefit the worker first, but to benefit his cronies first. The pervasive corruption of the late Soviet Union had become institutionalized, and therein lay the entire difference between the two men and their administrations. Equally shitty people on a personal level though they were, the Russians would gladly take Gorbachev back, but tolerate Putin to keep the days of Yeltsin from ever returning.

And so it is with the GOP. They are a workers' party that lost its way. With its socialist base gone, the abolitionists remained but, slavery banned, their Christian abolitionism became plain evangelical conservativism. These working class conservatives never abandoned the party even after the socialist rump left for the Socialist Party of America and eventually the Democratic Socialists of America on the other side of the party system. Some evangelicals did stray from the GOP over the years (see: Jimmy Carter), but the rise of the Moral Majority and the rise of the conservative movement within the GOP with Goldwater and Reagan kept them front and center of the coalition.

The evangelicals remain. Those Northern industrial interests, on the other hand... These latter were originally the Rockefeller Republicans, but got chased out as RINOs and "gypsy moths" (an invasive pest from the Northeast, where the Rockefellers hail from). So the original Republican bougies flipped sides, and last I checked, men with that last name were running as the freedom-hating Democrats they really are.

Obviously, that isn't to say that the Republicans don't have bougie interests in their camp; but those interests largely were in industries not yet invented during the Civil War, or interests that defected from the Democrats.

Continue reading Part IV