He doesn't explicitly say "the middle class works for the bourgeoisie and will do their bidding from the inside," but the bolded part might as well say exactly that. Stalin is a bit more optimistic about the possibilities of the New Deal than what actually happened, but IMHO this is diplomacy, not theory, at work. He spends a whole paragraph being careful to praise Roosevelt the man and his efforts before explaining his disagreement with the New Deal. At the time of the interview, Stalin would have been trying to rally the liberal West against Nazi Germany. Those diplomatic efforts would eventually fail and lead to him signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to strengthen the USSR and prepare it against the eventual Nazi invasion, but they were being earnestly pursued at the time. This, I believe, is why Stalin doesn't take a harder line against the New Deal which he obviously considers to be a mistaken economic policy.
If the New Deal wasn't good enough for the tankie-in-chief, it shouldn't be good enough for us either. But during the beginning of it all, the CIA was just a glimmer in FDR's eye, and its forerunner was an ad-hoc network of businessmen and travellers keeping FDR informed about goings-on abroad. Therefore, its full danger was not apparent to the left, and FDR did indeed order the US Army to protect striking workers against the bosses and provide other benefits to the working class. Therefore, America's communists by and large chose to work with the Roosevelt administration rather than against it, to uphold the New Deal rather than oppose it. It was a mistake, but one that wasn't obvious at the time.
But now, with dozens of CIA coups across the world in living memory, with American imperialism grown into full stinking flower, we know the end of this experiment that Stalin did not. In a way he was right; in the course of serveral generations it has indeed become possible to approach the goal of socialism in America through the New Deal. Not because the New Deal worked, but specifically because it didn't, and the creation and subsequent abolition of the labor aristocracy radicalized my generation in a way that might never have happened had the labor aristocracy never existed. Only by knowing how good things might have been for us can we be motivated to give our all for the creation of socialism in the face of such immense bourgeois obstacles.
The Republicans, in this crumbling fifth party system, are the party that opposes the New Deal. They may be wrong about just about every proximate issue, but on the beating heart of the matter, they are absolutely correct. There is no hope for some communist third party to come to power in this country; we have the most strictly-delineated two-party system in the bourgeois democratic world. Fortunately, one of those two parties began its life as, if not a communist party, then a party with communists in it, dedicated to doing communist things like ending slavery and redistributing the means of agricultural production. Despite our many, many disagreements with the Republican Party as it exists today, it is our natural home as communists, and we can only advance our politics in a meaningful way inside of it.
Of course, the synthetic left, the reformist socialists, they will reject this. The Trots that pushed the creation of the New Left in the 60s, they will reject this. The sellouts running the CPUSA who never met a Democrat too corrupt to endorse, they will reject this. But this in and of itself is just the manifestation in the American political system of the old split on the left between reformers and revolutionaries, between middle class poser socialists and actual communists. We should not find ourselves surprised by it, and we should not be moved by the disingenuous arguments of those "comrades" who've chosen to take the bourgeois silver. My conclusion here is only outrageous upon first glance, but the longer one looks at the details, the more obvious its logic.
Of course, this fifth party system will not last, cannot last, is already falling apart before our eyes. The establishment consensus of the 60s still exists, but has been driven out of the Republican Party. History didn't end, systems didn't converge, and those who stubbornly refuse to admit that are all now Democrats. The National Review Trots who joined the GOP to fight the Cold War, who called themselves neoconservatives and got Dubya elected, they're all Democrats now. Bloated centrism is now solely the domain of the Democrats.
The Republican workers, having been told that abject reaction is actually good and in their interest, are now making socialist-sounding arguments in the reactionary language they've been taught. Critical race theory bans are pushed on the grounds that critical race theory is itself racist, an argument that is true, based, and anti-fascist action in practice as much as the fist that punched Richard Spencer. The only solidarity they've been taught to embrace is that of faith, family, and patriotism, and so they uphold those values with their lives and votes. Most of them used Trump not to hurt oppressed nationalities, but to protect those things and to wreck the globalization that wrecked them. They are organically reinventing socialism from scratch using what little they know in their own lives. They were taught that socialism was evil, so they don't call what they're doing socialism. But as conservatives in China "crossed the river by feeling the stones," they are doing likewise and creating actually-existing socialism by another name. A rose by any other name is just as Red.
The sixth party system, if we communists play our cards right, will be much like the third: a coalition of people against the mechanism by which the liberal rich control us, versus a coalition of people who want it to continue. In the third party system, that mechanism was called slavery; in the sixth, it is called imperialism. Literally anyone who opposes imperialism in functional terms is our ally, whatever goofy things they might say about trans people; and anyone who supports imperialism in practice is our enemy, no matter how many pronouns they get right. This is the direction in which we must all travel in the coming era.
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I found this essay insightful and comprehensive in concentrated form.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed it and very much agree overall.
You are a fine writer.
Andrew Jackson is a top five executive IMO (I’m afraid to even admit that on Leftbook I’m ashamed to say) and one of his Herculean labors was to blast the SBotUS (Devil’s Bank) into smithereens like a complete C H A D, and I was curious as to your thoughts on the current situation with the Fed.
Is the Fed the economic and societal malefactor I believe it to be, and if so, how would you prioritize its then necessary demise in the grand scope of Our Proletarian Revolution and the Immortal Science or Marxism-Lincolnism?
Andrew Jackson is controversial mostly because of the Trail of Tears, but he is probably overly stigmatized over that. He had a more organic connection to Native peoples anyway; he adopted a Native orphan as his own son so the situation is more complicated than ultras would like to make it out to be.
ReplyDeleteHe was popular because he crushed the Second Bank, and to be fair that was a very chad move of him. But a class analysis of Jackson, and the Democratic Party he helped found, is necessary to come to final conclusions.
Ultimately, as a general and as someone who supported ethnically American expansion into Native lands but also supported the petty bourgeoisie and the independent farmers over the big bourgeoisie, Jackson was a nazbol, as was the Democratic Party he founded at the time of its founding. I say this not as a slur against him, but as a way to analyze which class and ideology he generally falls into.
The thing about nazbols is that they're the bourgeoisie without money, and to compensate they have to embrace the will to power as nakedly as possible. This is why military elements of any government are often the ones advocating for socialism-lite positions; it's an expression of nazbollery, of socialism for the in-group and ruthless exploitation by force of outgroups.
But the problem with nazbols (besides the ruthless exploitation of outgroups, in this case Natives) is that when their plans succeed, they get money. And when they get money, bourgeois nazbols become bourgeois liberals. This is what happened to Jackson's Democrats. They were small farmers, and the bourgeois liberal Second Bank that was wringing the life out of them was crushed. But then the Southerners (and Jackson was a Southerner) among them just became bourgeois liberals themselves. They improved their homesteads until they became plantations, they bought slaves, and became the Slave Power that Lincoln had to send troops in to crush.
FDR and his New Deal was probably the last gasp of the small-bourgeois element that helped found the Democratic Party, a final fling of Jacksonian democracy at its best. After that, the Slave Power was resurrected in new form by that same party: imperialism, where the slavery was outsourced so we wouldn't have to see its horrors ourselves up close.
DeleteAs for the Fed? Imperialism is done in part to enforce our government's ability to export inflation. And inflation is the Fed's chief business. They print the dollars that we exchange for goods and services around the world, because nice country you got there, kid, shame if someone brought some "freedom" to it, why don't you buy some dollars. They are a Third Bank of the United States for all intents and purposes, except with even looser and more private rules of engagement. Congress can and should take back all powers from the Fed and wind it down, or if it's to be left in place it should have thoroughly inescapable proletarian controls placed upon it until the end of time to prevent it from ever behaving in the manner it's done up until now.
It was the Fed's deliberate mismanagement that caused the Great Depression. The quantitative easing they did to goose us out of the Great Recession in '08 mostly just accelerated the transfer of wealth from the workers to the bourgeoisie, and helped cause the inflation crisis we're experiencing now. They have a lot to answer for. Rand Paul is not right about many things, but in his hatred of the Fed, he's spot on.
That distrust of the banks is probably the single best aspect of the Jacksonian tradition, and one that a socialist America will embrace warmly. So is his legacy of small-d democratic control of American institutions; it was not a given before Jackson that democracy would govern us, and it's been a given ever since Jackson that it would. It is a great gift from his time to ours. So I don't want to be thoroughly down on the man.
On the other hand, as the President responsible for acquiring Florida, we can blame that state's many problems on him. If it weren't for him, Florida Hombre would be something for Spain to deal with.
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment; this is the kind of commentary I'm excited to see on here.