Communists for Bush

Following on from my last post (appologies to those who may have felt me intemperate, believe me, that was laid back Bill getting on his high horse, if I'd have been in a bad mood, you'd have known it - the words would have leapt from the screen and torn out your eyes).

Anyway,just to say, I received the chagrin of a tanky aquaintance of mine in t'pub t'other night, when I point out how I had urged an Ohionian in a swing seat not to vote. This raises a very real prospect, if I was successful in getting them to spoil their ballots for world socialism, that they may tip the balance in favour of Bush.

If that happens, I will have to buy a t-shirt with the legend 'Communists do it For Bush' or some other type of hiiiiilarity.

More seriously, the November issue of The People - journal of the Socialist Labor Party (Last survivors of the First International) is worth a read. I shamelessly reproduce here:

CAPITALISM WINS 2004 ELECTION BY DEFAULT

By Paul D. Lawrence

The Loser in the November election was the working class. Although the election had not occurred at "The People's" press time, the winners will have been the candidates of the capitalist class. Substantive differences between Democrats and Republicans, Greens and Libertarians, liberals and conservatives, are virtually nonexistent. Their differences are as meaningless as different sitting positions under the poisonous upas tree of capitalism.

Worse, the capitalist victory was by default. No working-class party backed by the economic might of the working class even contended.

Given the manifest problems of decadent capitalism, the absence of a working-class party is cause for grave concern. In politics, in the economy, in the media, in education--everywhere is the monopoly of the capitalist class.

It would be easy to despair, to write off the working class as hopeless, as class-comatose. But Socialists should never give in to such feelings. They are not justified. As Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist and champion of the early labor movement, once said:

"No matter where you meet a dozen earnest men pledged to a new idea--wherever you have met them, you have met the beginning of a revolution. REVOLUTIONS ARE NOT MADE: THEY COME. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back." (Emphasis added.)

True also, however, is a famous misquotation attributed to the 18th-century Irish-born British politician and litterateur Edmund Burke: "It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph."

If workers do not become classconscious and do not organize themselves as a class politically and economically, then they will not defeat capitalism and will never establish socialism. If capitalism collapses, workers' intuitive measures of self-defense will not likely succeed. What would lie ahead is something like fascism, industrial feudalism or even a new Dark Ages. The progress of humankind could be arrested for centuries.