The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. [13] If money, according to Augier, [14] “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. (Karl Marx: Capital Volume I Chapter 31) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. (Karl Marx: Capital Volume I chapter 26) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm
As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. (Fredrick Engels: On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State @ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm
In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the state citizens are necessary – taxes. These were completely unknown to gentile society. We know more than enough about them today. With advancing civilization, even taxes are not sufficient; the state draws drafts on the future, contracts loans, state debts. In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. (Fredrick Engels: On the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State @ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm
From Charles Beard on the Economic Basis of the Constitution viz. The Federalist Papers, the State and Taxes, Federal Government and Armed Power:
But the cautious student of public economy, remembering the difficulties which Congress encountered under the Articles of Confederation in its attempts to raise the money to meet the interest on the debt, may ask how the framers of the Constitution could expect to overcome the hostile economic forces which had hitherto blocked the payment of the requisitions. The answer is short. Under the Articles, Congress had no power to lay and collect taxes immediately it could only make requisitions on the state legislatures. Inasmuch as most of the states relied largely on direct taxes for their revenues, the demands of Congress were keenly felt and stoutly resisted. Under the new system, however, Congress is authorized to lay taxes on its own account, but it is evident that the framers contemplated placing practically all of the national burden on the consumer. The provision requiring the apportionment of direct taxes on a basis of population obviously implied that such taxes were to be viewed as a last resort when indirect taxes failed to provide the required revenue.
With his usual acumen, Hamilton conciliates the freeholders and property owners in general by pointing out that they will not be called upon to support the national government by payments proportioned to their wealth.[21] Experience has demonstrated that it is impracticable to raise any considerable sums by direct taxation. Even where the government is strong, as in Great Britain, resort must be had chiefly to indirect taxation. The pockets of the farmers "will reluctantly yield but scanty supplies, in the unwelcome shape of impositions on their houses and lands; and personal property is too precarious and invisible a fund to be laid hold of in any other way than by the imperceptible agency of taxes on consumption." Real and personal property are thus assured a generous immunity from such burdens as Congress had attempted to impose under the Articles; taxes under the new system will, therefore, be less troublesome than under the old.
Congress was given, in the second place, plenary power to raise and support military and naval forces, for the defence of the country against foreign and domestic foes. These forces were to be at the disposal of the President in the execution of national laws; and to guard the states against renewed attempts of "desperate debtors" like Shays, the United States guaranteed to every commonwealth a republican form of government and promised to aid in quelling internal disorder on call of the proper authorities.
The army and navy are considered by the authors of The Federalist as genuine economic instrumentalities. …
As to dangers from class wars within particular states, the authors of The Federalist did not deem it necessary to make extended remarks: the recent events in New England were only too vividly impressed upon the public mind. "The tempestuous situation from which Massachusetts has scarcely emerged," says Hamilton, "evinces that dangers of this kind are not merely speculative. Who can determine what might have been the issue of her late convulsions, if the malcontents had been headed by a Caesar or by a Cromwell."[27] The strong arm of the Union must be available in such crises.
In considering the importance of defence against domestic insurrection, the authors of The Federalist do not overlook an appeal to the slave-holders' instinctive fear of a servile revolt. Naturally, it is Madison whose interest catches this point and drives it home, by appearing to discount it. In dealing with the dangers of insurrection, he says: "I take no notice of an unhappy species of population abounding in some of the states who, during the calm of regular government are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into human character and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves."[28] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States/Chapter_VI
September 3, 2011
Class Domination Politics and the Democratic Party’s Congressional Black Caucus
Lil Joe from Compton, Marxist
The syllogism: The U.S. government is the political -lackey of capitalist class interests. The Democratic Party is a political party in this government. The Democratic Party is therefore a party of capitalist’s political lackeys.
On this logical basis I recognize Democrats who are Black to be no different than any other Democrat; they are also capitalist’s political lackeys. They prove it by the legislation they put forward and/or vote for or against. Politics are not determined by the content of one’s genetic heritage, the color of one’s skin, but by material social class position and the interests of that class.
As a political partisan of the working class, recognizing the capitalist relations of production to be based on the dominance of the capitalist classes, is the understanding that the economic political interests of capitalists and wage workers is dominate to subordinate in economic relations of production and therefore in politics the trade unions in the Democratic Party are in a power-dependence relationship. The trade unionists in the Democratic Party are toadies.
I have always fought for a Labor Party that is financially based on the trade unions outside and independent of the Democratic Party. The material interests of capital and labor are mutually exclusive. Capitalists appropriate and exploit wage labor, and the quantum of profits and wages are inversely related, therefore the only interests that can be represented politically is either the one or the other, not both. The Democratic Party inasmuch as it is the political lackey of capitalists is the party of the class enemy and therefore is itself the political enemy of the working class.
In that the interests of wage labor and capital are mutually exclusive and the Democratic Party is the political lackey of the capitalist class, the class enemy of the proletariat, the working class and the surplus population of the unemployed, the self-described Black Congressional Caucus, the same as the Hispanic Caucus and the so-called Progressive Caucus are just as much the enemy of the working class as are the Blue Dog Democrats, Conservative and the so-called Moderate Democrats. These are just so many labels of factions of capitalist political lackeys, and are enemies of the working class.
Recognizing the Democratic Party to be a political faction of capitalist’s lackeys, I don't as a rule post articles by or featuring Democrats in government. On this basis I also recognize those Democrats who because they are Black use the color of their skin rather than the content of their capitalist oriented politics - that as pretence for being 'Black leaders' to circumvent class basis for being Democrats. But, by race baiting and fear mongering, Black Democrats, by playing their race card, want to separate not just themselves ideologically from ‘the White man’, although by their politics they are brown-nosing yes men of ‘white’ capitalists.
By ‘identity politics’, presenting the color of their skin to camouflage the political lickspittle character of themselves as Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus want ideologically to separate working class blacks from the rest of the working class. Indeed, by making themselves, on the basis of color, appear to have the same interests as working class blacks, are hoodwinking working class blacks into identifying themselves with capitalist class interests.
Material relations of production to which correspond labor appropriation determine class and property form. This is not based on race. A human being is a human being; it is under definite economic conditions of production and appropriation that he or she is a capitalist or proletarian, economically speaking this is what they are.
You are what you do. Capitalists, as owners of the means of social production and money, by money, appropriate labor power; proletarians, on the other side of this class divide, are a class that has no means of production, and so must sell their labor power in order to purchase means of subsistence.
The mode of income characteristic of capitalist society is primarily taken in the forms of wages of labor, profits of capital, interests on finance and rent of land or buildings, apartment or tenement housing.
Corresponding to these modes of income and distribution of products, the profits of capital are derived directly by the exploitation of the workers, whose labor power he has purchased of him and the products of whose labor therefore belongs not to the workers, but to the appropriating capitalists.
Consequently, the capitalists possess not just means of production but the produced means of production and subsistence. It therefore is from other members of the class of capitalists that workers must purchase means of subsistence e.g. food and clothing from retail capitalists.
Thus – there is a constant economic opposition between the class personifications of labor powers, the proletariat as the producing class of workers vis-à-vis personified capital, the labor appropriating class of economic parasites, the capitalists. There is therefore an economic battlefield on which there is a constant opposition, insomuch as profits and wages are inversely related, therefore, class interests are mutually exclusive. But, every class struggle is a political struggle.
In a Lecture on Politics Max Weber stated: What do we understand by politics? The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action. One speaks of the currency policy of the banks, of the discounting policy of the Reich bank, of the strike policy of a trade union; one may speak of the educational policy of a municipality or a township, of the policy of the president of a voluntary association, and, finally, even of the policy of a prudent wife who seeks to guide her husband. Tonight, our reflections are, of course, not based upon such a broad concept. We wish to understand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.
But what is a 'political' association from the sociological point of view? What is a 'state'? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force.
'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state--nobody says that--but force is a means specific to the state.
Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions--beginning with the sib--have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/dss/Weber/polvoc.html
The capitalists in the United States are the most powerful, economically dominate class as well as the most powerful, politically dominate class. There is no "middle class" - i.e. there are the capitalist class ownership of financial institutions and the nations material forces of production and distribution on one side viz. the economic class comprised of those who own and lend money and appropriate it back with interests, and those who appropriate labor power for money-wages and exploit it for profits, and corresponding to these on the other side are those who borrow and pay interests, insurance, buy homes, cars and so on from capitalists, and do so because they sell their labor power to capitalists for money.
The Democratic Party claims to be 'for the middle class' because it is based on and financed by capitalists. Thus, obviously it cannot be at one and the same time ‘for the working class’, i.e. a Labor Party fighting to displace the capitalist class by elevating the working class to position of ruling class. This requires that as a class the workers expropriate the productive forces and end capitalist commodity production and wage labor.
The Democratic Party is openly financially based in capital and politically its class servant. It is in the interests of the capitalist class that it ‘find jobs for workers’ – i.e. provide labor power to appropriate and exploit on one hand, and on the other rebuild roads and bridges by means of which capitalists can move circulating capital and commodities from place to place by having workers tax money rebuild this infrastructure.
The working class doesn’t need the capitalist class to provide jobs, nor is the Democratic Party’s masquerade as an unemployment office and its ‘Black Congressional Caucus’ providing circus in ‘black community job fairs’ nothing but a hoax. When there is a demand for their commodities is when capitalists need worker’s labor to profitably appropriate and exploit and they will do their own hiring as it is in their own interests to do so.
The same is true of the Republican Party hoax. Republicans will kiss the capitalist asses by tax cuts and deregulation sweeteners to provide ‘incentives’ to hire cheap labor power. The capitalists are not fools. They will not hire workers when there is no demand for the products those workers will produce. Production is an expense. Capitalists will not hire workers, i.e. purchase labor power even for a penny an hour, with no unions, no taxes and no regulations, because they would also have to purchase machinery, energy and raw materials at their cost price, which cost millions of dollars - much more than pennies. Commodities produced by exploited labor has to be sold because the prices of production cannot be recovered when the commodities produced by labor for pennies cannot be sold at prices to at once cover the prices of production and make profits from the money saved by purchasing labor power for pennies an hour, even if no taxes are paid.
Capitalism is in a ditch and it cannot get out of it by government policies, neither Keynesian economic schemes presented as ‘stimulus packages’ by Democrats, nor by capitalist kiss asses of the Republican Party offering tax cuts and deregulation.
Capitalism got itself out from the paradox economic crisis of overproduction and surplus population of the 1930s by global warfare. The physical destruction of means of production in Europe and killing off the surplus population was the condition for the US War production and post war boom. But, now, permanent arms production along with permanent wars are part of the problem. As Jean Paul Sartre would say of the current crisis, there is 'no exit'.
The working class individuals need jobs, so far as individuals solutions to individual family problems is to sell their labor out to capitalists, offer themselves for exploitation and subordination to capitalist ‘bosses’; one by one we are nothing but tools in the employ of capitalist masters. Separately, we are nothing, together we are everything, or rather must as a Labor Party in political power with our class in possession of the productive forces become Everything – to paraphrase Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes.
Hegel wrote about the dialectical opposition and identity of the one and many and the many ones: the many workers as ones are at the same time one class. The subsumption of the one and many is class solidarity, the personification of class interests serve the interests of each member once we become a class party, not just a class of individuals in themselves but objectified interests as a class for itself.
The reason that the Republican Party can follow through with campaign promises to the capitalist financiers and class interests upon winning national power, whether as a minority with or without the presidency, or in the majority with or without the presidency, is because they are what they say they are, servants of capital. On the other hand, the reason that Obama turned out to be the image of a Stepin Fetchit in office (initially with Democrats in majorities in the House and Senate) rather than a powerful, confrontational Martin Luther King Jr forcing concessions on capitalists, is because the Democrats are fakes, great speech makers and eloquent fake ‘friends of labor’ and fake identity politics as ‘minority rights’ representatives. The Democratic Party is a capitalist class party, its ‘populist’ rhetoric and eloquence of demagogy notwithstanding, the Democrats never intended on pressing the interests of the working class. Neither did Obama.
The Democratic Party, and Obama in particular, as President, only seem to be able to make concessions and capitulations to the Republican Party in Congress, and to so-called Blue Dog and “Conservative Democrats” and to the Pentagon brass. In fact, the Democrats in government posts are doing exactly what they do because of what as a party they are, personifications of capitalist class interests.
The State is the political instrument of class domination. Political power is the force of arms. States jail and kill people. That is the Constitutional duty of members of Congress, the Office of the President and the Judiciary. Repression of revolts and insurrections is what the Constitution describes as maintaining ‘domestic tranquility’.
The ‘common welfare’ referred to in the Constitution by the slave owners and capitalist classes political representatives who wrote it, is concerning the common interests of these property owning appropriating classes, and never had references to unemployed and elderly poor workers receiving welfare checks, social security, unemployment compensation or national health care. Only a labor party that is based financially in the labor unions and socially on the class as a whole will have the objective as well as subjective social and individual interests in forcing these programs through legislation and on the president and the courts.
The formation of a worker's Labor Party must not just adjust to capitalism by providing social programs and welfare, but must fight to eliminate this exploitative system which creates the extremes of wealth and power at one pole, and poverty and powerlessness at the other.
Therefore, in the process of becoming the ruling class, the Labor Party must, in addition to winning the battle of democracy by becoming the majority in the House of Representatives and legislating the transfer of the productive forces and means of finance from the private possession of the capitalist classes to the public property of the working classes, at once make itself the sole governing body by issuing the call for a new Constitutional Convention that will be comprised exclusively of trade union and working class delegates from every major city of every state and working class and union delegates from Canada and Mexico that will write a new Constitution which will abolish police, prisons, standing armies and national borders.
The North American Continental Convention must lay the foundations of a government administration of the working classes and toiling masses, by the working classes and toilers and for the working classes and toiling masses to achieve the elimination of all classes and thus putting an end to the appropriation of the labor power by one group of people by another. Constitutionally putting an end to class exploitation and with it the elimination of the need for a State, thus abolishing police, courts, prisons and standing armies.
The slave-owners and capitalist's Constitutional Convention faked their document with the words "We the People", because in actuality the overwhelming majority of propertyless men, yeomen farmers, women, slaves, native Americans and that includes colonised Mexicans in the South-West and Texas, could not and did not attend the Convention, didn't vote for its ratification, and to this day workers still do not have a labor party representing them in Congress, or any other branch of government at any state or federal level. The United States has never been a 'democracy'.
Black Democrats want working class blacks to see themselves as a race rather than members of the proletariat. When there is discussion of the working class vis-à-vis the capitalist class, instead of discussing the inverse relationship of wages and profits, therefore the issue of exploitation of wage laborers by capitalists, and on this basis of the inherent conflicts of interests of workers vis-à-vis capitalists as classes whose interests are mutually exclusive, Democratic Party Congressional Black Caucus mambers pit working class Blacks against working class Whites by complaining against ‘white skin privilege’, comparing the lower wages of Black workers to White workers rather than of workers wages to capitalist profits.
Democrats, i.e. specifically members of the CBC, rather than presenting empirical relations of production and appropriation of labor power by capitalists instead present working class Blacks as victims of ‘racism’ and themselves, i.e. the Democratic Party as in need of having their ‘special interests’ as ‘race interests’ to be ‘advanced’ and be protected by the Democratic Party. Masquerading as "Black American" members of Congress protecting the special interests of capitalists, Black Democrats denounce ‘racism’ and promote themselves as protectors of ‘Black folk’ from the White boogie man. The lie dripping from the mouths of those Democratic Party lackeys of capitalist class interests is that 'race' trumps class, color of skin trumps class basis and character, the interests of workers as workers.
Thus, and thereby, to circumvent the class character of the Democratic Party, and consequently also to overlook the empirical fact that this party has the same ruling capitalist class partisanship as does the Republican Party, the Democrats identify the Republican Party as racists and with racism, instead of what they truly are, enemies of the working class and the political lackey representatives of the vampire capitalist class, because, the pot (Democrats) can't call the kettle (Republicans) grey, as they both are grey!
The Democrats want to remove actual class struggle content and character from the vocabulary of American politics - the battle lines of wage labor fighting capitalist exploitation, to instead rant about race, gender and a nebulous 'middle class', just as the Republicans remove language of profits derived from exploitation of wage workers by calling capitalists 'small business' and calling big capital 'job creators' rather than economic parasites that appropriate and chew up the labor power of workers.
Thus, the bugbear of the boogieman is under the bed childish fear of Republicans, mobilizing scared, ignorant and pliant Blacks for the Democratic Party as a voting bloc, and even campaigning for Democrats.
It wasn't an accident that the first powerful civil rights organization at the national levels confronting government was the trade union of pull-man porters, working on trains country wide, led by Socialist A. Philip Randolph and the New York based NAACP. The industrial capitalist's need for wage labor to exploit in the valorising labor process of commodity production enabled mass migrations of descendants of chattel slaves to relocate from rural economies of share-croppers and farmers into the urban proletariat, in cities both North and South.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the actual successes of the civil rights movement against racial segregation and winning of voting rights, the working class and socialists continued in the black liberation movement and anti-war movement, whereas the bourgeois elements pursued their own economic personal and class interests by joining the Democratic Party.
A Democrat is a Democrat, a political lackey of the ruling classes, the labor appropriating -exploiting capitalists. Capitalists are capitalists and Democrats in government are political brown-nosing lickspittles of capitalists the same regardless of capitalists and Democrat's race, gender or religion.
This is proved by the facts: 'Congressional Black Caucus' chairman and members of Congress in this Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the 'progressive caucus' and so on voted for and passed the Bush-Obama-Republican providing of trillions of dollars of bailouts to finance and industrial capitalists, even as they were throwing workers out their houses as 'toxic loans' and throwing workers from employment, forcing labor union concessions, and selling out card check legislation and single player health care, to the continuation of the Bush tax cuts that are now the Obama tax cuts, to the current attacks on social benefits, the sending of tens of thousands more occupation troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing of Libya and destruction of its government and infrastructure in order to put in place a quisling regime, similar to those in place in other countries.
Democrats supported invasion - Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya. All the Democrats brag about Obama's murderers killing of Osama bin Laden, as proving he is 'patriotic' and 'tough', and denounce Republicans as 'racist' for not recognizing Obama's military gains for U.S. imperialism's wars.
The labor bureaucrats in the Democratic Party are Democrats - that is, not representatives of the labor movement in the Democratic Party but representatives of the Democratic Party in organized labor.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker summed up the call for good jobs this way:
For months now, the lives of millions of Americans have been shaken up by economic uncertainty. Just as our nation’s capital literally shook this week, we hope that discussions like the one we will have today will shake our elected officials to move with boldness and a fierce urgency of now. We call on our leaders to respond to the desperate cries of the people for jobs and justice.
Baker proves herself a toady of the Democratic Party, and therefore a political lackey of the capitalists where she spoke of existing members of Congress as "our elected officials" in "our nation's capital". She is not speaking as a worker, but as a Democratic Party lickspittle, as a representative of capitalist class interests, because only Democrats and Republicans have been elected to federal offices. The US does not have a political party of workers and therefore have no workers in Congress as "our elected officials"! The only thing the workers are doing in D.C. is cooking, sweeping and running machines for the Democratic and Republican bootlickers and political lickspittles of the capitalists who financed their campaigns and bought for them their Seats in Congress and the office of President and his Administration.
The same as was the case with Jesse Jackson. Rev. Joe Williams once wrote of Jesse Jackson, when the latter was running in the Democratic Party primaries for president, that the Jackson campaign wasn't a political representative of the Black community in the Democratic Party, but was by these campaigns a representative of the Democratic Party in the Black community. A Democrat is a Democrat. The same is true of ostensibly Black professors and pundits, Democrats such as Cornell West, Melissa Harris-Perry, Imiri Baraka and Eric Dyson.
The Democratic Party's so-called 'progressives' and fighters for a mythical, so-called 'Middle Class' - whether as Democrat members of Congress or on radio or television - operate on behalf of the capitalist class e.g. the MSNBC paid cadres of 'pundits' viz., Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz, together with their paid professional left 'guests' representing The Nation Magazine, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Solon.com, Washington Post, and so on. These Democrats advocate for the stabilization of capitalist interests by Keynesian economic solutions to capitalism in crisis, echoed by labor bureaucrats such as Trumka.
Ideological propagandists of the professional 'left’ – Democrats on radio, print and television call for government sponsored projects that will pay capitalists to 'rebuild America', employ i.e. economically exploit, workers whose labor power is to be appropriated by capitalists to repair roads and bridges, schools and so on, as ostensibly in the interests of 'the middle class' whose 'jobs' have been lost due to the capitalist crisis of overproduction, because the money goes to capitalists to employ workers.
In the socio-economic framework of capitalist economic relations of production that are based on the exploitation of wage labor by capital, there is no such a thing as 'economic justice'. This is nothing but a slogan, because in a capitalist economy, the same as any other socio-economic mode of production and appropriation based on class property, the most powerful, economically dominate classes are the most powerful, politically dominate classes. The laws of society are decreed or legislated by the political lackeys of the ruling classes, and therefore what's called 'justice' is the implementation of those laws - the Dred Scot Decision for example, and presently the reign of Taft-Hartley.
"Economic justice" is an oxymoron. What is needed to end the existence of a surplus population is the overthrow of the mode of production and appropriation that engenders surplus populations.
The working class has to, for itself, form itself into a political association that will take State power to elevate itself into the ruling class by dominating parliament - by winning the battle of democracy to have its legislators legislate the transfer of the productive forces from the private possessions of the capitalist classes to the public property of the working classes, thus putting an end to capitalist commodity production and the buying and selling of labor power, putting to end the appropriation of labor power by capitalists and thereupon an end to the exploitation of workers.
The Republicans and Democrats pretend to be debating 'big government' v 'limited' or 'small' government - this is a pretension because it is a red herring. The issue isn't the 'size' of 'government', but the fundamental class basis of the State.
The Republican politicians want to eliminate any social function of the State, to limit it to its essence - special bodies of armed men, with prisons &., at their disposal, as a direct instrument of capitalist class rule - law and order by armed repression of worker unrest. The Democrats want to retain some degree of social programs, but as Clinton said to his 'fellow Republicans', the 'era of big government is over'.
The political 'deals' between Democrat President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, are based on common representation of capitalist class interests and nothing but an extension of the agreements of Clinton-Gingrich. It wasn't the Republicans, but the Obama administration that proposed to the Republicans the 'grand deal' of cutting four trillion dollars from social spending. Thus, the political tendency for Democrats, as well as Republicans is to end social functions of 'government', except for where its social functions serve capitalist class interests directly.
Ronald Reagan proclaimed that "government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem", by separating the social function of 'the federal government' from the fact that government is but the managerial staff of the capitalist class dominated State, it is true.
The essence of the State Power is that it is a coercive apparatus of violence - an instrument of class domination by brutal power. Its essential function is to kill and jail rebellious workers. The men that sicked dogs on children and turned water hoses on civil rights protesters were armed police and firemen used as repressive State operatives. The members of the city, county and state governments that sicked the cops on the protesters were Democrats.
It is the Democrats, in Congress and MSNBC, who are defending the capitalist States existence, by saying 'government has a role', always referring to firemen, forest rangers, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), FEMA and of course, police and prisons. Reagan and the Republicans were, then and are today, in agreement with this 'role' of 'government'.
But, this 'definition' of 'government' dripping from the lips of Democrats and their media lackeys is nothing but a deliberate obfuscation of the actual function of Democrats and Republicans as political lickspittles governing in service of capitalist class interests - the management of the capitalist class' State. The repressive powers of the capitalist's dominated political State.
Class-conscious workers are not concerned with red herrings, except to expose them as such, but the class basis of the State. The capitalist dominated State must be destroyed, displaced by a workers dominated state - the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat! This objective is not a dream. It is science.
The "American dream" rhetoric, that every American can become a capitalist if they work hard, get a 'good' education and a 'good' job and 'play by the rules', is bullshit. There are 350,000,000 American citizens, and it is ridiculous the advocacy to them that each one of them can become capitalists: three hundred and fifty million capitalists, meaning a country of capitalists without a working class.
This original concept of the 'American dream', and clap trap about 'only in America', was so absurd - a nation comprised of capitalists without a working class to produce commodities and exploit as basis for profits - that the concept of the 'American dream' has been revised by Obama and Ed Schultz to mean workers becoming a 'middle class'. This sociological concept moves the concept of class from relations of production and issues of exploitation to misty myth of 'status', an issue of 'lifestyle'.
When Martin Luther King Jr participated in the labor union strike in Memphis, Tennessee and called for a city wide general strike there, he wasn't dreaming. He was participating in objective, i.e. empirical class war. I don't know what King would have become had he not been murdered, but it is clear that by his participating in the labor movement and organizing a poor peoples march on Washington, that he understood class reality and chose the side of the working class and its causes, and became a champion for the poor, not only in America but internationally - including those of Vietnam.
Whether or not putting an end to war including class war, poverty and crime by ending the appropriation of labor power and exploitation of workers through the labor process of capitalist commodity production will become a violent revolution or peaceful evolution depends upon whether the capitalist classes accept the worker's governments legislating the transfer of the productive forces from private possessions to public property - depends upon whether the capitalists become reactionary and use their police and soldiers to resist this transfer. If the capitalists and their political representatives chose violence to resist the new legislation and accept the new Constitution, then, even as Martin Luther King Jr, though a man of peace, quoted John F. Kennedy as saying: those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
LabourPartyPraxis discussion - subscribe
