Originally posted by Guns of
[email protected] 11, 2006 08:03 pm
It is a capitalist election and its significance is in what it tells us about the status of the capitalist class. The election wasn't just something that "happened". It seemed to me, for example, that the slant coming out of CNN was different (more critical of bush and supportive of the democrats) than before the other elections. The entire news/entertainment superstructure, in a whole bunch of subtle ways, seemed to sleant and bend differently.
Oh, absolutely. There were a whole series of revelations and news items which tended to aid the Democrats. The Mark Foley scandal for one.
Elections tend to be won by whoever the ruling class has more confidence in - and media coverage is one indication of who that is.
The defeat of the incumbent party probably does reflect, partly, dissatisfaction with the war among the middle-classes and working people. If nothing else, the Republicans' "sitting wartime president" advantage has been negated.
Didn't others see that? Why were the neo-conservatives, this time, unable to manipulate and steal the election (as, from all appearances they did in Ohio and florida in previous elections?
This question has a mistaken premise - that something significantly different happened in the vote-counting in 2000 and 2004, compared to this year or other elections.
There were extremely narrow electoral margins in both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. Not an exceptional amount of election cheating, and as always both sides were trying to cheat. It's just that it was so close that a little bit of cheating went a long way.
None of the major races was that close this time, that's the only difference. The closest was the Virginia Senate race - where a Democrat narrowly won. The Republican candidate decided not to go for a recount. Remember all the leftists denouncing Kerry as "spineless" for not having a prolonged recount fight in Ohio?
Didn't hear any of 'em saying that about the Republican Senate candidate in Virginia, whatever his name was. Gee, wonder why that was?
The US ruling class has factions and conflicts. Different factions of capital are in conflict with each other. And they have different policies about how best to represent the interests of the empire and of their own capital group within it. It seems to me that the conflict between the democratic and republican parties in the US is one of the main forms that the struggle between these factions is played out.
To a degree. But the venom of this conflict is all out of proportion to the real policy disagreements. Consider the Kerry-Bush debates and how much trouble Kerry had explaining how he woulda conducted the Iraq war differently.
Kerry: I woulda got our allies on board! Bush: Don't you think I tried? Kerry: I woulda tried harder! As if he could erase the underlying causes of increasing rivalry among the advanced capitalist states. To the degree there's a real disagreement there, it's not over Iraq - it's over relations with France, Germany, etc.
The conflicts are largely ideological - not so much over what policy to follow at the moment - as how to sell and justify the policy. And some implications about how to decide future policies.
Partly things are debated so vaguely, I think, this is because none of the possible policies are so great for them. But it's hard for ruling-class ideologists to fully face up to that hard reality.
And partly it involves "special interests" of particular companies, industries, and sections of the military brass and government bureaucracy. Rumsfeld was especially a lightning rod for clashes with parts of the brass - and many military contractors injured by his policies. His 'transformation" towards a leaner, faster military involved cancellling some heavy weapons systems. So the conflicts around him certainly involved contending bureaucratic and corporate interests - more than policy disagreements exactly.
The victory of the democratic party represents and signals a change of policy and, it seems, a new alliance of key factions on a new policy.
Yeah, they'll have to reach some bipartisan compromises, or try to. It's interesting that the new Defense Secretary is part of the bipartisan commisssion called the "Iraq Survey Group", which will be coming out with some kind of tactical recommendations. He was also recently co-chair of a bipartisan commision that recommended direct negotiations with Iran. There's been a lot of speculation by pundits about reach a compromise with Iran and Syria on stablilizing Iraq - Iran especially has a lot of influence on the Baghdad government; and some prominent Iraqi Ba'athists went into exile in Syria.
These factions have shown great animosity to each other in the past. Will they be able to maintain their alliance and move forward in relative harmony?
I seriously doubt it. We probably won't see an actual impeachment, but in some ways the next couple years will be a mirror-image of the late Clinton administration and his troubles with the constant demagogy of the Republican Congress.
I expect their alliance to hold because, very pragmatically their need is great - the neoconservative leadership and policy has proven itself to be too crude and unsophisticated to lead by itself. The neo-conservatives are having too many failures and leading their policies are doing too much obvious damage to the empire. The classic neo-liberals, with their more nuanced and sophisticated view face renewed credibility in the face of the failures of the neo-conservatives.
The difficulty with this is - that the neo-liberals have no basically different policy proposals (as you also say later in your post.) They can blame the empire's difficulties on their partisan rivals - but they can't show their policies woulda avoided those difficulties. At least lashing out helps maintain the empire's reputation as something to be feared.
1. The economy is very fragile and weak. It is way too pumped up on debt and easy credit. It is facing a classic imperialist crisis, especially in the financial realm.
2. The US is facing increasing competition from other (much weaker) imperialist and pressure from maneuvering capitalist blocks (even from within its current imperialist realm) looking to capitalize on its weaknesses.
3. the US ruling class is committed to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan but will have to pay a high price to continue in the face of a growing resistance ready to explode. And, importantly, no faction seems to have a clear and confident plan for how to attain victory.
Absolutely. But I don't think their problems are going to promote greater unity. On the contrary, the pressure tends to produce cracks. That's why there's been so much partisan venom over the past decade or so.
1. A more aggressive prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it must spiral out of control in the face of, what I expect is soon to be, a determined and massive liberation movement.
You're wrong about Iraqi and Afghani politics - and if there was "a determined and massive liberation movement" things would spiral into that movement's control as in Vietnam - not down the drain of increasing, pointless sectarian and ethnic conflict.
The U.S. ruling class will try to become more "effective" by trying different tactics in their occupations - I'm not sure if they'll be able to escalate much, though. They have problems with available numbers of troops, and the steady trickle of casualties is producing growing antiwar sentiment.
They could just as easily pull back to fortified bases and let Iraqis kill each other all around....come out and impose a settlement when everyone's tired of it. It worked in Yugoslavia. It's a huge PR problem, and the death of any "beacon of democracy" hopes - but not the massive "credibility" loss of a lost war or withdrawal.
2. A radicalization of a small portion of the "left" wing of the democratic party.
3. A revitalized mass movement against the wars.
Nah. They'll become less radical.
The radical-liberals will tend to go along with the Democrats in office. During the Clinton administration, you saw less antiwar activity from the radical-liberals. Far right types were often more vocal against the bombing of Yugoslavia.
Also, with the prospect of electoral success, they won't need to console themselves with Michael Moore-style complaining about election cheating and Bush "coups".
4. A new propoganda blitz to justify the increased war effort.
Featuring both parties, and media supporting both parties. Which is one reason we won't see 2 or 3. The infighting between them has created a lot of unfavorable publicity for the war - "when thieves fall out" we've gained in that respect.
5. Possibly, a new event of some type (like 911), especially if the pro-war propoganda is not effective.
An inevitable product of their system and their wars, but they don't control the timing and we can't predict it. Also, evidence indicates al-Qaeda's global structure isn't operating, much anyway, and they don't have home-grown cells among Amerian Muslims. There was an interesting article in Foreign Affairs recently about how fear of this is overblown.
The question would be whether new cells that spring up in Europe or elsewhere could operate into the U.S.
6. All of this could spiral fairly quickly into a social upheaval, at least, on the order of 1968.
Not based on 2 and 3 anyway. And 5 would push back working-class struggle for a time.
I'm not going to predict when the next major social upheaval will come - mass struggles like the immigrants' rights protests seem to have caught almost everyone by surprise. But I will say it'll look nothing like '68 - a middle-class radicalization occurring in a period of economic prosperity. The middle classes now are more concerned with protecting their privileges from the unwashed masses in the context of growing inequality.
'68 is overrated anyway - far from the height of the antiwar movement. Chicago '68 especially is overrated - a small action by frustrated liberals hoping to aid the "peace candidate" McCarthy. Of course, their actions had the opposite effect anyway.....
Which is kinda like the left opponents of the "Bush regime" now. They want to help the Democrats, even if they don't admit it to themselves. But the protests by the RCP and others don't help the Democrats electorally, obviously.