[Peace-discuss] More on the elections…

[Morton K. Brussel]

The following article makes in my eyes much sense, despite a certain  
opaqueness—or is it optimism—that revolution in the USA can (or  
should) take place in a foreseeable future. Also, it treats Democrats  
as a monolithic political entity, unwilling to admit that it is  
useful to work with some to advance progressive goals while  
condemning others for standing for a retrograde status quo. Yet, I  
think the basic perspective of this editorial has validity despite  
its Communist origins. Comments?

http://www.revcom.us/a/069/elections-en.html

Revolution #69, November 19, 2006
The Elections: What They Do—and Do NOT—Mean
Last Tuesday’s mid-term elections marked a significant turn of  
events. For the first time in 12 years, Republicans in the House of  
Representatives and Senate were voted out, and Democrats were  
returned to power. As soon as the results were in, the much-hated  
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced to resign.

Yet the question of the day remains: what is actual significance of  
these elections? What changes are—and aren’t—likely to result? What  
will—and won’t—they mean for the overall Bush agenda and the Iraq  
war? And what challenges and responsibilities confront those who  
oppose everything Bush and his regime stand for, and understand the  
need to reverse the whole direction they’ve been taking the world?

What do you think of the Democratic victory? is on everyone’s lips,  
and this post-election discussion and debate is one that every reader  
of our paper should plunge into.

The War—Their Agenda and Ours

Many people see the vote as a popular referendum repudiating Bush,  
his administration, and the Iraq war. Millions of those who voted did  
so out of anger and disgust with the war. But in reality the war was  
not up for a vote—at least not in the way people may think.

The elections marked the crescendo of months of dire warnings and  
criticisms—including from within the U.S. military and other major  
voices in the imperialist foreign policy establishment—concerning the  
deteriorating situation in Iraq.

The Bush team had thought they’d quickly be able to turn Iraq into a  
pro-U.S. client state, a platform for further aggression in the  
region, and a signal to the world that U.S. power was  
unchallengeable. Instead, U.S. forces have been unable to either  
quell the growing insurgency or cobble together a new Iraqi ruling  
class with the power, cohesion and legitimacy to stabilize the  
situation. All this has the potential to turn Iraq into a center of  
anti-U.S. hatred and instability, further strengthen Iran,  
destabilize the region, weaken the U.S. military, and open the door  
for rival powers. In short, exactly the opposite of what Bush and  
company set out to accomplish.

This caused forces within the ruling class to maneuver to force Bush  
to adjust his strategy. These forces want to prevent a strategic  
debacle and to salvage what is possible from Iraq—in order to  
maintain U.S. military, political, and economic domination over the  
Middle East. They are not aiming for an immediate end to the war but  
instead for a shift in tactics within Iraq and, perhaps, in regard to  
other forces in the region. They are not questioning the morality or  
justness of the war, merely its execution. For these forces, the  
elections became one means of both criticizing the Bush team and  
forcing (and creating political cover for) a serious reassessment of  
the war’s conduct and adjustment in strategy.

The Democrats’ calls for a “new direction” and “competent” leadership  
in Iraq and their criticisms of Bush’s “failed policy” served these  
objectives. The Democratic denunciations of the war were vague. Few  
candidates spelled out specifically what they would do, and fewer  
still called for immediate withdrawal. Some called the war a  
“mistake,” but none called it what it actually is: reactionary,  
criminal, and immoral.

This vagueness had two major virtues for the ruling class. First, it  
enabled the Democrats—who have consistently voted for and supported  
the Iraq war and continue to support its broad objectives—to divert  
the broad anti-war anger into a framework that doesn’t question the  
whole nature of the war. Second, it gives the Democrats the  
flexibility to join into a “bipartisan consensus” to “adjust,” rather  
than end, the war. Indeed, the “neocon” fascist William Kristol said  
on FOX News that the Republican defeat could actually give Bush the  
political cover to put more pressure on the Iraqi government and to  
call for some sort of regional conference (both Democratic demands),  
while also increasing the number of troops (which Kristol and other  
Republican forces like McCain favor).

The Fall of Rumsfeld and the Rise—and Further Taming—of Nancy Pelosi

The fall of Donald Rumsfeld has to be seen in this light. Rumsfeld is  
most associated with his insistence on attempting to conquer and  
occupy Iraq with the minimum number of forces necessary. His exit is  
at least in large part a signal that this strategy is open for “re- 
evaluation.” Knocking down someone so high up is meant to show that  
Bush recognizes that all is not well, that they face serious problems  
and significant dangers, that some significant adjustments are  
necessary, and that he is going to have to forge a broader consensus  
among the ruling class to deal with all this.

The pledges of the Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi for “civility  
and cooperation” must also be seen in this light [see “Post  
Elections: Dissecting the Democrats”]. She is pledging to hold tight,  
to not do anything that could possibly endanger the stability of the  
whole thing, and to keep “her base”—those who do look to the  
Democratic Party as an agent of change—firmly in check. The people  
may have been voting to end the war and even to reverse the ugly  
direction of this regime—but Pelosi and the rest are already  
reinterpreting things and using their power to put a stamp on what  
people did—to fit it into and make it serve a whole other set of  
objectives than most people intended through their votes.

The elections, therefore, by themselves, will not signal a  
fundamental reversal of course on Iraq, still less a repudiation of  
the logic that led to the invasion. Instead—absent a massive movement  
in determined opposition—they will end up as a vehicle to adjust,  
sustain and rehabilitate this hated war.

The Democrats and the Bush Agenda

But Iraq is only one part of the Bush package. What about the other  
Bush horrors?

Where was the Democrat, for instance, who came out against the  
legalized torture and gutting of habeas corpus that was passed in  
September? Where were the “attack ads” that called out the  
Republicans for supporting such outrages?

Where was the Democrat who went on the offensive against the mounting  
moves toward a theocracy—the rule by Christian fundamentalist  
fascists? Where were the attack ads that called out a Republican for  
something like the “Terri Schiavo” incident?

Where was the Democrat who sounded the alarm against the Bush regime  
plans to invade Iran, or who criticized the support for the brutal  
Israeli invasion of Lebanon over the summer? Or who stood up for the  
rights of gay people to marry and dared to uphold the morality of a  
woman’s right to an abortion?

Instead, the Democrats not only tacitly—and in some cases openly—went  
along with the Bush agenda on these and other questions, they took  
great pains to claim the “war on terror” as their own, even as that  
“war on terror” forms the logical underpinning of a huge part of  
Bush’s agenda. [see “The (Deadly) Logic of the ‘War on Terror’”] And  
despite widespread sentiment to hold Bush accountable for his many  
and horrific crimes, Nancy Pelosi denounced on 60 Minutes any idea of  
impeaching Bush. That fact alone means that the crimes and outrages  
of the Bush regime—from its doctrine of pre-emptive war to its  
widespread use of torture and illegal imprisonment, among others—will  
now become legitimated and “normal.”

Many commentators have remarked that the current election is unlike  
1994, when the Republicans took over Congress with a clear-cut  
program for radical overhaul. This is because the forces behind the  
Bush regime (and behind that 1994 takeover as well) have developed a  
“package” that speaks to some of the main underlying economic and  
political dynamics in the world—and the Democrats haven’t. This  
package includes aggressive international projection of the  
overwhelming military power of the U.S., a huge intensification of  
repression domestically, a drastic cut in government-funded social  
welfare programs, and the increasing buildup of a Christian fascist  
movement in the politics and culture of society (with some of the key  
forces in this mix pushing for an outright fascist theocracy).

The Democrats, try as some of them might, have not come up with  
either the program or the organized social and political forces to  
counter that—and they are not willing and they are not able, at this  
point, to oppose it with anything more than what Lenin once called  
“pious doubts and petty amendments.” The top Democratic leaders make  
their main priority the preservation of this system, no matter what  
horrors (and horrific compromises) this preservation may require—and  
at this point they are quite open about that. For the past several  
years they have been intent on keeping the outrage of the people  
suppressed and diverted into channels that end up shoring up the  
system, and even the Bush regime itself. This dynamic has not  
fundamentally changed through the election.

Moreover, we should step back here and look at the whole system that  
both Bush and the Democrats maintain is the “greatest country on in  
the world.” What, after all, is it that U.S. military force defends  
in the over 100 countries in which U.S. soldiers are based?  
Fundamentally, it is the “right” of U.S. capital to go anywhere and  
do anything, no matter how monstrous, in search of the highest  
possible profits; to dominate and despoil whole countries and even  
regions, sometimes if only to make sure that their rival imperialists  
do not; to drive people off their land in the blind pursuit of profit  
and then to use those same people as “cheap labor” either within  
their home countries or the imperialist countries themselves; to  
fortify repressive social orders and customs so long as they serve  
the needs of imperialist expansion; to crush whoever gets in their  
way, even fellow reactionaries and gangsters; and to violently and  
viciously suppress any revolutionary or radical movements that arise  
when people dare to throw off their chains, or even resist.

This very basic truth must be returned to, brought out and driven  
home to people, in a million different ways, as we get into with them  
what the Democratic victory will—and will not—mean.

The Bush Regime: Still Intolerable, Still Must Be Driven Out

To return to the questions at the beginning of this editorial, we  
must also ask all those we work with and meet: what do you think  
about the elections? And what are you going to do?

The elections are now over, but we still confront a criminal regime  
and the urgent need to drive it from power and repudiate its program.  
Everything it is doing is STILL intolerable!

Now is not time for political retreat or wait-and-see. The  
contradiction between the burning desires of the millions who voted  
against Bush and the war on one hand, and what Bush and the Democrats  
will actually do on the other, could drive many more into resolute  
opposition. But that depends on us—and on you. Left to itself, that  
contradiction will only become a source of despair and a force for  
further passivity and paralysis. We—and you reading this—have to find  
the ways to resist, and to recast the political terms in this situation.

We have to insist that what was unacceptable yesterday remains  
unacceptable today—and tomorrow. We have to work with World Can’t  
Wait to rally others to the basic indictments, as well as the  
political stand and the moral certitude expressed in its very  
powerful Call to drive out the Bush regime. Teach-ins, massive  
distribution of that call, getting out the materials from the Bush  
Crimes Commission, joining in and supporting resistance—all these are  
the order of the day.

Beyond that there is the urgent need to get the works of Bob Avakian  
into this situation—in college courses and on the campuses more  
broadly, into the communities of the oppressed, on the radio, into  
the bookstores and libraries, out among intellectuals and in  
intellectual journals, and hundreds of other ways. These works not  
only shed real light on the underlying dynamics of this whole  
situation and speak very directly to the huge political questions of  
the day, they also pose the way forward—both in regards to how a  
revolution could be made, and to the truly liberating character such  
a revolution must have—the ways in which it must build on but go way  
beyond the revolutions of the past. And with that, there is also the  
urgent need to get out this paper—to get the truth, every week, into  
many many more hands and build the scaffolding of the revolutionary  
movement.

The underlying dynamics of this system—the misery and horror it means  
to billions of people every day—have not changed. The ways in which  
these dynamics have brought forward the perverse Bush regime—and the  
ways in which that regime answers the “needs” of that system, with  
whatever “course corrections” are needed—have not changed. The great  
dangers—and the potential openings—posed by this whole course taken  
by imperialism have not changed. The acute need for revolution  
continues.

We must act.
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