[Peace-discuss] News from Doug Henwood
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Wed Nov 3 10:48:28 CDT 2010
The meaning of the election
Posted: 03 Nov 2010 06:47 AM PDT
You heard it here first (well maybe it was somewhere else, but I missed it):
yesterday’s “historic wave” was of the same lasting significance as the
“historic wave” of 2008—none. Or, more exactly, it’s another instance of the
eternal recurrence of American politics, another iteration of the status quo. A
country that’s rotting from the head, poisoned by alienation, plutocracy, and an
aversion to thinking, careens from one idiocy to another, with the winning side
celebrating its momentary triumph, and then it all goes sour in a few months.
Engels nailed it [from a letter of 1892, when Engels was 71]:
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The
divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that
tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented
in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each
particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each
of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms
the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the
South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this
jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and
the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully….
The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming
a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the
farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in
succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy
promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor
also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid
element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell
them out to one of the big parties afterward.
The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is
a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt
for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in
every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and
by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois
cliques profit.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92_01_06.htm> long ago:
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