[Peace-discuss] News from Doug Henwood

[Laurie Solomon]

Yes, I believe that both Henwood and Engles have it right.  Most elections - especially in the US - are ritualized political "genuflecting" that has little meaning and significance other than reinforcing the political myth that the masses are participating, legitimating, and involved in the policy decision-making by virtue of the act of selecting from among the circulating elites a group of elites that they can call their representatives and complain about after the election because they really never did represent those who elected them but rather some established interest who probably fuels and directs the electoral process by supplying financial resources and  the like but does not actually engage in the voting per se.  This election brings to mind two tunes.  One is "Razzle Dazzle" from the show Chicago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5-VN3SH1o); the other is Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag" (Marty Feldman’s intro and version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ0bqZw6B0A).  Of course, there are probably a number of songs by Tom Lehrer and others that characterize American Politics; but these have come readily to mind prior to reading your post and after reading the post stand out as appropriate.

-----Original Message----- 
From: C. G. Estabrook 
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 10:48 AM 
To: Peace-discuss 
Subject: [Peace-discuss] News from Doug Henwood 

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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