On Tue, Sep 3, 2024 at 03:28 PM, Charles Rachlis wrote:

> 
> So why would Debs, Lenin and Trotsky say its unprincipled to vote for the
> Democrats... revolutionary Marxists start from what is objectively
> necessary (we say what is) not from the backward consciousness of the
> working class.

But the Bolsheviks very much took into account the backward consciousness of 
the class and adjusted their tactics accordingly. You’ll recall Lenin sharply 
criticized Sylvia Pankhurst and the British “Left Communists” for not wanting 
to support the “bourgeois” Labour Party backed by the Trades Union Congress. 
And remember this was in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 
a period quite unlike our own when masses of workers in Europe and elsewhere 
were engaging in militant strike action and moving to the left politically.

In 1920, the same year Lenin polemicized against Pankhurst and her comrades, 
the Bolsheviks as you say supported Debs’ Socialist Party against the 
Democrats, as we all would have. The SP was the political home of both 
revolutionary trade unionists who from the IWW and reformist workers from the 
AFL unions. The Democrats only became a union-based party from the 1930’s and 
Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Lenin thought the British working class would soon abandon Labour for the 
fledgling CPGB if the latter supported it “as a rope supports the hanged” and 
Trotsky also thought the Democrats would haemorrhage their working class 
support to the newly-formed Fourth International which he predicted would win 
the US and global proletariat to its ranks during the pending world war.  
Neither forecast came to pass, and I believe each would have altered their 
optimistic perspective about the imminence of world revolution had they had 
lived past WW II.

As you may know, I don’t distinguish between the Democrats and their kindred 
social democratic parties outside the US. They all have the same program, 
leadership, and social base. In Canada, I support the union-backed NDP when it 
is involved in a tight race with the Liberals or Conservatives but I've 
abstained wherever it has held a safe seat, as it presently does in my riding.  
As my earlier comment indicated, I would approach the US election in the same 
way.


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