Dan Scanlan:
The best way to do that is to push from the left and don't vote for them.
Bush has a long way to go before he kills as many people in Iraq as
Clinton did, estimated at more than 1 million (compared to current
estimates of tens of thousands in this war segment).
I was thinking about this stuff this morning. It occurs to me that one of
the worst things about the "anybody but Bush" line of thinking, especially
from self-described Marxists, is that it amounts to a Great Man theory of
history. You have national elections every four years when the winner gets
a chance to determine future history sort of like pulling a lever to switch
railroad tracks.
I think a much more sensible approach is to see presidents as responding to
deeper social and economic realities that make a reversal of the train
virtually impossible without attacking those structures.
The main fact of our epoch is an end to the postwar boom. This has led to
attacks on the welfare state, trade unions and all the rest in order to
make the USA more competitive in the world market. Voting for a Republican
or a Democrat will not alter that reality. In fact, a Democrat was the
first to respond to this new reality. Jimmy Carter's "limits" rhetoric was
really his way of saying that the good old days were finished. Let's
remember that Harry Truman, a Democrat, launched the Red Scare. But the Red
Scare was not something cooked up by a President. It was the unavoidable
response of the US ruling class to the reality of Soviet survival and
expansion.
The only thing that these bastards will respond to is street politics. FDR
was elected on a balance-the-budget program. He switched tracks only after
trade union struggles threatened the fabric of capitalism. Until the mass
movement gets some muscle, the attack on working people will continue.
Dean's campaign was interesting because it addressed the question of the
role of the Democratic Party. He had the temerity to demand that it at
least give lip-service to the idea that it operates on a multiclass basis,
while Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman and Clark were for "staying the course".
If you had a million people marching in Washington demanding universal
health-care, I suspect that even Bush would respond.
Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
