New Times Require Fresh Politics and Flexible Tactics

New Times Require Fresh Politics and Flexible Tactics

Author: Sam Webb, National Chair
First published 03/30/2007

The Democratic Party isn’t a people’s party, nor will it evolve into one. A people’s party embedded in and led by the core forces of a broad people’s coalition is still waiting to be born.

But the Democrats are not identical to the Republicans either. Conflating the two isn’t an accurate representation of reality nor tactically wise. To do so forecloses political openings and initiatives that allow the movement to make legislative gains.

Or to put it differently: to assume before the struggle has been even joined that the Democratic Party is no better and no different than the Republican Party is undialectical, analytically flawed, and demobilizing.

Thank goodness the CIO and its allies in the 1930s didn’t embrace this logic. Nor did the great revolutionary democrat, Martin Luther King, although he easily could have, given the number of Dixiecrats at the time. King possessed a political and tactical genius that allowed him to take advantage of openings and divisions in the Congress and ruling class, not to mention an unsurpassed ability to touch the hearts and the minds of tens of millions.

Of course, there are class and institutional pressures and constraints on the Democratic Party. It has no inclination to challenge the overall operation and logic of capitalism to be sure. But to leave the matter here betrays a lack of understanding of Marxist methodology. In analyzing a problem, Marxism moves from the general to the particular, from the abstract to the concrete. It studies a problem in a many-sided way and in all of its concrete manifestations and connections.

We can’t make such an analysis now; time doesn’t permit, but at the very least we can say that at the level of policy and social composition, the differences between the two parties are consequential to class and democratic struggles.

http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/819/1/140/