RCP election analysis

Let's start with this:

The Democrats, try as some of them might, have not come up with either the programme or the organized social and political forces to counter that – and they are not willing and they are not able, at this point, to oppose it with anything more than what Lenin once called “pious doubts and petty amendments.”

The top Democratic leaders make their main priority the preservation of this system, no matter what horrors (and horrific compromises) this preservation may require – and at this point they are quite open about that. For the past several years they have been intent on keeping the outrage of the people suppressed and diverted into channels that end up shoring up the system, and even the Bush regime itself.

This dynamic has not fundamentally changed through the election.

Following is an abridged article from Revolution, voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.

The Elections: What the Do — and Do NOT — Mean

Last Tuesday’s mid-term elections marked a significant turn of events. For the first time in 12 years, Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate were voted out, and Democrats were returned to power. As soon as the results were in, the much-hated Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced to resign.

Yet the question of the day remains: what is the actual significance of these elections? What changes are – and aren’t – likely to result? What will – and won’t – they mean for the overall Bush agenda and the Iraq war? And what challenges and responsibilities confront those who oppose everything Bush and his regime stand for, and understand the need to reverse the whole direction they’ve been taking the world?

Many people see the vote as a popular referendum repudiating Bush, his administration, and the Iraq war. Millions of those who voted did so out of anger and disgust with the war. But in reality the war was not up for a vote – at least not in the way people may think.

The elections marked the crescendo of months of dire warnings and criticisms – including from within the U.S. military and other major voices in the imperialist foreign policy establishment – concerning the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

The Bush team had thought they’d quickly be able to turn Iraq into a pro-U.S. client state, a platform for further aggression in the region, and a signal to the world that U.S. power was unchallengeable. Instead, U.S. forces have been unable to either quell the growing insurgency or cobble together a new Iraqi ruling class with the power, cohesion and legitimacy to stabilize the situation. All this has the potential to turn Iraq into a centre of anti-U.S. hatred and instability, further strengthen Iran, destabilize the region, weaken the U.S. military, and open the door for rival powers. In short, exactly the opposite of what Bush and company set out to accomplish.

This caused forces within the ruling class to manoeuvre to force Bush to adjust his strategy. These forces want to prevent a strategic debacle and to salvage what is possible from Iraq – in order to maintain U.S. military, political, and economic domination over the Middle East. They are not aiming for an immediate end to the war but instead for a shift in tactics within Iraq and, perhaps, in regard to other forces in the region. They are not questioning the morality or justness of the war, merely its execution. For these forces, the elections became one means of both criticizing the Bush team and forcing (and creating political cover for) a serious reassessment of the war’s conduct and adjustment in strategy.

The Democrats’ calls for a “new direction” and “competent” leadership in Iraq and their criticisms of Bush’s “failed policy” served these objectives. The Democratic denunciations of the war were vague. Few candidates spelled out specifically what they would do, and fewer still called for immediate withdrawal. Some called the war a “mistake,” but none called it what it actually is: reactionary, criminal, and immoral.

This vagueness had two major virtues for the ruling class. First, it enabled the Democrats – who have consistently voted for and supported the Iraq war and continue to support its broad objectives – to divert the broad anti-war anger into a framework that doesn’t question the whole nature of the war. Second, it gives the Democrats the flexibility to join into a “bipartisan consensus” to “adjust,” rather than end, the war. Indeed, the “neocon” fascist William Kristol said on Fox News that the Republican defeat could actually give Bush the political cover to put more pressure on the Iraqi government and to call for some sort of regional conference (both Democratic demands), while also increasing the number of troops.

The fall of Donald Rumsfeld has to be seen in this light. Rumsfeld is most associated with his insistence on attempting to conquer and occupy Iraq with the minimum number of forces necessary. His exit is at least in large part a signal that this strategy is open for “re-evaluation.” Knocking down someone so high up is meant to show that Bush recognizes that all is not well, that they face serious problems and significant dangers, that some significant adjustments are necessary, and that he is going to have to forge a broader consensus among the ruling class to deal with all this.

The pledges of the Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi [the new Democratic parliamentary leader] for “civility and cooperation” must also be seen in this light. She is pledging to hold tight, to not do anything that could possibly endanger the stability of the whole thing, and to keep “her base” – those who do look to the Democratic Party as an agent of change – firmly in check. The people may have been voting to end the war and even to reverse the ugly direction of this regime – but Pelosi and the rest are already reinterpreting things and using their power to put a stamp on what people did – to fit it into and make it serve a whole other set of objectives than most people intended through their votes.

The elections, therefore, by themselves, will not signal a fundamental reversal of course on Iraq, still less a repudiation of the logic that led to the invasion. Instead – absent a massive movement in determined opposition – they will end up as a vehicle to adjust, sustain and rehabilitate this hated war.

The Democrats and the Bush Agenda

But Iraq is only one part of the Bush package. What about the other Bush horrors?

Where was the Democrat, for instance, who came out against the legalized torture and gutting of habeas corpus that was passed in September? Where was the Democrat who went on the offensive against the mounting moves toward a theocracy – the rule by Christian fundamentalist fascists?

Where was the Democrat who sounded the alarm against the Bush regime plans to invade Iran, or who criticized the support for the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon over the summer? Or who stood up for the rights of gay people to marry and dared to uphold the morality of a woman’s right to an abortion?

Instead, the Democrats not only tacitly – and in some cases openly – went along with the Bush agenda on these and other questions, they took great pains to claim the “war on terror” as their own, even as that “war on terror” forms the logical underpinning of a huge part of Bush’s agenda. And despite widespread sentiment to hold Bush accountable for his many and horrific crimes, Nancy Pelosi denounced any idea of impeaching Bush. That fact alone means that the crimes and outrages of the Bush regime – from its doctrine of pre-emptive war to its widespread use of torture and illegal imprisonment, among others – will now become legitimated and “normal.”

Many commentators have remarked that the current election is unlike 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress with a clear-cut program for radical overhaul. This is because the forces behind the Bush regime (and behind that 1994 takeover as well) have developed a “package” that speaks to some of the main underlying economic and political dynamics in the world – and the Democrats haven’t. This package includes aggressive international projection of the overwhelming military power of the U.S., a huge intensification of repression domestically, a drastic cut in government-funded social welfare programmes, and the increasing build-up of a Christian fascist movement in the politics and culture of society (with some of the key forces in this mix pushing for an outright fascist theocracy).

The Democrats, try as some of them might, have not come up with either the programme or the organized social and political forces to counter that – and they are not willing and they are not able, at this point, to oppose it with anything more than what Lenin once called “pious doubts and petty amendments.” The top Democratic leaders make their main priority the preservation of this system, no matter what horrors (and horrific compromises) this preservation may require – and at this point they are quite open about that. For the past several years they have been intent on keeping the outrage of the people suppressed and diverted into channels that end up shoring up the system, and even the Bush regime itself. This dynamic has not fundamentally changed through the election.

Moreover, we should step back here and look at the whole system that both Bush and the Democrats maintain is the “greatest country in the world.” What, after all, is it that U.S. military force defends in the over 100 countries in which U.S. soldiers are based? Fundamentally, it is the “right” of U.S. capital to go anywhere and do anything, no matter how monstrous, in search of the highest possible profits; to dominate and despoil whole countries and even regions, sometimes if only to make sure that their rival imperialists do not; to drive people off their land in the blind pursuit of profit and then to use those same people as “cheap labour” either within their home countries or the imperialist countries themselves; to fortify repressive social orders and customs so long as they serve the needs of imperialist expansion; to crush whoever gets in their way, even fellow reactionaries and gangsters; and to violently and viciously suppress any revolutionary or radical movements that arise when people dare to throw off their chains, or even resist.

This very basic truth must be returned to, brought out and driven home to people, in a million different ways, as we get into with them what the Democratic victory will – and will not – mean.

The elections are now over, but we still confront a criminal regime and the urgent need to drive it from power and repudiate its programme. Everything it is doing is STILL intolerable!

Now is not time for political retreat or wait-and-see. The contradiction between the burning desires of the millions who voted against Bush and the war on one hand, and what Bush and the Democrats will actually do on the other, could drive many more into resolute opposition. But that depends on us – and on you. Left to itself, that contradiction will only become a source of despair and a force for further passivity and paralysis. We – and you reading this – have to find the ways to resist, and to recast the political terms in this situation.

We have to insist that what was unacceptable yesterday remains unacceptable today – and tomorrow. We have to work with World Can’t Wait to rally others to the basic indictments, as well as the political stand and the moral certitude expressed in its very powerful Call to drive out the Bush regime. Teach-ins, massive distribution of that call, getting out the materials from the Bush Crimes Commission, joining in and supporting resistance – all these are the order of the day.

Beyond that there is the urgent need to get the works of Bob Avakian into this situation – in college courses and on the campuses more broadly, into the communities of the oppressed, on the radio, into the bookstores and libraries, out among intellectuals and in intellectual journals, and hundreds of other ways. These works not only shed real light on the underlying dynamics of this whole situation and speak very directly to the huge political questions of the day, they also pose the way forward – both in regards to how a revolution could be made, and to the truly liberating character such a revolution must have – the ways in which it must build on but go way beyond the revolutions of the past. And with that, there is also the urgent need to get out this paper – to get the truth, every week, into many, many more hands and build the scaffolding of the revolutionary movement.

Comments

[what's left...]

CPUSA:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/10184/1/348/
"Congratulations on an extraordinary year of labor-led all-people's front organizing and fightback. The right-wing stranglehold on Congress has been broken. The elections are a stunning people's victory -- part of a hard-fought quarter-century battle to defend democracy."

FRSO-Fight Back
http://frso.org/docs/2006/republicanmeltdown.htm
"The midterm elections represented a defeat of historic proportions for the Bush administration. They were a referendum on the war against Iraq. The American people voted ‘no.’ The Republican agenda of racism, inequality and reaction met with a setback. This is a moment to savor. It’s payback time for the politicians who left people to die on freeway overpasses in New Orleans and who are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq.

"Sure, a defeat that was more complete would have been better, as there are plenty more reactionary officeholders who kept their positions in Congress, the statehouses and at the local level. Or, it would be better if corporate interests did not dominate the Democratic Party. And it’s right to make the point that it would be better to have a system where political power is truly in the hands of the working people, as opposed to the wealthy elite who now run this country."

FRSO-Left Refoundation
http://freedomroad.org/content/view/403/52/lang,en/
"Though many activists on the Left, including those who want nothing to do with the Democratic Party, were thrilled that the Republicans were trounced on November 7th, it is critical that we think through the implications of what unfolded.

"The election results clearly demonstrate fury with the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, but they also reflect (at least according to the polls) disgust with Republican corruption. According to a CNN exit poll on Election Day, 57% of voters disapprove of the war in Iraq and a Newsweek poll showed that 53% of Americans want impeachment to be on the agenda.

"Both of these tendencies are something upon which progressive and Left forces can build. It is also interesting to note that more than 1/3 of the electorate saw themselves as explicitly voting against President Bush."

ISO
http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/610/610_03_NoToWar.shtml
"Unfortunately, many leading organizations of the antiwar movement put a high priority on mobilizing a vote for the Democrats, and they are claiming the result as a vindication of their strategy of trying to build alliances with Democratic Party politicians.

"Yet during their post-election interviews with the media, Democratic leaders took every opportunity to pour cold water on the hopes placed in them by their liberal supporters.

"The election was a referendum that rejected the Bush administration and its right-wing agenda, but the Democratic leadership remains convinced that it succeeded because it adopted many elements of that agenda, and distanced itself from the party’s traditionally more liberal base."

[what's left...]

Workers World Party
http://www.workers.org/2006/us/vote-1116/
"The main accomplishment of the 2006 midterm elections was to open a breach in the wall surrounding the Bush gang, who had ruled almost by edict since the 9/11 events. Now is the time to step into that breach and mobilize a massive movement to really get the U.S. troops out of Iraq, to win rights for immigrants and for all workers in the U.S., and to promote the struggles for women’s rights, against racism and for lesbian, gay, bi and trans rights."

Party of Socialism & Liberation
http://www.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5995&news_iv_ctrl=1122
"The results of the Congressional elections showed that the U.S. people want an end to the war in Iraq. Because the imperialist establishment has its grip firmly on the levers of real power in this country, however, the elections are being utilized to replace one team of managers with another.

"The mass anti-war sentiment, now clearly expressed, puts the majority of people objectively at loggerheads with the politicians of both parties. The Democrats profited from the anti-war wave—but they intend to become Bush’s partners in Iraq. That is why the immediate struggle to stop the war in Iraq means that the people must act in larger numbers and with greater determination in the coming months.

"The struggle for genuine peace is a long and complicated effort. Realizing the will of the people will require a profound, radical transformation of society. Power must be taken from those who profit from a global empire."