Is the US a one party state?

Is the US a one party state? It seems ridiculous to even ask this question. But let us look a little deeper and we might see that there might be something to it.

Of course it is not a one party state in the sense that all but one party is banned. There are in fact a myriad of parties in the US. But if that is so, and it is, how come that at every election the only candidate that has a chance of winning is a Democrat or a Republican or some version of these?

The decisive factor in US politics is that the US working class has never built a mass party of its own. What would building such a Party mean? It would mean a mass movement of the working class, great strikes and demonstrations, great social upheavals against the present order and out of this a change in the conscious of tens and tens of millions of working class people. This change would have to involve a recognition that there is a working class and that these workers themselves are part of that class, that the working class does not have the same interests as the capitalist class and therefore must have its own independent organizations and program. And from this tens of millions of workers must move to set up their own party, a Mass Working Peoples' Party. On this basis the US would never be the same again.

Socialists like myself would be part of the struggle to build such a party and we would be part of such a party. We would also put forward our program in this party. This would start from a complete separation of the party and the trade unions from collaboration with the employers and their governments and parties. That is we would stand for an independent party, program and strategy of struggle. But we would also campaign for this party to have a democratic socialist program to end capitalism and to establish a democratic socialist society world wide. If such a party was built in the US on a mass scale think of what it would mean.

Instead of US politics and working class political consciousness being dominated by the squabbles between the Democrats and Republicans the big issues would be put on the agenda. At the moment the two parties reduce everything to the size of the cuts in workers' living standards, the Democrats marginally less than the Republicans. But both are for cuts. They reduce foreign policy to the numbers of soldiers they send abroad, the Democrats sometimes slightly less than the Republicans. But the decisive issue is that with these two parties dominating political debate the big issues of class and of capitalism versus socialism never get a hearing. The big issues of class and of the socialist alternative to capitalism are kept off the mass agenda.

How many times do we hear talk of the US working class? Practically never. The majority of the US population are described as middle class, middle between whom? Then there is the poor. And to the extent they can achieve it they never mention the ruling class, the capitalist class, in any way at all. If they have to talk about this class they might speak of Wall Street, like the capitalist or ruling class is some kind of street.

It is not strictly true to say that the US is a one Party state. But it is true to say that with their two mass parties, their control over the mass media and the state, their control over the education system, US capitalism has a political monopoly over society. We the working class need our own mass Party, we need to break the effective monopoly capitalism has over society, we need to put the issues of class, capitalism and democratic socialism back on the mass agenda.

Sean.