Pelosi: "The Democratic Party is Capitalist". What is DSA, Cortez and Tlab's Response?

by Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

In the video above, Nancy Pelosi, the California Congresswoman and multi-millionaire who held the powerful position as the Speaker of the US House of Representatives from 2007-2011, answers a question from a student. The student asks if the Democrats could move to the left. In response, she makes it abundantly clear,  “I have to say, we’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is,” She was speaking less to this student than to the party backers, the bankers, industrialists and the US capitalist class as a whole, ensuring them that the party is still theirs and always will be.

The mid-terms have lit a small fire under Pelosi and the Democratic Party old guard, a development due partially to the rise of Trump, a positive side of the Predator in Chief’s activity, forcing people to get active in some way. As of this writing 101 women have won House seats and there may be more yet.  Many of these new faces are women of color as well as from diverse backgrounds. New Mexico’s Deb Haaland and Kansas’ Sharice Davids  are the first Native American women. Ayana Pressley and Jahana Hayes are both black.

Perhaps the most well known at the moment is the Latina Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are members of Democratic Socialist of America (DSA).

Without a doubt this is a very positive development as it was when Obama was elected in the sense that it opens cracks in an historic racist and sexist tradition.  I remember watching Jesse Jackson crying when Obama got the Democratic Party nomination at a huge rally in Chicago and I saw in his face the reality of this setting in, something he probably thought would never occur in his lifetime. Those tears were genuine in my opinion.

But while the election of people of a different color, gender and religious backgrounds, in a society built on racism, sexism and exploitation is a positive development. The main question for all of us though is not their particular identity as a female or gay person or what they are saying, but what are they going to do? For some of us that are older, we have heard all the rhetoric before from left Democrats. It might not be an exaggeration to say that in Jackson's first run for the nomination he was to the left of someone like Ocasio-Cortez but was eventually brought back to reality by the Democratic Party machine.

If you have listened to Pelosi in the video above, her response to the young student is classic. She affirms the primacy of capitalism and her party as a political arm of it. But she understands the point the student makes about the mood among young people and she also sees how the capitalist crisis is destroying living standards, the environment and undermining society’s faith in bourgeois democracy.

But it’s not capitalism that’s the problem she argues and tells of he old days when the Chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey said that when the CEO’s and corporate heads made decisions they applied “stakeholder” capitalism principles. They took in to consideration the shareholders, the management, the consumers and the workers. In other words, “the community at large”.  Pelosi, perhaps because she has a degree in advanced economics along with her extensive reading of Marx and Engles’ works, and maybe a Michael Roberts article or two, then makes the claim that about 15 years ago “stakeholder” capitalism was pushed aside and replaced by “Shareholder capitalism”. Brilliant economic analysis Nancy.

The capitalist mass media covers the collapse of the Venezuelan economy (and the collapse of Stalinism) as a failure of socialism or communism although both were neither. The crises in the capitalist world we are led to believe are due to “crony capitalism” or simply corruption or bad management, in other words, character flaws. The Russian capitalists are almost always described as “Oligarchs”. The US capitalist class along with the Vatican spent a lot of money and time influencing Russian politics after the collapse of Stalinism to ensure that what replaced it was not a healthy workers state, a democratic socialist regime, but capitalism. They got what they asked for and regret it.

The intention in using these terms is to stress that capitalism can be made nice. The Chairman of Standard Oil Pelosi quotes, along with the likes of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos today, would argue we are all just  “one community” and a regulated capitalism, a socially conscious capitalism, can provide a secure and healthy existence for all as well as protect the natural world in which we live. But regulation doesn’t, never has and never will, control capitalism and its brutal, violent and inhumane affect on humanity and the planet. What this argument does is ignore the inherent class antagonisms within capitalism that are the source of all wars, and conflict and are at the root of environmental destruction, racism and exploitation. It also ignores history.  Theodore Roosevelt took on the Trusts and Robber Barons. Franklin Roosevelt took on the big bourgeois in the 1930’s. Neither attempt brought the capitalism Pelosi is talking about. It was a world war that saved capitalism from itself at the cost of 57 million lives and it was the aftermath of it that that allowed the intact productive forces of US imperialism to enter a period that provided the material basis for the so-called American Dream which was a very limited dream indeed. US capitalism was still a nightmare existence for millions of its citizens particularly in the Apartheid South.

So one would think that such a comment from a major US bourgeois politician like Nancy Pelosi would be jumped on by the Democratic Socialists of America and new politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib who are both DSA members, they too must be aware of the disgust with the two capitalist parties and the desire not only for a new party but socialism.

But there seems to be a significant silence on this issue. DSA appears not to have taken up this challenge and Pelosi is let off the hook. Recently Ocasio-Cortez described the present situation as a sort of  “no holds barred, wild west, hyper capitalism”. Like Pelosi, she is saying that capitalism is not the problem in and of itself. As a socialist she seems to avoid class and class antagonism’s altogether. The billionaire George Soros has the same view but uses the term Market Fundamentalism and suggests names like “robber capitalism”, or the "gangster state,". Either way, all of these descriptions that lead to the idea that capitalism has a future.

 

The Young Turks?

While welcoming new faces in politics as in all aspects of life, women, religious minorities, people of color etc., this does not guarantee much. There are far more black politicians, mayors of cities and legislators than in the past, but the crisis that capitalism brings to the black community and far more disproportionally continues; homelessness, unemployment, incarceration rate, racism in the justice system and police brutality, housing education, health care you name it.

So new faces, people shut out of the game based on their race religion or gender, can be a huge step forward. But it doesn’t have to be. Their politics and how they see the world is paramount.  The first contentious issue for me is that they are in a party that (as Pelosi says) is a capitalist party that will not serve the interests of working people, never mind go after the bloated US offense budget, stop Washington’s murderous wars and transform foreign policy. The Democratic “Better Deal” will be more of the same unfortunately although without the cretin Trump’s madness. For socialists it is clear that a democratic socialist US cannot be brought about through the Democratic Party. But for the average worker even serious reforms are unreachable and any reform of substance will be temporary or paid for overwhelmingly by workers and the middle class. They’ll rob Peter to Pay Paul.

The elation at these new faces is justified but there is also the petit bourgeois from all backgrounds whose obsession with identity politics is in actuality a class position, it is to obscure the class differences among marginalized groups, people of color, gays etc.  It is when the politics of identity is used in this way to obscure and outright censor the discussion of class and class society it should be confronted. Some of the loudest proponents of identity politics are actually using it as a means of defending a class position------theirs.

I do not know much about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I know she is courageous as are her colleagues challenging the power in the US as members of disenfranchised communities. She did say in the same interview where she talked of “Wild West Capitalism” that “Capitalism has not always existed and will not always exist.”  This comment caused some controversy showing how afraid the US ruling class is of the working class although Ms Cortez never mentioned the working class and as far as I can tell is not a frequent user of the term. Any mention of capitalism having a shelf date is bad enough. But she is young and who knows where she might end up but she is in a minefield. In this situation there are, like the workplace, only two sources of power, the capitalists or the working class.

The DSA should be guiding Ms Cortez in these dangerous waters including joining with her in taking up Pelosi's admission that the party she is in is a capitalist party and orienting to the working class including the 14 million members in unions. The DSA leadership is guiding her but not in the right direction evidently.

Myself and some others around Facts For Working People were very positive about Cortez' victory in the primary not because we see the Democratic Party as a vehicle for change but because her election, and since the mid-term results, will bring what seems a likely split in the Democratic Party even closer.

Let’s hope so.