Mood For Change Throws Back Pelosi/Schumer Corporate Wing

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I started off my morning read with a bit of a chuckle. On the one hand it’s refreshing to watch as Pelosi and co suffer a bloody nose having to backtrack on a proposal that was aimed at condemning Ilhan Omar for so-called Anti-Semitic remarks and introducing instead what the Wall Street Journal refers to in today’s edition as a “Resolution Opposing Hate.”  Does that mean that there will be no more wars, no more mass shootings, no more racism, sexism, homophobia, religious sectarianism, now hate is being condemned by the US House of Representatives?

I am being facetious of course, surely the Roman Senate had a higher political level than the US Congress today.

In my previous post I explained what some of us around Facts For Working People think is the real reason for this watered down proposal, a proposal that was initially meant to mention Ilhan Omar by name. The retreat from the original proposal is shown by the fact that it doesn’t mention Ilhan Omar by name and it also includes Anti Islam in its condemnation of hate.

While those of us around this blog, have made a point of learning from our past and admitting our own mistakes, Facts For Working People has been way ahead of the curve on this issue. Like most of the US we did not predict the election of Trump. However we were always confident a new strike wave would develop and this is developing as shown by the teachers/educators movement in 2018 where rank and file union leaders emerged, by passed established union leaderships and struck and took action in states where strikes are illegal.

We have been consistent on the political developments with regard to the established  capitalist parties and the political process. We have had conference calls every week for the past year or more when we discuss international and domestic events. One important conclusion we have drawn about US political life since the election of the sexual predator and racist Donald Trump is that the era of the domination of US political life by the two capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans is coming to an end. We have stressed this emphatically in our writings on this blog.

We also explained as I did in my previous post that while Facts For Working People believes the Democratic Party remains a dead end and can never serve the interests of working class people, we greeted the bombshell defeat of an entrenched Democratic Party machine candidate by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last November as a very positive development. The reason we did so was because it will hasten a split in the Democratic Party and this in turn will open the road for the formation of a new mass left political force or mass workers party.

Possibility of a Split Grows.

Ocasio-Cortez has been joined by others and in particular this young Somali woman who has stirred up a hornet’s nest with her criticisms of lobbying money and in particular US support for the brutal Israeli Apartheid Zionist regime.  It is not simply the corporate Democrats such as Pelosi and Schumer that are concerned about the party’s left wing. Republicans are worried as well. Both parties rely on each other to keep basically the same economic interests in the driver’s seat and the influence of the working class out of the game while throwing a few crumbs here and there. But even the crumbs have been swept from the table these days as we are headed in to the 2020 election cycle. While pacification of the upstarts can’t be ruled out as the Pelosi Schumer wing have a lot of gifts to offer, there is definitely a potential crisis of major proportions developing.  We can get an understanding of that by reading the more serious journals of capitalism.

Today’s Wall Street Journal opinion page has one such example. Kimberly Strassel, a member of the WSJ editorial board has an Op Ed piece titled, The Democratic Crackup. Strassel writes that,”…. radical-left House members for weeks have overshadowed the Pelosi agenda with their own proposals for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, giant tax hikes and more.”

These conflicts between the right and left wing of the Democratic Party are not, just “growing pains” Strassel writes and that it would be a mistake to “write them off” as such.  She reflects this growing concern among the US ruling class as a whole about the crisis affecting their two parties and warns that, to do so, “….ignores how huge and fundamental the fissures are becoming in the Democratic Party. This isn’t a tea-party moment, which was fueled by conservatives who felt their Republican members weren’t living up to principles that most in the party share. The Democratic Party is moving in two different directions.”

Strassel has argued that regulation denies women opportunities (bourgeois women of course) and called for a debate around supplying teachers with stun guns so they could protect their students. Here are some of her concerns in relation to the present situation:

“Ideologically, how do you mesh a party whose members variously embrace and reject capitalism? Hillary Clinton, in a remarkable moment last year, said she believes her decision in 2016 to call herself a “capitalist” hurt her in places like Iowa, where “41% of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists.”

In other words, well over a third of Iowa caucus-goers reject the economic and political basis upon which the Democratic Party was founded.

The moderates who won Mrs. Pelosi the gavel ran on deficit reduction, border security and market reforms. Today’s progressive movement subscribes to “modern monetary theory,” in which debt no longer matters; wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and believes markets are immoral. These aren’t degrees of separation. They’re completely separate philosophies.” (my added emphasis)

One can only imagine the terror that will strike strike the heart of the ruling class and its political representatives in the face of a massive strike wave and working class movement in the future. After all, none of the new batch of “diverse” House members condemn capitalism or touch on the taking in to public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, that is the major corporations which dominate the economy or anything like that.

Where this will end up is hard to say but we’re definitely in a new period. I think it highly unlikely that Democratic Party leader Sanders will be the figure around which a real opposition will form or who will lead the exit from the party and a new left formation. On the question of US foreign policy Ilhan Omar has clearly taken the lead and the assault on her from the Republican side and their friends and colleagues in control of the Democratic Party has hit a bit of a road block.

It’s clear that the US ruling class, or significant sections of it represented in both parties is disconnected from the mood in society and it is my contention that as far as the electoral sphere is any indication, the 100 million people who do not vote,  are not all right wing nuts, in the main they are just the opposite.

The left, or the self styled socialist organizations as they are called, have also not adapted to these significant changes, functioning in the same sectarian closed ways they have in the past and refusing to reflect in a serious way on their methods, mistakes, and in particular their poisonous undemocratic internal lives, all factors in why the left has more socialists that have left than there are members and have failed to build a genuine influential left current in the US workers class.

The same is true of the heads of organized labor who still cling to the coattails of the Democratic Party machine despite millions of workers including their own members abandoning both parties of capitalism.

Lastly, the Democratic Socialist of America, the largest “socialist” organization in the US with over 50,000 members, including this writer, has an opportunity and responsibility. They will not be able to take this opportunity or carry out their responsibility, by running candidates through the Democratic Party. The biggest mistake for those who oppose the existing capitalist society would be to underestimate the mood for change and the anger that exists in US society. Things that were not possible in the past are now possible. 

Every political organization and trade union will be convulsed in debate and discussion as the crisis of capitalism worsens. This will especially be the case  when the economic downturn, whether this be a recession or slump, hits in the period ahead. The US working class as a class, in spite of all the confusions and differences, is potentially the most powerful force in US society. What we see in the strikes and struggles and the movements against racism, sexism, climate change, war etc., is a harbinger of what will happen in the coming period when the US working class enters the stage in a more forceful way and begins to put its imprint on society. As it does it will then be obvious to all that US society has entered a new phase.

All activists and fighters must look at their way of working and struggling, learn the lessons from the past, what worked and what did not work, and take on in an effective way, the capitalist system which threatens life on earth as we know it and threatens the very existence of the human species.