Everyone understands that our country is approaching a certain political nodal line. What is the process of political development? First comes the objective foundation for change, then the scattered spontaneous reaction to this new emerging change, then comes the discussion, debate, and consolidation of ideas about that change, and out of that comes an organized effort to adjust to the new reality.
The economy develops on a more or less spontaneous basis. Politics has to be conscious. It has to clear the path for the spontaneous development of the economy.
The drive toward “bipartisanship” today is the political expression of something new taking place in the economy. The ruling class needs a political motion to clear the lumber out of the way so it can move forward. They are laying the foundations for a new political movement that is based on the interests of corporate power that is completely merged with the state.
The confusion we see in Congress and in politics in general is an expression of the changes that are taking place in the economy, and the need for the political relations in this country to be adjusted to the new situation.
Opening door to next stage
There is a good deal of fumbling around about how to go about this. But in the midst of all the confusion and opposition among Democrats and Republicans and the combined opposition from the right wing of both parties, there are some who are seriously trying to open the way for the new economy.
President Obama has been in the forefront of the call for bipartisanship. He is attempting to establish bipartisan commissions on everything from fiscal regulation to health care to jobs. Most recently, Congress voted down his proposal for a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction, but he has decided to move ahead with it through executive order.
What is the meaning of these calls for bipartisanship? The American people didn’t vote for Republicans and Democrats. The majority voted for a Democratic Party program. Today, the insistence on governing through bipartisanship is an expression of the spontaneous striving and impulses for the realignment of the political relations in this country in order to open the doors for the development of the economy.
This is being expressed politically as the spontaneous merging of the center of the Democratic Party and the center of the Republican Party. In this process, the left and right wings of those parties are drifting away from them.
By constantly demanding the merging of the center of the Republican and Democratic parties President Obama is leading this process of political realignment.
Under today’s conditions, bipartisan means a new idea. New ideas are scatterings of the old and they are parts of the new. A new idea or a new apparatus does not spring afresh. It is part of the old and part of the new, and it develops by step by step ridding itself of the old. It is not as if something new all of a sudden occurs. We understand that qualitative development depends on the introduction of something new, that something new is always rooted in something old. It is a quantitative development of the new within the old that creates the crisis that allows for the sublation that creates what we call the new.
Anything new begins with the destruction of the old forms. The Republican and Democratic parties are not dying, but we are seeing the actual formation of something new in Congress. When people hear the word bipartisan, they usually think of temporary alliances over specific issues. That is what the word has meant in the past. The bipartisan commissions that they are now attempting to form are a relatively permanent alliance between a sector of the Republican Party and a sector of the Democratic Party.
These changes are to facilitate the thorough open domination of corporate interests over the U.S. political structure. Of course, there have been impulses in this direction before, but it has never been as open.
One of the most important things that has happened in the Obama administration is the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Docket No. 08-205. That ruling allows corporations to operate on the level of an individual citizen in contributing to the makeup of the Congress and the Presidency. It just so happens that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John G. Roberts is thoroughly conservative, if not fascistic, and was positioned on the Court during the Bush administration. Such a situation does not simply happen. The situation evolved so that Bush could appoint someone, who then under evolving conditions, could open the way for a ruling that provides the ruling class with a way to go about furthering the merging of the corporations and the political structure of the U.S. state in the interests of the capitalist class.
All branches of the government are involved. We see it in the Congress, in the Supreme Court, and in the way the Presidency itself is forced to make these compromises. But these compromises are essential for the ruling class if they are going to open the door to the next stage of the process.
Political resistance is inevitable
Anytime there is forward motion, there is resistance. We can see this throughout American history. Every time there has been a step forward in the consolidation of the corporate control of the country, there has been a rise, at least an attempted rise, of a third party to counter that motion toward corporate control. It happened after the Civil War, it happened during the 1920s, it happened again in the 1930s, and it happened again after WWII with Henry Wallace and the Peoples’ Progressive Party.
Parties don’t come about because somebody wants them. They come about as an expression of changes in the economy and society, and the formation of a new foundation. First comes the need for something to happen. Then there is a striving for it to happen. But it can’t happen unless there is a political motion that makes it possible.
Today, resistance is coming from the “right” and from the “left.” As the centers of the two main parties increasingly merge, there will be a left wing that develops out of that merging that will take the form of a motion toward a third party. It will not be a workers’ party, that is, a party that reflects the class interests of the workers. It will be one that attempts to restore things as they were, to bring about the “good old days.” It will not be talking about changing the productive relations of the country.
But the third party is an absolutely indispensable stage in the revolutionary process. It will serve to further develop the consciousness of the separate interests of the masses of American people against those of corporate interests. It is a necessary and inevitable step toward a workers’ party and the embryonic form of political class consciousness it represents.
But first of all the mass of American people have to become disillusioned with bourgeois politics. Right now, the idea that political parties represent all classes, that there is a national interest that all classes share together, is widely held among the American people. A workers’ party can emerge only when the national interest becomes expressed as class interests, when the well-being of America is absolutely expressed in the well-being of its working people.
We are reaching a new stage of American history. Never before have we witnessed such an open naked move for corporate power as is going on today. The process must move through its stages, but the foundation for a workers’ party is beginning to form. Revolutionaries must help to clear the path.
