As the world's most powerful nation, the fate of the USA has a huge impact on us all.
Currently the US is likely to fall to the Democrats in 2008. While no great fan of President Bush and his "big government Republicans", I am even less a fan of the Democrats and their leftist allies.
The most dangerous of the Democrat's friends is the Communist Party USA.
While only thousands strong, its domination of the
US peace movement and many labor unions, gives the CPUSA disproportionate influence.
Its links with many leading Democratic Congressmen and Senators and its outright infiltration of the Democrats, gives the CPUSA huge influence over Democratic Party policy and direction.
History is not made by mass movements. It is made by small committed groups, using "leverage" to influence, guide and control much larger organisations.
The CPUSA is such a group.
By using its leverage, the CPUSA will be able to significantly influence the 2008 US elections and the policies of the Democrats, if victorious.
This means that CPUSA will be able to influence the fate of us all.
Below are excerpts from a
recent report by CPUSA chairman, Sam Webb.
The Right’s Last Dance: 2008 Elections Report to the CPUSA National Committee, July 7, 2007
2008 Elections More and more the elections are taking up most of the oxygen in the room. By early next year they will become the center of political gravity and nearly everything else will revolve around them.
Why do I say this? Because the elections are the main arena where a fundamental and necessary realignment in the balance of forces can be effected. Other struggles can weaken the Bush administration and the extreme right, but none of them, even taken together, have the same potential to inflict a deadly body blow to the far-right and shift the balance of power in a qualitative way in a progressive direction.
The aim of the labor-led movement is to elect a
Democratic President and larger Democratic majorities in the Congress. Not since the landslide victory in the 1964 election has the broader movement had the opportunity to make such sweeping changes in the political landscape.
I have heard some people say that the main task in 2008 is to elect a majority of progressive Democrats to Congress. At first glance, it sounds good, but I think that we have to question this a bit more before we uncritically embrace it.
First of all, I am for electing as many progressives as is possible. The expansion of the
Progressive Caucus in 2008 would make a major difference in the legislative battles in 2009. But realistically speaking, a larger Democratic majority in Congress will inevitably include Democrats of varied political stripes. There will be progressives to be sure, and hopefully many more of them, but it will also include centrists and moderates, in fact they will likely be the majority. Thus the tactical approach of the broader movement has go beyond simply electing progressives to include the election of other Congressional Democratic candidates as well.
Moreover, the struggle to increase the number of progressives in Congress
will take place in the primaries as much as in the general elections. The primaries will decide which candidates the Democratic Party fields in the general elections. Too often in the past, the labor-led people’s movement wasn’t integrally enough involved in this important phase of the election process. The selection of candidates was the property of the Democratic Party’s leadership,
but this is changing. But once the primaries are done, the movement, while continuing to press Democratic candidates on the issues, will fight to elect a larger Democratic majority to Congress. That may entail working for progressive candidates, but it may also entail assisting centrist Democrats in a traditionally Republican districts.
The other reason why I question making the election of a majority of progressive Democrats the singular task is that it doesn’t attach proper weight to the strategic importance of a Democrat winning the White House. That’s a big mistake. After all,
winning the Presidency is crucial to shifting the political balance of power and terrain of struggle. No significant turnaround of the political direction of the country is conceivable without capturing the Presidency.
Or to say it differently, a landslide Democratic victory – taking the Presidency and the Congress by substantial margins –
will create the best conditions for progressive change. It will reframe every question. It will
strengthen the hands of progressive Congress people, while nudging the slow moving and cautious to take better positions. And it will constitute a political turnaround after almost three decades of right-wing Republican rule.
As for the presidential candidates, we aren’t going to endorse one either now or later; although we should note that unlike in previous campaigns extending back nearly 30 years, the front-runners are cleaving in a progressive direction, including Clinton.
Of the front-runners, Edwards offers the most programmatically, but at the same time, neither is he light years ahead of
Obama or
Clinton.
We have to acknowledge the historic nature of Obama, Clinton and Richardson’s campaigns. A victory by any one of them – and I believe every one of them could win – would be historic. Furthermore, I believe that the country is ready to elect an African American or a woman or Mexican American to the Presidency.
I don’t accept (and I don’t think that we should accept) the conventional wisdom or grapevine talk that a Black American is unelectable, that the American people are not ready for it. What is the basis for such a claim? We do know that Massachusetts elected an African American governor in 2006, that
Illinois a U.S. Senator in 2004, and Tennessee nearly an African American Senator in 2006.
Finally, we should have a positive attitude toward the candidacy of
Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Despite the efforts of the media to sideline him, Kucinich is emerging as a leading voice of the broad people’s coalition. He brings consistent anti-right, anti-corporate, pro-peace positions to the presidential primaries and debates. None of the other candidates can make the same claim.
The more he speaks to audiences of the core forces, the better positioned the movement will be to win in 2008 and to fight the good fight in 2009.
As we edge closer to 2008, our role is to be a part of and help to unite a movement that has its sights set on the 2008 elections. Our role is to bring the most burning issues facing our nation into the 2008 elections. Our role is to expose the Republican Party’s candidates, while pressuring, cajoling, nudging, and, if need be, taking strong issue with the candidates of the Democratic Party.
Our strategic goal hasn’t changed yet. And it won’t until a
major victory is won in November 2008. If that happens, then we will take a fresh look at our strategic and tactical policies. But for now the defeat of the right will take the broad unity of an array of forces, some reliable and permanent, others inconsistent and temporary. Into the latter category I would include many
Democrats and even a few Republicans.
Even when we reach a point in the struggle that calls for a strategic shift, we will have to do it carefully. A Democratic victory, for example, doesn’t mean from either a strategic or tactical point of view that we will then relentlessly attack the Democrats with “all guns a-blazing.”
The Party At every opportunity we should be a part of the struggles and the organizational forms of the labor-led people’s movement – both old ones and new ones, battling the extreme right and corporate globalization. Such has been our strategic policy and political emphasis since 2000.
We said then that we wanted to get into the mix, and we have on many levels and in many ways. We are a larger factor in existing struggles and organizational forms of the core forces of the all-people’s coalition against the right. We eagerly joined the antiwar movement, lending our energy and leadership on a local and national level. In 2006,
we jumped feet first into the 2006 elections and can take pride in our role.
And now with opportunities to widen and deepen our participation in current struggles and in the 2008 elections, it is imperative that every member and club find the practical ways to engage with this movement and its struggles. The doors are open, and no one is going to keep us out but ourselves.
To this movement we bring our energy, our appreciation of unity, our strategic and tactical insights, our understanding of capitalism, our vision of socialism, and our sense of partisanship.
