Haley Stevens’ Endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers Signals Deep Divide within the Democratic PartyIt would be a mistake to view Stevens’ concerns as just her own. They are the real concerns of the Democratic Party establishment, which has made it clear that it will fight to sideline the Left inside the party and uphold the class character of the Democratic Party as a party of capital. While the Democratic Party establishment condemned Stevens for her endorsement of Rogers and even removed her from an El-Sayed election rally for her public criticisms of him, it should not be assumed that the party’s establishment and the Left have “unified.” The establishment Democrats are embracing El-Sayed in ways they are not embracing Florida Dem Senate candidate Angie Nixon because Michigan is a swing state and El-Sayed has shown his willingness to work with the establishment and embrace more centrist politics. The most prominent examples of this are his meeting with Kamala Harris, his public support for capitalism, and his rejection of defunding the police. Stevens’s defection shows that sectors of the Democratic Party will side with the Right rather than cede space to campaigns that challenge to some degree a status quo in which capitalists are free to profit while working people can’t make ends meet, billions of dollars are sent to support genocide and imperialist war, and immigrants are targeted for deportation and detention using the most violent xenophobic rhetoric. The Democratic Party exists to keep capitalist profits flowing and U.S. imperialism dominant while mediating discontent from below. Whether El-Sayed wins or not on Tuesday, he and other other progressive populist candidates face this opposition from within their own party. This spells trouble for their ability to push their agenda through Congress, and for a strategy that relies on an imperialist party to make gains for the working class and oppressed.
https://www.leftvoice.org/haley-stevens-endorsement-of-republican-mike-rogers-signals-deep-divide-within-the-democratic-party/The Turkish Soap Opera of Venezuela Business DealingsIn Venezuela, reality feels more and more like a puzzle. We have to look at what officials choose to say and not say, what is leaked, what remains behind the curtain, and try to weave a plausible narrative out of that. The government’s opacity has become the norm. There are key decisions about the country’s future with little to no public explanation, contradictory statements, figures that are hard to believe or put into context. Affairs that should be debated and familiar to everyone are shrouded in uncertainty. For years, the justification was that the US blockade forced everything to be kept secret, so that the enemy would not use that information to its advantage. Then, when corruption scandals broke out, we were told it was the price to pay for doing business under sanctions. Fast forward to the present, and the blockade has given way to US neocolonial tutelage. But opacity has only gotten worse. Sometimes Trump officials are the ones explaining what happens in our country. The greatest example is the recent oil deal, but there is another sector plagued by these dark interests: the cement industry, which is especially important now amid the post-earthquake reconstruction needs.
https://venezuelanalysis.com/columns/the-turkish-soap-opera-of-venezuela-business-dealings/Rosa Luxemburg: The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case…. In the article ‘Méthode socialiste” (Petit République, August 3) he seems to put the activities of socialists in a bourgeois government on the same plain as their activity in parliament, municipal councils, etc. “What is true,” he says, “is that socialism today is strong enough to appropriate all powers, without being absorbed by bourgeois society.” With this we would accept the principle of penetration of the government as one of the numerous means of socialist action, but this isn’t in harmony with the essential character of socialism. According to us, the point of view that should serve as our guide was developed by us in the above cited July 6 article. We must limit ourselves here to only the essential. The sole method with the aid of which we can attain the realization of socialism is the class struggle. We can and we must penetrate all the institutions of bourgeois society, and put to use all the events that occur there and that permit us to carry on the class struggle. It’s from this point of view that the participation by Socialists was imposed as a measure of preservation. But it’s precisely from this same point of view that participation in bourgeois power seems counter-indicated, for the very nature of bourgeois government excludes the possibility of socialist class struggle. It’s not that we fear for socialists the dangers and the difficulties of ministerial activity; we must not back away from any danger or difficulty attached to the post in which we are placed by the interests of the proletariat. But a ministry is not, in general, a field of action for a party of the struggle of the proletarian classes. The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister. The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realize have nothing, in themselves, of socialist; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle. But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government. While in parliament, or on the municipal council, we obtain useful reforms by combating the bourgeois government, while occupying a ministerial post we arrive at the same reforms by supporting the bourgeois state. The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as it is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1899/11/dreyfus-affair.htm