American election
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Over 50m turn out already…
I am not into predictions in early voting- and based on the systemic failure of the polls last time… it is a 2 horse race…
As to political violence predictions- let us hope that does not eventuate… I am not the best keyboard warier, I close my eyes at violent words.
Further to my earlier post, LT
Labor Prepares for Last-Minute General Strike If Trump Tries to Steal Election
an AFL-CIO regional body of labor groups representing more than 150 unions in the Seattle, Washington, area, passed a resolution Wednesday that calls for a general strike if President Donald Trump does not respect the outcome of the November 3 election.
In Detroit, Michigan, union activists with the American Postal Workers Union created a flyer with a pledge to take to the streets and shut the country down if necessary to prevent a coup.
the Western Massachusetts Area Labor Federation also approved a resolution calling for a general strike and pledging to take nonviolent action to defend the democratic process “if Donald Trump and his GOP enablers attempt to obstruct, subvert, sabotage, overturn or reject a fair and complete count of presidential ballots.”
A lesson for us not to teach granny to suck eggs
That would be a proper response to a very hypothetical situation (though I suspect that this is just the usual Trotskyist resolution-mongering) but, as we have always said, if people are not prepared to vote for something they won’t be prepared to strike for it. It looks, though, as if they are going to be prepared to vote for it in sufficient numbers to make Trump history. Most of the US capitalist class seem to have become fed up with him too.
@ ALB … we know that Biden is no socialist, far from it. Call him what you want … Trump light, a Romney clone etc. But that is not the issue.
What do I suggest to face down this fascist coup? The only thing we can do, as others have said, and that is to organize and withhold our labour. That means doing everything we can to shut down the economy with a nationwide strike. And a million man march, if not more, on the WH.
Btw, if you don’t think that the USA is fascist, you haven’t a clue what fascism means.
Btw, if you don’t think that the USA is fascist, you haven’t a clue what fascism means.
Enlighten me, please, on why the USA is fascist.
Useful interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present
cannot place link – you’ll have to google her name and lareviewofbooks.com
I take it, Leon Davidovitch, that you will be voting for Biden? Which would not be possible if the US were a fascist state rather than a limited, “bourgeois democracy”. It is true that in a fascist state there are two parties — one is in power, the other is in gaol.
@ALB “Enlighten me, please, on why the USA is fascist.”
Marxists and progressive thinkers from Dr. R. Wolff to Chomsky have classified the USA as fascist, or to put it more accurately, neofascist.
How do they describe Nazi Germany then? And the difference in political institutions and practices between there and the US? In fact how to they explain why the two of them are not in a concentration camp?
Marxists and progressive thinkers from Dr. R. Wolff to Chomsky have classified the USA as fascist, or to put it more accurately, neofascist.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you see the — Donald Trump’s attack on the press as part of that trend toward fascism, his calling the press the enemy of the people?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s dangerous, but Nixon did the same thing. You remember the — Agnew and so on. Yes, it’s dangerous, but I think it’s well short of what we regard as fascism.
“There’s no doubt that the Trump malignancy runs deep, and that he is drawn to fascist symptoms. But fascism is something more than symptoms. It’s set of doctrines, which call for the whole society including crucially the business world, to be controlled by the maximal leader and his party. The US is almost the opposite of that… i think we should be cautious in using term fascist. He’s more like the tinpot dictator of some small neocolony.” – Chomsky
Richard Woolf’s definition is much more economic than political.
“The fascist solution to capitalism’s breakdown is to bring in the government to support private capitalist enterprises.”
“a merger of the state and private big capitalists. The former enforced the conditions of profitability for the latter. In turn, the capitalists accommodated the running of their enterprises to finance, produce, price, and invest in ways supportive of the fascist state’s policies…But the tendency of capitalism is toward instability (its cycles), inequality (its upward redistribution of wealth), and fascism (state-capitalist merger)”
According to this definition it equates to FDR who Chomsky described as fascist-friendly
I still require enlightened, LT. Why do YOU believe Trump and his Republican and right-wing supporters are fascist
Fascism. The term fascismo was coined by the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. It is derived from the Italian word fascio, which means ‘bundle’ or ‘union’. Fascism was an authoritarian, nationalistic and anti-socialist political ideology that preaches the need for a strong state ruled by a single political party led by a charismatic leader. Later the word was used in relation to a similar extreme nationalist movement in Germany even though this described itself as ‘national-socialist’ (Nazi) rather than fascist. Both these movements won control of political power more or less constitutionally, in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933, and proceeded to establish a one-party dictatorship with mass organisations to win over the population and preaching that all members of the ‘nation’ had a common interest. Fascism/Nazism was implacably opposed to Marxism for its internationalism and its recognition of the class struggle within nations.
Reading
Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History, 2003
Giovanni Gentile & Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932
Marcos has drawn attention to this article from News and Letters, a Marxist-Humanist group. It seems a bit alarmist, especially as they think that Trump will be voted out fairly decisively anyway, if only because people want a return to “normalcy”. But it does list various ways in which the election has been corrupted; all elections, in fact, since it’s not like here where elections are organised and run by neutral local government officials but by elected officials who represent one or other political party. Here’s a part of the list of corrupt practices:
- For years Republican state legislators, secretaries of state and judges have been making it harder to vote, limiting registration opportunities, absentee voting and early voting, closing polling locations and drop boxes, and adding requirements to present only certain IDs and to have witness signatures, sometimes notarized. One result has been people standing in line for up to 11 hours to vote. In the midst of a surging pandemic, all of these increase the risk of infection, and Black, Latinx and Native American areas are affected most.
- Native Americans living on reservations often have no street addresses, live far from voting locations and even mailboxes, and are confronted by impossible requirements to present IDs with addresses.
- More than 5 million people with felony convictions are barred from voting—a system introduced to disenfranchise Black people under Jim Crow. When Florida voters passed a referendum to lift that ban after sentences are completed, state legislators, backed by federal courts, gutted the law with the equivalent of a poll tax.
- Republican politicians, backed by federal judges, sustained restrictions on mail-in ballots that, during a pandemic, turned absentee voting into a death risk for many.
- Trump installed his crony Louis DeJoy as head of the Postal Service, which he has been sabotaging to slow down the mail. In some states, Republicans fought off measures to allow extra time for mailed ballots to arrive.
- States like Michigan and North Carolina throw out large numbers of mailed ballots because of arbitrary judgments that signatures don’t match or failure to follow pointless rules, using the excuse of fraud, which rarely occurs. As of Oct. 15, North Carolina had already rejected over 5,000 mail-in ballots.
- Slow absentee vote counting was engineered in some states, specifically to allow Trump to make false claims about vote fraud. Initial vote totals will not include mailed votes, which usually lean Democratic.
” … he is drawn to fascist symptoms …”, Chomsky. The only thing between a declared state of fascism and a hidden state of fascism is the lack of public acceptance of it. No US president would utter the word, despite the fact that the US is a fascist state. Even Hitler knew it.
Btw, I didn’t know that concentration camps were a condition of fascism? Where did you get that from? Had you actually read Chomsky or studied Latin America, you would realized that fascism comes in many forms. But since you mentioned it, does “lock her up” or most recently “lock them all up” mean anything to you?
Fyi, fascism has a number of attributes: intense nationalism; scapegoating and fearmongering; law and order rhetoric; corporate ownership of the economy, politics and the media; dismantling of labour unions; election manipulation; secret trade agreements; gross inequality and the loss of the middle class; militarized police, high levels of incarceration, etc. How far did you get in school again?
A lot of those characteristics of “fascism” are features of capitalism; which is what you would expect as fascism is a political system that operates under capitalism just as “bourgeois democracy” is.
But the one big omission from your definition is the single party. Fascism advocates and implements a one-party state.
And you have completely misunderstood what fascists meant when they advocated a “corporate state”. This doesn’t mean a state where “the economy, politics and the media” are controlled by capitalist corporations. It was the idea that each industry should be organised as a single corporation and that these corporations should be represented in a decision-making body as an alternative to a parliament elected by universal suffrage. This was just the theory ( derived from syndicalism) but was never implemented. In practice what characterised fascism was state control of politics and the media while industry remained in private capitalist hands but was subject to state control. In this sense it was a form if state-run capitalism.
Neither of these are features of present-day America. Politically it is not a one-party state and the last thing most capitalist corporations want is to be subjected to state control.
The capitalist class do not normally want to hand over formal political control to a single political party. They prefer the two-party system of ins and outs as this means that no set of politicians gets so entrenched in power that they escape from control and begin to line their own pockets at the capitalists’ expense. That was why Engels pointed out that the ideal capitalist political form was a republic based on universal sufffage.
The US is capitalist and that is bad enough as capitalism is characterised by a tendency to ever-greater inequality and governments which have to put capitalist interests first and a media that puts out ruling class propaganda.
The trouble with Trotsky was that the political system he advocated did have features in common with fascism like a one-party state and state monopoly of the media, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production while the workers remained wage-workers. Another form of state capitalism.
I specifically quoted the two “experts” that you cited as evidence that the USA under Trump would become a fascist state – and neither supported your analysis, LT.
Many of those attributes you cite are exactly the policy of Biden or was his platform in the past.
We are both speculating, using experience of the past, to add credibility to our predictions. I suggest that history of the USA does not provide any evidence that Trump would turn the USA into anything other than what it always has been, an authoritarian country.
By promoting the fascist scenario, you are advocating the vote lesser evil strategy. Perhaps you should focus on that as the real issue to be debated, because it is the concrete alternative being offered by the left. Dump Trump now and then go on to dump the president you lied all about to get into the White House.
BTW, Chomsky’s lesser evil argument is based on what he considers to be the existential threat to humanity by Trump’s environmental program, not any creation of a police-state or the transformation of the USA into a corporate-state.
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