International Declaration against Fascism

[The following manifesto against the ultraright in Brazil is being circulated with a request that people add their names to the list of signers by emailing freelulabrasil@gmail.com and sgeral@mst.org.br.]

We, women and men, united in our commitment to democracy and human rights, express our unequivocal rejection of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, a contender in the second round of Brazil’s presidential elections on October 28.

The positions that this candidate has defended throughout his public life and during the current electoral campaign are based on xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic values.

This far-right candidate openly defends the violent methods deployed by military dictatorships, including torture and assassinations.

Positions such as these are a threat to any free, tolerant and just society.

In the second round of the election, the people of Brazil will be making a choice of paramount importance, between liberty and pluralism and retrograde authoritarianism, with a lasting impact, not only for Brazil but also for Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of the world.

We call on Brazilians to reflect on the gravity of this pivotal moment in history.

There can be no neutrality in the choice between democracy and fascism!

Russian woman indicted for criminal conspiracy to commit free speech

In a new attack on freedom of speech, Trump's Justice Department has indicted a Russian woman for a conspiracy to post things on the Internet that the U.S. government doesn't like.

"The strategic goal of this alleged conspiracy, which continues to this day, is to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions," G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

This campaign was focused on "a wide variety of topics, including immigration, gun control and the Second Amendment, the Confederate flag, race relations, LGBT issues, the Women’s March, and the NFL national anthem debate."

"Members of the conspiracy took advantage of specific events in the United States to anchor their themes, including the shootings of church members in Charleston, South Carolina, and concert attendees in Las Vegas; the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally and associated violence; police shootings of African-American men; as well as the personnel and policy decisions of the current U.S. presidential administration," the Justice Department said in its press release.

It also praised the "exceptional cooperation" of Twitter and Facebook, making it clear that the Internet giants have become subsidiaries of the political police.

You might say, "but constitutional guarantees are only for American citizens" or "only apply within the United States." But that's not so. The First Amendment doesn't give any rights. It protects them by prohibiting the government from interfering with them.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Congress shall make no law. It is an absolute, categorical mandate. And the amendments adopted after the civil war extended the prohibition to all levels and branches of the government. Which part of "no law" doesn't the Justice Department understand?

The freedom of speech that is being attacked is our freedom of speech: there is only one. Consider, for example, the strategic aim of this conspiracy: "to sow discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in our democratic institutions."

That description could well be applied to what I do day after day on Radio Información. I don't just sow discord or undermine, I promote protest and denounce the fraud of American democracy. Here are some things I've said just in the past week or so.

• They guy who lost the election is sitting in the White House. 
• Fewer than 600,000 people in Wyoming have the same representation in the Senate as the nearly 40 million people in California. 
• Republicans got 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats in House races in 2012 but had 33 more seats.
• The Supreme Court is a committee of unelected politicians with lifetime terms that function  like a permanent constitutional convention accountable to no one.
• We have more than a half million elected positions, the huge majority of which are noncompetitive and simply filled by diktat by the dominant local machine. 
• For the more important positions, these are for sale to whatever stooge of the rich got the most bribes (so-called "campaign contributions").
• In a very few cases, the very rich buy both major candidates but let the people freely choose which one is better at fooling them.
• In other countries, at least they have the decency to pretend the guy they're shoving down  your throat got the most votes.
• American democracy? I think it's a great idea.

There's not a single activity that's been in  the press on the woman's supposed crimes that isn't simply organizing and paying people to say nasty things about the U.S. government, U.S. policies and U.S. Society. 

--José G. Pérez

The New York City DSA's infantile, sectarian criticism of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

The New York City Democratic Socialists of America has issued a statement censuring comrade Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying in an  interview with CNN that she “look[s] forward to… us rallying behind all Democratic nominees, including the governor, to make sure that he wins in November"

It is unsigned but presented as a "NYC-DSA Statement" and it castigates Ocasio Cortez  for having violated "a responsibility to name our enemies."

"An endorsement for Cuomo suggests that working people across New York should accept him as an ally," and worse, Ocasio Cortez "erases the real distance between insurgent socialist candidates and the Democratic Party establishment."

The most troubling thing is that this statement reeks of factionalism, of people being lined up in some private little group built around an important “principle” like we must “name our enemy,” or that DSA members “who seek to speak on behalf of working people” must defend X, Y, or Z position. And it is a very transparent attempt to drive AOC out of the organization.

But the DSA is not and must not become a faction – and no one should be required to act as if they were in one. The DSA is the beginning of a party, and a party is not a faction.

A party, a genuine party represents a class, section of a class or some other social force. In the case of parties based on working people, ideally it is defined by its base, not what it says on some paper, but what its adherents believe and want. You can tell the DSA is the beginning of a party from the way people are joining – on pure class instinct and identification.

A faction is defined by its ideas. It’s borders are not set by class interest but by agreement with a whole litany of positions. No matter how big it is, a faction that sets itself up as a separate, independent organization with a position on everything under the sun that you have to accept is not a party but a sect.

Viewed as a whole, the far left in the United States mostly wasted the entire last 100 years precisely on this mistake.

We called it “Leninism,” and “building a party of a new type,” and only in the past decade or so have many of us learned that this was a bureaucratic fabrication and not what Lenin thought at all. In his very last major work, Left Wing Communism: an infantile disorder, Lenin wrote:

History, incidentally, has now confirmed on a vast and world-wide scale the opinion we have always advocated, namely, that German revolutionary Social-Democracy ... came closest to being the party the revolutionary proletariat needs in order to achieve victory.

Not "a party of a new type."

Alexandria was entirely within her rights to speak as she spoke. Even if the organization had adopted a position to not vote for "all Democratic nominees," an anti-endorsement, so to speak, she would still have been entirely within her rights to express her own views.

As for the specific infantile stupidity of creating a principle that you must never say vote for X if X is a bad person, people might want to read the Lenin pamphlet I just quoted, especially the part on "critical support."

In a separate post I will take up the question of electoral tactics, and then this idea of publicly pillorying one of your own members, without bringing charges, without giving her a chance to defend herself, on the basis of unstated rules about what you must and must not say if you are a candidate, or perhaps just if you're a Latina who is a candidate.

--José G. Pérez

The kidnapping of 43 Ayotzinapa students: We do not forgive. We do not forget

What does a country reap if it sows bodies?

September 26 is the fourth anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the  Ayotzinapa School for Rural Teachers, one of a series of such colleges set up in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.

For decades the successive Mexican governments have been in conflict with the schools and their mission to train teachers for Mexican rural communities and especially for Indigenous peoples. This has been true above all of the Raúl Isidros Burgos school of Ayotzinapa in the combative State of Guerrero, where Genaro Vásquez and Lucío Cabañas, two of the most important leaders of the armed resistance to the Mexican State during the dirty war of the 1970s that followed the Tlatelolco Plaza massacre of hundreds of students On October 2, 1968.

The 43 stuidents were kidnapped the night of September 26 by the police of the city of Iguala acting together with other government institutions and the drug cartels that supply and are financed by the U.S. market. This is just one incident of many that have cost the peoples of Latin America tens of thousands of lives due to the U.S. "War on Drugs." This half-century long fraud is used to as a weapon of imperialist domination of Latin Americas and domestically to repress and dominate the Latino and Black communities.

--José G. Pérez

A dishonest sliming of the DSA and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

On August 31, Counterpunch published a bizarre and dishonest racism-baiting attack on the Democratic Socialists of America by Andrew Stewart.

“Grappling with the racism of the DSA’s Founders” has the peculiarity that three of the five “founders” of the DSA --described by Stewart as “its early leaders/thinkers”—in reality had nothing to do with the DSA. So much so that one of them –Max Schactman—had been dead for a decade by the time DSA was founded in 1982.

The other two, Albert Shanker and Bayard Rustin, were close associates of Schactman. Rustin was the head of the Socialist Party and its successor organization, Social Democrats USA. Shanker was president of the New York teacher’s union from 1964 to 1985 and a close friend of Schactman’s, though as far as I know not actively involved in socialist groups like the SP during those years.

By the early 1970s these three were the political enemies of the figure most associated with the DSA’s founding, Michael Harrington.

Harrington and those three had all been part of the Socialist Party, a political current of anti-Stalinist socialists. Over time, the SP’s anti-Stalinism increasingly became plain right-wing anticommunism and even in domestic politics the group shed most vestiges of its socialist past, coming out against the antiwar movement and the Black movement.

But a small part of the SP led by Harrington resisted the drift to the right and instead began to move to the left under the impact of the antiwar and other protest movements of the 1960s, leading to a split in the early 1970s between the progressive minority that founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, one the organizations that eventually joined to found of the DSA, and the right wing majority which, to make clear that they were not socialist and not a party became “Social Democrats USA” in 1972.

Max Shachtman: right-wing social democrat
supposedly cofounded DSA 10 years after he died

Stewart lies by saying the three from the right wing were founders of DSA. They were not. The purpose of the lie is to then saddle DSA with political responsibility for Schactman’s rabid anticommunism, Shanker’s reactionary teacher’s strike in New York in 1968 against Black and Latino control of the schools in their neighborhoods, and Bayard Rustin’s attacks on Black nationalism taking advantage of his well-deserved prestige as the key behind-the-scenes organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

And if you insist that DSA is somehow responsible for the actions of those who years before the DSA existed were in the same group as Michael Harrington, then why not give DSA the credit for the 1963 "I have a dream" March of Washington, Shachtman’s leading role in resisting the rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the things Shanker did to defend the legitimate interests of New York Teachers?

The reason, of course, in that this is an outrageous frame-up, the sort of thing I’d expect from Fox News or Inforwars, not a web site like Counterpunch.

Stewart also brings up Harrington’s opposition to the founding Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. But Harrington later reversed course and the DSA was founded by the fusion of DSOC with the New American Movement, a group descended precisely from the early SDS.

Stewart begins his Philippic by trying to shield himself from the obvious criticism that this construct of his is based on events from a half century ago, has nothing to do with the real world DSA of today by admitting as much:

OK, with a serious dose of honest humility and respect, I will admit readily that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership is doing some great stuff at the grassroots level.... So this polemic will be relegated entirely to the founding generation of Democratic Socialists of America and its early leaders/thinkers.

But he continues by assailing the DSA’s electoral work with the paper-thin disguise of countering “a meta-narrative” supposedly being foisted by Jacobin and other outlets. According to Stewart, this story holds that after decades of failed efforts by everyone from the Greens to the SWP and the Communist Party, in its first try the DSA “has finally … brought socialism into the mainstream electoral realm,” and concluding in ironic bold type: “And with that, dear comrades, we shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!”

And, of course, of course, of course, he proceeds to deconstruct to his own fabrication:

I am compelled to recall the great quote of Amilcar Cabral, “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” … Unfortunately, we are not on the verge of a great socialist electoral upsurge.

But Stewart has nothing but his own straw man compelling his recollection of “the great quote of Amilcar Cabral,” (by which I assume he meant to say, “a quote from the great Amilcar Cabral” instead of implying that only once in his life did Cabral say anything memorable.)

Despite his disclaimers, the real target of Stewart’s attack is not people who have been dead for decades but today’s DSA. It has just reached 50,000 members and has growing political impact and recognition.

He betrays that the electoral success of some DSA members is a special concern (and provides another example of his dishonest methods) by recommending to us to his “recent dismantling of the mythic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez candidacy over at Washington Babylon.”

That story, “How Long Was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Planning Her Run For Public Office?” slimes her by implying she is a Kennedy family puppet.

It takes off from a tweet from her that mentions in passing her internship in Senator Ted Kennedy’s immigration office and leads to a Stewart rant about “the political circus known as the Kennedy family” and especially “the ne’er-do-well Patrick,” a carpet-bagging Boston Brahmin who had the temerity to move to Rhode Island and get elected to Congress.

But soon he remembers that he meant to talk about Ocasio-Cortez and not the Kennedys.

“An internship in Ted’s office was a great career booster in government agencies and/or the Democratic Party,” he snarks, adding:

Ocasio-Cortez worked in Kennedy’s office from early 2008, when she was 19, until his death in the summer of 2009. Prior to that, she was active in the National Hispanic Institute’s Lorenzo de Zalvala Youth Legislative Session.

Actually, in “early 2008” Ocasio would have been 18, not 19, since she was born in October 1989. And, of course, there’s that week-long Youth Legislative Session summer camp and never mind that the name is “Lorenzo de Zavala” and not “Zalvala” with an extra “L” as Stewart would have it. But what are facts to the rapier thrusts of this polemicist?

Put those two together, the internship and the summer camp, and the conclusion is supposedly inescapable: “this is the resumé of someone who wanted to run for public office as a teenager.” And worse.

I’d even have to wonder if she joined DSA because she saw a wellspring for free interns and staff for a campaign she has been planning since the Dubya administration.

Of course! The woman is so brilliant that she foresaw the radicalization of working class millennials that powered her campaign on the cheap even before the economic depression that sparked the radicalization had taken place. And so she positioned herself to take advantage of it by attending a “Boy’s State”-type summer camp in high school.

But despite that, don’t give Stewart all that bull about her brilliant primary victory.

Certainly the “miracle primary victory” narrative is partly mythological horse shit. AOC had connections within the Democratic Party and would have been able to target a vulnerable but liberal district like Joe Crowley’s…. That’s the MO of a Kennedy operation top-to-bottom, I’ve watched them do it forever.

So that explains it. Why is this woman sitting at the table instead of waiting on it, her previous job? Because Massa put her there.

I mean, you don’t really think a young, working-class Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx could have done it herself, do you?

I only have one more thing to say to Stewart about his attack on the DSA’s “racism”: for your next hatchet job, try getting a cleaver made of firmer stuff than bovine excrement. So you don’t get splattered.

--José G. Pérez

Will Russians hack elections again?

Well, if they do, it won't be "again."

There has been no evidence presented that the Russians did anything in 2016 save the normal spying all the "great" powers do to each other. And what they are accused of doing makes no sense. For example, we are told that the Russians had penetrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) network by the summer of 2015, but all the FBI did was call the DNC computer help desk which did a quick check and finding nothing, forgot about it.

There was a second penetration of the DNC severs in the spring of 2016, which took much of the same material as the first one but was so incompetent that even the DNC noticed. Crowdstrike, a computer security firm was called in.  That led to the first very successful penetration finally being spotted, and both were supposedly cleared by completely nuking and rebuilding the DNC network (including each and every computer) in mid-June. Three days later, the head of the private security firm that cleared the system, who happens to be a Russian emigre who is active in anti-Putin groups, published all the details in the firm's blog.

Several things. First the FBI considered this sort of spying routine and could not even be bothered to walk the half mile to the DNC offices to discuss it with them. The reason they thought it was the Russians is because data was being sent to an IP address they thought was connected with Russia. That was all.

And having completely owned the DNC network by capturing or creating an admin login, Putin (and supposedly he ordered it personally) sends in a second group, who are so incompetent even the hapless DNC staff notices. That's simply not believable. It is a violation of the most obvious norms for spying to send in a second operation on top of one that already is getting *everything*.

The penetration is so sensitive that a private security firm headed by a Russian national takes care of it, not the FBI, NSA or CIA. Really?

And then contrary to even the most obvious principle of counter-espionage, full details are put on a blog three days later by the anti-Putin Russian who --what a coincidence!-- says it was Putin. And that way Putin can know how much we know and how we figured out it was him.

Meanwhile at Hillary headquarters top dog John Podesta gets an email claiming his gmail password has been compromised and please click here to change it. An aide checks with someone more competent in computers who tells them to follow this other link to change the password (the real link to Google) and to turn on two-factor authentication. So Podesta's people dig up the original phishing email, follow the fake link, give away access to the email account, and do not turn on two factor authentication.

This, we are told, was a sophisticated Russian attack called "spear phishing." But actually what was really involved is that Podesta and his people were brain dead. There can be no security mechanism that can cope with that level of stupidity.

Russians? It was probably a middle school student having fun with her iPad. Or the equivalent. Because a really serious intelligence operation would have used the penetration to get access to Hillary's network. But they didn't. They just took Podesta's emails from gmail servers.

Then the Russians take the stuff and leak it. The Russians could have leaked the secret contracts showing the DNC was in the tank for Hillary in February or March. Their slogan would have been  "Anybody but Hillary." But if they were going to try to knock her out, that was the moment to do it. Either that, or in October, with a classic October surprise.

But instead they give it to Wikileaks in the middle of the summer. They could have leaked it to the New York Times, CNN, the Guardian -- none of them would have refused the material and the Russians could easily have covered their tracks. The obvious explanation of why it went to Wikileaks is because almost certainly it wasn't the Russians but a lone hacker, perhaps an inside job, and Wikileaks has ways to receive leaks securely and anonymously, which major press outlets do not.

Well, the Russians were pretending to be a lone hacker. But if this was their cover story, it is idiotic to let the false story they were developing get in the way of using the devastatingly compromising material they got on Hillary in the most effective way.

The Facebook plot is even more ridiculous. The Kremlin was going to spend literally thousands of dollars, perhaps hundreds of thousands, to influence an American election. Really? A billion dollars or more were spent on the election. And the Russians supposedly thought they could make a difference?

And, again, absolutely no evidence of the nefarious Russian schemes has been given to the public.

Could the Russians have done anything more serious? You be the judge:

A couple of weeks ago at the annual Defcon hackathon in Las Vegas it took an 11 year old girl 10 minutes to hack into a  replica of the Florida statewide election system. Someone else took only two minutes to hack the voting machines being used in 18 states. Of course it's not fair to compare. The two minute hack was done by Rachel Tobac who is an adult and has her own security firm.

Supposedly the Russians, determined to have Trump instead of Hillary, passed on the obvious and multiple vulnerabilities that had already been covered in the U.S. press and instead focused on trolling with a half dozen invented characters and a couple of stolen identities which they needed to pay for Facebook Advertisement.

For sure. I honestly and sincerely believe that Ms. Goody Two Shoes, KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin, could not bring himself to steal the election and merely sought to influence the outcome.

Not.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar: what Engels would have said about it

My mid-August post about the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the one a few days later called "Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, superstar," have drawn a number of responses, both in the comments here and also on Marxmail, an email list moderated by an old friend, the Unrepentant Marxist Louis Proyect. Marxmail has been ongoing for two decades and I must have posted hundreds of times to it, though not very much in recent years.

When I sent a link to my second post (the "superstar" one) I included an extensive and very Marxist-geeky comment trying to clarify and focus on a central point: there is something happening among working people, a change. That change is motion towards coming together as a class. 

Below is the comment I sent to Marxmail. It is more informal and profane than what I tend to post here, but I have kept it as I posted it, apart from fixing a few typos. It went out under the pen name "Joaquín Bustelo" which I used for pretty much anything I wrote on the Internet about politics for many years because of my job, but this is the "real" person behind both that pen name and this blog. The comment started started with the link to the "superstar" post. 

That's from my blog. And before you go apeshit, read it closely enough to understand that my point is that it is not about her, it is about us.

Honestly, I don't write this stuff to be provocative but I know many comrades profoundly disagree.

So what follows is an attempt to explain the main elements of my thinking about the course I have chosen, with special emphasis on how I believe it is fully in keeping with the way Marx and Engels approached these sorts of questions.

The core of my analysis is that Bernie's campaign, the DSA's growth, Ocasio's victory, etc., are all expressions of a movement in the working class, not a movement in the sense of a protest campaign but in the sense of a change or development in mass consciousness. This started with Occupy and was evidenced by its slogan we are the 99%, which tens of millions of people immediately identified with.

Both the Sanders and Ocasio campaigns were extremely aggressive and loud in identifying with the working class and emphasizing it through things like the contributions policy.

I know some comrades think that all this is a fake and a fraud, there is just an illusion of class identity. From my point of view that is really irrelevant in addressing the question of tactics. I think the clearest explanation of the right tactics is Engels's famous letter to Sorge about the Henry George candidacy for mayor of New York.

But you might object, what good is Engels's advise if we're dealing with a complete counterfeit? Well, here is how his letter starts: "The Henry George boom has of course brought to light a colossal mass of fraud and I am glad I was not there." He says it was not just a fraud but a colossal one so revolting that he was glad to be thousands of miles away.

So did he proclaim it a catastrophic setback for the class? Actually, quite the opposite. The next sentence after the one I just quoted says "But despite it all it has been an epoch-making day."

Not just a relative advance considering the nefarious circumstances but "epoch making." A "colossal mass of fraud" that was a world historic advance for the working class.

The next couple of sentences are the famous ones about how "the Germans" in the United States treat Marxism as a dogma instead of a guide to action. And then he presents the following approach to tactics. At the heart of it is how to deal with the contradiction between workers realizing they need to come together as a political force but beginning to do so around "a colossal mass of fraud."

The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.

Comrades will object that in no way can the Sanders campaign or Ocasio's be equated with Henry George's, there are no ongoing institutions, no mechanisms for discussion and decision making etc. But I think here it is very important to not project our understanding of "party" to what Marx and Engels were talking about in the 1840s when they first laid out their views.

If you re-read the Communist Manifesto which is where the whole concept of the centrality of the party in the worker's movement is first thoroughly dealt with, you will see there are references to concrete, existing parties in the last chapter. They mention two parties as worker's parties: the Chartists and the U.S. Agrarian Reformers. That last one is a somewhat mystifying reference because it is not exactly clear who they're referring to or what information they had that led them to call it a working class party.

But the Chartists Marx and Engels did know very well, and that was not a "party" as we would use the word today but a movement around a petition called the "People's Charter." There were various versions of the petition but the central and most important demands were all around elections: universal male suffrage, no property requirement to run for parliament, equal population in parliamentary districts, payment for MP's so workers could also be MP's, and other democratic reforms.

Chartism did not have a continuous national structure or leadership though there were a couple of national conferences. There were two big signature collecting campaigns and one or a couple big demonstrations. Some newspapers were associated with the movement but they belonged to individual publishers, not any collective body. I've not gone back to check the details, this is a recounting from memory, but the point is, this is something we would call a "movement" not "party." But it was generally recognized as representing the interests of the working class and presented an ambitious political program that was expected to shift the relationship of class forces greatly in favor of the workers.

The other "opposition parties" mentioned in Part IV seem to be mostly well defined and generally identified political trends but not structured organizations.

I think M&E's idea of "party" is a generalized, mass and cohered movement of the working class recognized as such, pushing for a broad, important series of policy changes or reforms in the political system. It does not necessarily imply a single national organization but it has to understand itself as a movement of the working class.

Notice in what I have quoted from very late (1886, almost four decades after the Manifesto), that Engels uses the terms movement and party interchangeably. Similarly, if you look at the Critique of the Gotha Programme, you'll see Marx referring to a program reflecting "the level of the party movement".

About a month after the letter to Sorge, Engels returns to the subject in a letter to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky. Writing about a preface to a U.S. reprinting of The Condition of the Working Class in England, he says:

 My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug werden" [to learn by one's own mistakes].

Note he again talks about it as a movement even though focused in the electoral arena. That, among other reasons, because there were no structures, mostly just local candidates sponsored by labor councils.

I think the important thing in evaluating campaigns like Bernie's is not what ballot line they are using but how clearly they identify as a *different* current counterpoised to the neoliberal corporate democrats and how fully it breaks with the Democratic Party "machine" and instead helps create a parallel "countermachine."

There is an obvious disadvantage to this and that is that it is a fucking mess, where it is very difficult to establish a clear, distinct "brand identity." This is not due to people being wrong-headed about tactics but --to be brutally frank-- the extreme political backwardness of the working class. This problem can't be solved by preaching at the class. Many of us on Marxmail were involved in such efforts for many years, and the actual results were nil.

So for right now, this tactical approach isn't a choice, an option, but a fact. It's what people have responded to, identified with.

The alternative to what Bernie did would have been another Nader-style and Nader-size campaign. But if anything should have been learned from so many efforts like that over the years, is that people do not understand the need to break with the two party system. And we should take Engels's advice: "do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn."

I know some people have an almost religious bedrock opposition to having anything to do with anyone on a Democratic Party ballot line. It is unclean, a capitalist party, a bourgeois party, and we will catch leprosy if we touch it. We must break with bourgeois politics.

But all electoral politics are a bourgeois fraud, the anarchists are completely right about this, our disagreement with them is about tactics. And the biggest fraud of all is the United States, where the guy who lost the election is in the White House and the fewer that 600,000 people in Wyoming have the same weight in the Senate as the nearly 40 million in California.

We have more than a half million elected positions, but in reality most are not really elected, but in essence appointed by the dominant political mafia in the given area. And the few that are really elected are often sold to the highest bidder, although there is also the modality of the capitalists buying both candidates through a system of legalized bribery known as campaign financing and then letting the people choose which one is better at fooling them.

And when we get it all staffed, we have a multi-level government with overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities. You have a problem with your kids school but the principal says, you have to deal with the board of Education on that one. The Board of Education tells you really it's the state government that can solve that, and when you get there they'll say, not its the feds, who in turn tell you that it's a local problem, and send you back to the board of ed who shrug their shoulders and say, OK if you feel that way, sue us. Which you do, starting in the local state courts, fighting appeals and re-appeals, and then perhaps having to take it to a District (federal) court, Circuit court of appeals, and the Supreme Court.

Taken as a whole, this system is, to put it mildly, a complete bourgeois fraud, a total fake. There is not an ounce of democracy in it. So for those worried about dirtying their hands with the Democratic Party, I'd say don't worry, because when you get involved in electoral politics, you dive head first into a pool full of shit. And 99% of socialist and "independent" election campaigns don't say word one about this fraud. Nor should they go preaching about it, except in very specific and limited ways (like the Electoral College). Because people will only begin to get it when there is an alternative.

A closely related point that I want to highlight is program. I believe there is an error in the post WWII 20th Century American Marxist Left and especially the Trotskyists, of fetishizing the formal, written "program," making "programmatic clarity" a central concern. I think it is clear beyond question that Marx and Engels stressed that the working class coming together as a class, cohering, was way above program, or, if you prefer, that was the essence of their program. The demands and measures would be worked out over time through practice as the political class movement developed.

The passage I already quoted from the second letter reflects that. But later on in that letter Engels expresses himself even more clearly;

What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level.... But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn.... The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others.

It is striking that Engels calls for subordinating programmatic clarity to the development of the actual movement. He says fighting around those things now will only get in the way.

But I think the most important point for us right now is where he calls on the followers of M&E in the United States to "go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such."

You might object, that was then there barely was a working class in a very few countries, the movement was in diapers. We are way past that stage. But I believe we are exactly at that stage, in diapers. It is very important to understand that before this decade there has not been a working class movement worthy of the name in this country that anyone on Marxmail could have experienced. Unless you were born before World War II.

 From my point of view, the real questions to be discussed are:

•  whether there is really a radicalization of the working class, developing class consciousness; 
• whether this found expression in Bernie's campaign (however mistakenly) simply because he stressed the class character of his candidacy so much. 
• whether this then transferred over into the growth of the DSA, in other words, whether the DSA is pulling people in by its efforts or whether they are being pushed in, so to speak, by the growing desire for activity and political organization that is a product of the radicalization. 
• and finally, whether it is also finding expression in campaigns like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's.

I want to make clear that to the degree what I wrote could be taken to imply that I think that Bernie's campaign, the DSA, and Ocasio-Cortez's campaign were fake, frauds, etc., I did so only for arguments sake. I was saying that even if they were as bad as some comrades claim or as what Engels said about the Henry George movement, I would still insist that this is the right approach. But in reality I do not believe any of those terms or phrases apply.

Joaquín