Workers World Vol. 26, No. 4
January 17 – The contemporary stage of imperialism imposes a special responsibility and obligation on our movement, the movement of the working class and oppressed peoples, here more than perhaps any other part of the world.
It could scarcely be otherwise. The U.S. is the center of world imperialist exploitation and oppression. It stretches its tentacles all over the globe.
It becomes more arrogant, more aggressive, and more dangerous with each passing day.
Despite its modest proportions, the movement in the U.S. can and must live up to its high obligations and great responsibilities. The size of a movement at any particular moment in history is not nearly as significant as its maturity in approaching the vast and complicated problems imposed by the ruling class upon the working class and oppressed peoples.
Some in the movement are taking the comfortable view that the struggle to reverse the tide is too overwhelming, making it imperative to seek refuge in one of the two political currents of the bourgeoisie, the Democratic and Republican parties.
But the objective dynamics of the world class struggle dictate that the only true and viable alternative is a resolute and determined challenge to the forces of domestic reaction and unbridled military expansion.
To actively respond to each and every attack against the working class and oppressed peoples abroad is obviously impossible, if for no other reason than that U.S. atrocities are so numerous and are multiplying.
Take for instance what happened just the other day. A U.S. helicopter invaded the airspace of Nicaragua and was shot down.
On learning of this news, everyone had to hold their breath, wondering what would happen next.
So far, the Reagan administration, after secretly meeting with the National Security Council, has decided to play is low key – at least for today.
But this is only part of a much, much larger development. The U.S. has for months carried out military and naval maneuvers on the entire Central American front, particularly the Nicaraguan-Honduran border, making such incidents absolutely inevitable.
Were this the only manifestation of a renewed war fever, it would be easier for the movement to concentrate its attention on this particular aspect of U.S. military adventurism.
However, as though it were completely unconnected with U.S. expansionist policy over the globe, the South African racist regime launched what could only be regarded as a full-scale military intervention against the People’s Republic of Angola, which it admits is a sovereign state.
By no stretch of the imagination would the South African apartheid regime have undertaken this except in complete complicity with the Reagan administration. The capitalist press, which surely knew about it at least days in advance, made sure that preparations for the invasion were kept under wraps. When it finally took place it was given scant publicity by the media here, just enough to cover themselves.
Were some type of intervention by one of the socialist countries to take place, the capitalist press would be saturated not only with condemnatory editorials but with blazing, malicious, sensational headlines.
As it happened, the resistance of the Angolan People’s Army and Namibian SWAPO freedom fighters, together with fraternal aid from Cuban volunteers plus Soviet material assistance, was able to drive them back to their bases, at least for now.
The loss of lives and property has still to be calculated, but the damage from this barbarous raid is clearly only one aspect of the ongoing struggle of the African people to rid themselves of the imperialist plague.
The ravages of imperialism in both Central America and Africa demand, if not simultaneous, certainly equally important and urgent responses on our part.
As though this were not enough, the war in the Middle East, the continual ravaging and brutalizing of Lebanon, threatens to take on a more ominous turn of events.
The Reagan administration is putting on a new tough stance against Syria and threatens to renew hostilities on a massive scale. Just yesterday it let loose another barrage from its big guns off the coast, increasing its direct role in the war at a time when sentiment for withdrawal of U.S. forces is greater than ever.
Nor does this exhaust the war theaters of the Pentagon. The Far East is also pregnant with military adventurism by the U.S., even though the broad public is scarcely aware of the danger.
The fact that there are 60,000 U.S. troops plus aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons around the Korean peninsula serves as an ever-present danger not merely of a minor skirmish on the high seas between the naval forces of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the south Korean puppets, but of a sudden conflagration.
This is precisely how the Truman-Acheson-Dulles administration prepared and instigated the Korean war in July 1950.
The DPRK (north Korea) stands as a formidable fortress which separates U.S. imperialist military forces from direct confrontation with both the USSR and China. Were it not for the DPRK’s existence as a strong, thoroughly anti-imperialist barrier against U.S. aggression through the south Korean puppets, no one knows what such a precarious state of affairs could lead to.
But the fact that Washington has begun to rekindle the first over there with Reagan’s recent visit to Korea and the renewed attempt to tighten anti-Soviet relations with China shows that the Pentagon’s vast, far-flung naval armada in that area can only augur increasing danger.
Also it seems that the movement has for a period of time been closing its eyes to the U.S.-China axis against Viet Nam.
To the shame of the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, they continue their hostile and provocative activities against Viet Nam, Kampuchea, and Laos.
One wonders what all this has to do with the visit of the Prime Minister of China to Washington. Not a great deal has come out publicly on the meeting between the Chinese Prime Minister and the Reagan administration.
The little that has been made public is not of great moment. But that which is so far secret may be far-reaching, particularly in light of Reagan’s forthcoming visit to the People’s Republic of China.
Yet all this – the U.S. position in the Far East, its role in the barbarous attack by South Africa against Angola and Namibia, the imminence of a full-scale intervention in Central America – all pose problems on where and how to deploy the forces of the movement in the struggle against imperialism.
And it all comes at a time of growing hunger on the domestic front in vast sections of the population, when 34.6% of the population is below the poverty line, and when 12 to 15 million workers are unemployed, notwithstanding an ephemeral upswing in the capitalist economy.
Following Reagan’s victory, the progressive movement sank into despondency, taking its cue from the liberal element in the capitalist establishment, which in turn was taking leadership from the defeated camp within the bourgeoisie as represented by the Carter-Mondale Democratic machine.
These forces virtually withdrew from any opposition to the Reaganite reaction and capitulated on the most important and central issues confronting the country – the unprecedented war expenditures and the equally unprecedented economic attacks against the living standards of the broad masses of the people.
A dead silence descended upon the progressive movement. It reawakened briefly on May 3, 1981, when 100,000 marched on the Pentagon in a huge, thoroughly anti-imperialist demonstration. The People’s Anti-War Mobilization, which organized this bold struggle, directed it at both the domestic as well as the foreign policy of the administration. It proved that the Reaganite reaction could be countered by mass action capable of awakening hundreds of thousands.
It was not long, however, before the liberal bourgeoisie, goaded by the more moderate forces within the capitalist establishment, began to reorient the mass movement away from the mass working class and anti-imperialist initiatives.
Participation in electoral politics is necessary, but not for the purposes of undermining the mass struggle or to stifle an independent anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and where possible anti-capitalist struggle.
It is significant that since May 3, 1981, until today, three major anti-imperialist activities have taken place, but none has been as large as the Pentagon demonstration. Those three were the March 27, 1982, rally of 50,000 against the war in El Salvador; the July 2, 1983, protest of 20,000 raising Central America, the Middle East, and domestic issues; and another demonstration focused on Central America on Nov. 12, 1983, of 50,000.
Of course, there was also the huge June 12, 1982, demonstration of one million people. It was a splendid outpouring insofar as the anti-nuclear struggle goes, but was marred by a truly significant defect. It did not have an anti-imperialist character.
It took place in the midst of the barbarous U.S. supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the near-genocidal attacks on Sabra and Shatila, yet hardly one of the dozens of speakers on the platform said a word about this murderous bombardment.
The Aug. 27, 1983, commemoration of the 1963 march led by Martin Luther King was a civil rights demonstration which raised a multitude of economic issues as well. It touched on U.S. foreign intervention only in a peripheral sense and cannot be properly regarded as a thoroughly anti-imperialist demonstration. But then it was not expected to be.
And then, of course, there was the Solidarity Day outpouring of half a million called by the AFL-CIO in 1981. This more than all the others was calculated not as a starting point for mass action or to further encourage or stimulate the millions-strong movement of the working class, but was meant to direct it purely into the 1982 Congressional elections at the expense of mass activity.
Now that the peril emanating from the capitalist establishment is greater than ever, both the objective and subjective possibilities for mounting a counter-offensive are also greater than ever.
It is precisely at this critical moment when the progressive movement and the workers and oppressed need to get hold of themselves and move in an independent direction that the pressure is applied to bog them down completely in the muck and mire of reactionary bourgeois politics.
The movement is being steered back into the Augean stables of the two-party capitalist political system at a time when all of history demonstrates that none of the burning issues confronting the working class and the oppressed – not the barbarous attacks in Lebanon and South Africa, not the threats in the Far East, not the blazing guns in Central America – can be solved or ameliorated within the framework of the bourgeois two-party political system.
If the progressives once again capitulate to the demagogic fraud of the lesser evil, the result will only be further disintegration of the progressive forces. That, it should be remembered, is really the historic function of the lesser evil in U.S. capitalist politics: not merely to capture and coopt the progressive and left movement, but to disintegrate it, to frustrate its efforts and scatter its forces, thereby reducing it to a nullity.
It is therefore very necessary to examine of the special currents in the political spectrum to which many progressives often look if not for leadership, at least for enlightenment.
At the present time, this current is clearly in the vanguard of stampeding the left movement into the camp of the lesser evil capitalist demagogy.
In every great social crisis such as the one we are facing today there is frequently a literary-political current whose utterances are symptomatic of the depth and acuteness of the crisis.
Almost invariably they represent an intermediate grouping between the two great class camps – the proletariat and oppressed on one side and the bourgeoisie and its servitors on the other.
In good times, so to speak, when the class struggle of the workers and oppressed is rising, when confidence is high, and the prospect for struggle appears bright, this literary-political current almost invariably articulates and occasionally acts in the interests of the working class and the oppressed.
It is otherwise, however, when difficult times fall upon the heads of the mass of the exploited. It is then that this literary-political current (not all of them, of course) begins to waver, run helter-skelter, and become the carrier of pessimism into the ranks of the working class, articulating and exaggerating the strength of the class enemy in relation to the exploited masses.
And as the crisis moves toward a climax they begin to loudly declaim the urgency for jumping class camps, or else “catastrophe will fall upon all of us.”
We are sorry to see that such an honest, skillful, and talented writer as Michael Parenti, author of “Democracy for the Few,” has fallen prey to the machinations of the bourgeoisie. In an article in the Jan. 11, 1984, Guardian, he does great harm to the cause of the working class, the anti-war movement and social progress in general by becoming a spokesman for capitulation to the demagogy of the “lesser evil” imperialists.
Parenti knows the arguments against the “lesser evil” so well he could probably rattle them all off in his sleep. He restates them in his article.
He understands “that the two-party electoral system is something of a monopoly capitalist sham... We on the left know that the American electoral system is something of a charade. Both major political parties are dedicated to maintaining a state-supported capitalism. ...
“We also know that the electoral system is a rigged two-party monopoly. ... The lesser of two evils approach has been an essential part of the charade, a way of getting millions of voters to endorse someone who does not really represent their interests. Should we get ourselves into this game?” asks Parenti.
“From a socialist perspective,” he says, “the answer almost always is no.”
However, he concludes, “sometimes, as in 1984, [and here comes the punch line] the answer is yet.” Shame, shame on you, Michael Parenti.
He then goes on to conjure up a picture of all the catastrophes that will fall upon us if we don’t hurry up and join the stampede into the Mondale imperialist swamp. He even brings up the ghost of Hitler and warns that there were those on the left who relished the thought of Hitler coming to power because his program was so fraudulent and the oppression so great that the left was bound to soon take over after he discredited himself.
We should hate to put Parenti in the company of a literary political current that hews to the line of bourgeois politics. We would much rather put him in such illustrious company as John Reed and his generation of literary and political commentators in the years before the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.
There is much to be learned about that literary-political current which was in a similar position in the years immediately preceding the entry of the U.S. into World War I.
When the war fever was rising and the hysteria from the capitalist press was seeping into the mass movement, millions were wondering what would happen next. The guns of August 1914 were already taking their toll in the millions and fear on this side of the Atlantic was becoming more widespread every day.
What did John Reed and a long list of progressive literary lights both inside and out of the Socialist Party, of which Reed was a high-ranking member, do? They jumped from the party of Eugene Debs, that is, from the camp of the working class, into the camp of the bourgeoisie in urging support for Woodrow Wilson. They, like Parenti, well understood how truly evil the lesser evil was, but like Parenti, “saw hope that Woodrow Wilson [read Walter Mondale] might save us from catastrophe.”
Can anyone forget that the “anti-war” Wilson led this country into the first imperialist World War?
Of course the lesser-evil apologists always feel uncomfortable and tend to immediately disqualify as irrelevant any historic analogies, all of which so eloquently speak against them. We are therefore compelled to examine the analogy which Parenti uses to scare the devil out of the left, the ghost of Hitler, who, as Parenti says, some on the left felt would quickly discredit himself with his fraudulent program, and this would open the way for the left to take over.
We remember those arguments all too vividly and are happy to state that we were not among the proponents of their line of reasoning. Quite the contrary.
However, it is incorrect to draw an analogy between Hitler’s Nazi Party and the Reagan administration, an analogy which was also drawn upon during the 1980 campaign by some ultra-lefts who saw nothing less than a full-scale fascist victory emerging in the U.S. as a result of a Reagan election victory.
Let us examine this Hitler analogy. It will come up again and again in the course of the electoral campaign. Without in any way underestimating the horrors of the Reagan foreign and domestic policy, it is necessary to state the fundamental difference between pre-Nazi Germany in 1932-33 and the U.S. today.
Contrary to bourgeois historiography of that time, the Hitlerite hordes constituted in the Nazi Party were not a disjointed and independent social and political force, arrayed against virtually an entire nation that was diverted and blinded solely by anti-Semitic racist demagogy and bellicose anti-communism.
What was taking place in Germany was an acute class struggle, not merely over who was going to administer the capitalist state, but over who would wield power: the working class or a bourgeoisie who reluctantly saw Hitlerism as the only way to block the working class from the seizure of power.
Look back to the headlines in the U.S. press and one will easily see that what was shaping up was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to put in a political grouping that would change not merely the top governing group but the form of state, from a bourgeois democracy to that of a totalitarian regime in which all other parties are crushed in order to end the threat of working class power.
Hitler might have been crazy. But the bourgeoisie were not.
Because of the acute capitalist crisis and a revolutionary working class, they opted for surrendering to a totalitarian regime as the price for ending the class struggle of the proletariat by force and violence. They would rather change the form of state from that of a bourgeois democracy (which most of the time suited them best) to a fascist dictatorship which might serve them ill but would end the threat of proletarian revolution.
That was the crux of the issue.
The insoluble contradictions of German monopoly capitalism in the sphere of foreign policy arose from the acuteness of the internal class struggle, a struggle for state power. This is decidedly not the situation in the U.S. today, and it is therefore wrong to invoke the ghost of Hitler.
The malignant character of the Reaganite reaction is such that it dares to carry out its reactionary domestic program and provocative foreign policy within the framework of bourgeois democracy. That’s not an inconsiderable difference.
It’s not that the Reaganites are devotees of the democratic rights of the masses, least of all the Black, Latin, Native, Asian, the lesbians and gays, disabled, and so on.
If a capitalist administration can get across its program in a so-called democratic way, that is by getting the consent of the democratic forces, getting them to agree to it and to confine themselves to mere dissent while allowing the program to go through, then the bourgeoisie does not see any need to change the form of the state since the present form suffices for its purposes.
Even the stupidest and most arrogant boss of a company is not likely to provoke a strike or engineer a lockout if what he demands of the union he can get without a struggle.
There’s no end to what horrors any capitalist regime can provoke, but to scare the mass of the people with a fraudulent analogy to that of a fascist takeover, that is, a full-scale transformation from a bourgeois democracy to a totalitarian dictatorship, is sheer deception.
A necessary ingredient for such a transformation has always been first and foremost the development of an acute and uncontrollable class struggle.
At the moment, however, it is the bourgeoisie, unfortunately, which is conducting a relentless, ceaseless struggle against the working class and the oppressed masses. And the labor bureaucracy and the liberal bourgeoisie are acquiescing in this ruthless prosecution by the monopolist ruling class against the oppressed and exploited masses.
Of course, there is a great deal of measured dissent from the opposition, especially the liberals, but, and this is the key point, there is not attempt to mount an actual struggle against the Reagan administration. On the contrary, the aim is to stifle it and confine it to harmless bourgeois platitudes which they prefer to call dissent.
Nevertheless, Parenti says there’s a chance, a hope, that things will be better if the Mondale campaign ends in a victory over the Reaganites. Upon what solid assumptions do the “lesser-evil” campers base themselves?
Those who plead for the lesser evil, as Parenti does notwithstanding the “monopoly capitalist sham” (as he puts it), do not at all proceed from a materialist analysis of the class forces in contemporary capitalist society.
First of all Parenti and most liberal and radical political commentators use the term monopoly in the pejorative to describe the wickedness of capitalism rather than as a Marxist scientific concept which defines a specific stage in the evolution of capitalist development. This is indispensable in assessing the nature of bourgeois liberalism in general and of the “lesser evil” in particular.
The capitalist system has gone through different phases of development. It has gone through the state of primitive accumulation centuries ago, which included the robbery, rape, and genocide of the underdeveloped peoples of the world; it went through its so-called progressive stage of development and then transformed itself into monopoly capitalism.
Even in its decline, there was a stage when there were possibilities for stable upward development, an era when workers could win concessions of considerable magnitude but only as a result of struggle. But this has gradually given way in the present phase of monopolist development to a period of reaction in the field of economics as well as politics on a world scale, not in just one imperialist country. This period is the result of capitalist stagnation and decline; the bourgeoisie is openly and aggressively trying to take back on a great scale what the workers have won through decades of struggle.
They are doing this not because of a psychological aberration of a particular office holder of the bourgeoisie, but because of the declining possibilities in this phase of imperialist development. Militarism and political reaction have joined to salvage their social system by unloosing a worldwide anti-working class, anti-oppressed people offensive.
This is not merely the result of Reaganism or Thatcherism. It is also present in such Socialist Party-run countries as France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and others.
It is not just the result of the business cycle, as the bourgeoisie calls it. It is the result of the growing exhaustion of the inherent progressive tendencies in the earlier phase of capitalist development.
In the contemporary phase the ruling class sees an imperative need to save itself by reversing a centuries-old trend of satisfying, even if only partially, what were once called the great anticipations of the working class. Social reformers, laborites, and liberals saw this as a permanent feature of the progressive development of capitalism.
Marx and Engels as well as Lenin, however, saw the irreconcilable class contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production moving in an entirely different direction, toward the doom of capitalism. But even during its so-called progressive era, how was it in the U.S. between the two capitalist parties?
Frederick Engels was no stranger to U.S. politics. He not only wrote copiously, he not only carried on an extended correspondence which is so illuminating even now, a hundred years later, but he also visited the U.S. and observed much before the turn of the century. Here is a sample of what he thought about the glorious democratic two-party system in the U.S. It is instructive in every way.
Apologists for the Mondale candidacy should pay particular attention.
“Nowhere do ‘politicians’ form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics. ...
“It is well known how the Americans have been trying for 30 years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be.
“Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army ... no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants but in reality dominate and plunder it.”
(From the introduction by Frederick Engels to Karl Marx’s “The Civil War in France,” March 18, 1891, Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 2, page 188.)
What is most remarkable about Engels’ description of the political situation in the U.S. in 1891 is that the U.S. was still considered to be in the pre-monopolist epoch, the presumed “progressive era” of capitalism. Yet the bourgeoisie through the “two great gangs of political speculators” were already at that time alternately taking possession of state power and exploiting it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt end, and the country was powerless against these two great cartels of politicians.
This was almost 100 years ago, and, as Engels says, there was no vast multi-million-strong standing army, no monstrous civil and military bureaucracy, no permanent officialdom, etc. Individuals in the bureaucracy, of course, changed with each administration, but the parasitic posts remained and constantly multiplied whichever administration got in.
Capitalism at that time was still relatively weak. It did not have the vast Pentagon that could dispense $250 billion and buy hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of capitalist politicians in both parties.
Militarism, and in particular military contracts, is the greatest source of political corruption on an absolutely unprecedented scale. If, in Engels’ time, one could speak of corruption in the government, it was in the magnitude of millions of dollars. Today it is in the hundreds of billions.
Bourgeois liberal politicians are as much a part of this as the reactionary hardliners. They compete with each other tooth-and-nail for this or that particular contract, a most contemptible form of bribery.
Just the other day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Thayer was forced to resign. He’s the one who handles the distribution of defense contracts in the billions. And he was forced to resign because of allegations of fraud involving untold sums of money. He had tipped off his friends on Wall Street regarding the purchase or sale of defense contracts. It matters not an iota that he is a conservative politician.
Again a few days ago the Defense Department let it be known that it is soliciting bids for the construction and development of a new plane engine which will cost upwards of $10 billion. There are only two giant multinational companies that can make this engine, General Electric and United Technologies.
The struggle as to who will get the contract, if it turns out to be a struggle, will not be between the liberal and right-wing politicians. All will join in the mad scramble, including those in the various appropriations committees as well as in the military and civilian bureaucracy, over who gets what. The most scandalously irrelevant question is whether one is a liberal or a right-winger. The issue is which particular clique will win out. Graft and corruption contaminates every nook and corner of the so-called democratic political process.
Does this mean that there is no difference at all between the “lesser evil” and the greater one? Is it all a hoax?
No, there is a difference between the lesser and the greater evil, between bourgeois liberalism (to the extent that it still really exists) and the more reactionary, that is the current Reaganite regime. Either our lesser evil apologists do not care to mention the difference or are not fully cognizant of it.
They reduce the struggle to a vulgar non-scientific and utterly unreal difference between which evil is greater. The truth of the matter is that one must view the relationship between bourgeois liberalism and outright blatant reaction and their inner connection and development as a process of evolution in the contemporary imperialist phase.
Let us take a well-known example, the Carter-Mondale administration. Its historic function as the lesser evil was to lay the groundwork, lay the basis by its program and its practices to smooth the road for the next phase in the evolution of capitalist reaction.
This culminated in the Reaganite victory.
Let us proceed to an examination of concrete examples.
On labor policy, it was the Carter-Mondale administration which laid the secure basis for the vicious strike-breaking and union-busting of the PATCO workers. It was during the Carter administration that the strike-breaking plans were carefully prepared, one might say efficiently and minutely. Notice of it was published in the Federal Register and hearing were held on these plans.
After it was all carefully compiled, the plans were then handed over to the Reagan administration. (See “AFL-CIO: One step forward, two steps back,” by Sam Marcy, Workers World, Nov. 13, 1981, page 9.) The Reagan administration would never have been able to so quickly and efficiently break the strike were it not for the plans already made in the way of using supervisory employees, calling upon the military for strike breakers, and so on and so forth, all of which were prepared by the Carter administration. This made it easy for the Reagan administration to carry out its union-busting and strike-breaking scheme.
The Continental Air Lines strike as well as the Greyhound strike which were provoked by management were aided and abetted by the so-called deregulation processes which were inaugurated not by the Reagan administration but by the Carter-Mondale team under the supervision of Alfred Kahn. Here again one administration calling itself more progressive laid the groundwork for the succeeding more reactionary one.
On economic policy, the Carter administration like most liberal and Socialist Party administrations in the capitalist countries opted in that phase of capitalist development (decay) for a cheaper dollar. This was meant to stimulate exports, since it would be easier for foreign countries to purchase a cheaper dollar and then they could buy more from the U.S.
The theoretical premise of the Carter administration was that a cheaper dollar would mean more dollars because manufacturers would be able to export more abroad, which really happened. By the same token it raised the inflationary spiral which in turn raised the cost of living here. By cheapening the dollar the Carter administration hoped, as do all imperialist governments, to weaken their imperialist rivals in the struggle for trade, which also happened.
The imperialist rivals, Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan, retaliated by cheapening their own currencies which in turn induced Carter’s administration to further devalue the dollar. This started a new spiral of inflation which the Carter administration thought would stimulate production again, but instead resulted in capitalist over-production and laid the basis for the capitalist recession. Having started in the Carter administration at a slow start, this became a gallop during the Reagan administration.
The Carter administration expropriated the savings of the workers by indirect methods, primarily galloping inflation, which in turn laid the basis for the Reaganites to opt for direct frontal methods to expropriate the workers and lower the standard of living.
The Reaganites made the dollar more costly abroad through deflationary measures at home.
This cut U.S. exports, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, but heightened the struggle against the imperialist allies by attracting an inordinate flow of capital from the imperialist allies into Wall Street because of the high interest rates.
Thus, whereas Carter opted for a cheap dollar as a way of solving the capitalist crisis, the Reagan-Volcker team opted for a so-called strong dollar as a way of vanquishing the imperialist allies by luring West European and Japanese capital into U.S. banks, thereby laying the basis for the deepening crisis in the European capitalist countries.
Neither the Carter administration nor the Reagan administration created inflation or unemployment as a deliberate policy, but each flowed independently from the blind forces of capitalist production. The policy of each administration could at best accelerate or slow down the process, but could not create it.
However, Carter’s policies led directly and inevitably to Reagan’s. If one is to understand the lesser evil politics one must understand the blind forces which regulate the economic activity of the capitalist system. In no other way can it be understood.
In the field of foreign policy, we again see where the policy of one lays the basis, creates the groundwork for the pursuit of the policy of the next succeeding administration.
Take the Camp David negotiations. What was that all about? An attempt to deprive the Palestinians of their legitimate right to their own homeland, to bribe and corrupt the Egyptian regime to act as a puppet. This laid the basis for the subsequent aggressions by the U.S.-Israeli genocidal attack in Lebanon, particularly the massacre at Sabra and Shatila.
Who started the fraudulent campaign against Cuba by concocting the so-called Soviet brigade which was supposed to be an imminent threat to the U.S. of national security proportions?
Was it not Carter’s neocolonialist solution for Nicaragua and El Salvador which prepared the groundwork for the Reaganite adventures? Was it not the Carter-Mondale team which opened the attack on the USSR over Afghanistan with the Olympic boycott?
Was it not they who banned the sale of grain to the USSR as a punitive measure? Was it not they who started once again the intensification of restrictions on the sale of so-called strategic technology to the USSR and other socialist countries? Was it not the brinksmanship of Brzezinski which constantly prevailed over the more liberal Secretary of State Cyrus Vance? Was it not Carter who speeded up nuclear weapons production?
In every line of activity the Carter-Mondale administration not only laid the basis for the Reaganites, they even tried to outdo them, to anticipate them. During the Iranian hostage crisis, they attempted their ill-fated military intervention (which they called a rescue team) because they feared the Reaganites would do just that if they did not try first.
A Marxist must first ask, are class contradictions not only in the U.S. but in the camp of the bourgeoisie as a whole softening? Are they moderating? Or are they sharpening, threatening to become more acute particularly as between the metropolitan imperialist bourgeoisie and the oppressed peoples of the world?
Is there a solid materialist basis, no a so-called humanitarian basis, for the imperialist bourgeoisie to moderate its aggressiveness, to moderate its impudent demands upon the oppressed peoples as the capitalist crisis mounts, as the debt burden becomes crushing, as poverty grows amidst capitalist super-abundance?
Even a superficial survey of the contemporary political scene dictates a negative answer.
One must ask, has the power of finance capital over the two-party system diminished as a result of capitalist development? Or has it increased?
Has the progress of finance capital tightened or lightened its grip on the bourgeois political parties, the two gangs as Engels calls them?
Against a scientific analysis of the political situation demands that one ask, is the domination of monopoly capitalism over the political process winding down as an objective process, or is it, as a process of evolution, spreading like a disease into every nook and corner of the bourgeois political process? That is what has to be examined.
The slow, gradual, but relentless growth of so-called consensus politics as an instrument of the ruling class is a means for cajoling every grouping and every faction within the two-party system so that whenever a crucial issue comes up which would embarrass one or both of the capitalist parties to vote one way or the other, the ruling class finds a medium through which its solution predominates, notwithstanding the disparate opposition within both capitalist parties and their grandiloquent dissents and mock opposition.
Take the Scowcroft commission report on the MX missile, or the Social Security commission report, or the very latest Kissinger commission report on Central America. These three reports should be studied in relation to the “lesser evil.”
The reports were agreed to not only by hardline reactionaries of the Republican Party and Reaganite loyalists but by both wings of the Democratic Party including the liberals and the labor bureaucracy headed by Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CEO. You had the whole political spectrum from left to right agreeing first to the MX, then to the Social Security cuts, and finally not to peace and democracy in Central America but to war and repression.
The Kissinger commission had the liberals, the moderate right and the extreme right. Each of them found room to dissent.
But, and this is the great merit of an imperialist democracy, they all support the final report. Naturally with their dissent. This is bourgeois parliamentarism in its most corrupt and indefensible form.
Why would anyone try to foist a fascist dictatorship on the U.S. when you have this grand alliance trying to put across such rampant reaction and imperialist war?
Of course, Parenti and company will tell you that there is a difference, that the McGoverns, the Harts, Cranstons, Kennedys, don’t want an imperialist war. Let us grant this possibility and agree that they don’t want an imperialist war and the Reaganites do.
But what do the lesser evil demagogues want and are ready to fight for? An imperialist peace!
That’s how a Marxist must view it.
If they do not want an anti-imperialist peace, they then must fight for a negotiated imperialist peace which is what we’ve had for close to a century, which is a stage in the development of an imperialist war. It cannot be otherwise in an imperialist system.
It cannot be otherwise in a system of irreconcilable class antagonisms where the super-profits of one class come out of the sweat and blood of the exploited and oppressed masses everywhere.
For genuine progressives to opt for a lesser evil once more and to disregard the lessons of history, identified through the objective dynamics, the social and political trends inherent in contemporary class society, can only lead to disintegrating the progressive forces in the movement of the working class and oppressed peoples.
When capitalism finds itself in a crisis is precisely the time to take advantage of its vulnerabilities. The duty is not to help them get out of the crisis, which is what the liberal bourgeoisie or those pretending to be liberal are aiming to do, but to utilize the crisis for independent revolutionary working-class ends to overthrown capitalism. This alone can bring peace and freedom to all humanity.
If Parenti has any doubt that bourgeois liberalism and the lesser evil smooth the way for a blatantly reactionary regime such as Reagan’s, he should go back to the immediate precursors of the Hitler regime, his own analogy.
It was none other than the massive Social-Democratic Party of Germany which paved the way for Hitler with its rigorous austerity program directed against the working class. The Social-Democrats in turn were followed in succession by the Bruening, Schleicher, and von Papen regimes, each of which laid further bricks on the road for Hitler to ultimately take over.
This is absolutely incontestable.
Perhaps the sorriest aspect in the long history of bourgeois liberalism in this country relates to the close and intimate association of generations of shall we say honest liberal legislators, who work long and hard to break or curtail the growing power of the monopolies or make them more responsible such as oil and, what is more pertinent at this time, AT&T, the largest, most powerful single company in the U.S.
There were decades-long struggles by the liberal legislators who tenaciously held on to the liberal conceptions of breaking up this most powerful and giant monopoly – AT&T. Now it has come about and the liberals are sadder than ever.
In the words of the poet William Morris, “I’ve pondered ... how men fight and lose the battle and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat. And when it comes it turns out to be not what they meant. And other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” (Quoted in Toynbee, “A Study of History,” abridged volumes one to six, page 184.)
Certainly the breakup of AT&T for which the liberals fought so hard has come about, but it is distinctly not what they meant. The breakup has resulted not in more responsibility to the consumer but, on the contrary, has strengthened monopoly.
As a result of the breakup, Fortune magazine’s 500 largest industrial corporations will have reduced their cost of long distance telephone communications by as much as $5 to $10 billion. This sum is only a part of what the broad mass of the public will have to make up while bearing the brunt of this breakup.
The so-called breakup has resulted not in a breakup of monopoly but in a division of some of the profits among the monopolists. It has strengthened the tendency of monopoly to concentrate the means of production in fewer hands but to more “equitably” divide the profits among the pirate monopolists.
The dream of the liberals, that is of those who have not been coopted, is to make the communications industry responsive to the needs of the people. But this will have to be fought “by other men” and other women under another name. Monopoly cannot be broken within the framework of capitalism, it can only be succeeded by the socialization of the means of production which entails the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.
To break up monopoly, as it was theoretically envisioned and may still be by some liberal legislators, means to put the giant means of production into a Procrustean bed. (When the mythical Procrustes found a disagreeable adventurer in his midst, he put him in a bed which was too short for his legs, so then he cut the legs down to size rather than find a new bed.)
There is not avenue of public life where monopoly does not hold the decisive position. The last attempt by liberals to crowd monopoly out somewhat was in public broadcasting. The aim was to challenge ever so modestly the media monopolists with a channel purely in the interest of the public and not for profit – the Public Broadcasting System. A most commendable project.
But you can leave it to the greed and lust of the monopolies to take care of that. By their generosity they have made tax-free contributions by which they dictate policy and get free advertising as well, of the most sophisticated type. Ford, Allied Chemical, Mobile Oil, and AT&T, just to mention a few, not only saturate the three big networks but have become the principle contributors to many PBS shows such as the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.
Is there any nook or corner which can be free from monopoly?
No, the alternatives proposed by bourgeois liberalism, the lesser evil, only strengthen in the final analysis the reactionary regimes which are the offspring of monopoly. Even when they want to, the liberals cannot fight effectively. Only through the independent organization of the working class and exploited peoples in their irreconcilable struggle against capitalist imperialism can a just, peaceful, and prosperous socialist system come about.
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Last updated: 11 May 2026