dimensionallava
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A wonderful article about the US Greens
The Green Party platform: Reformist politics in the service of imperialism - World Socialist Web Site
“Our nation was born as the first great experiment in modern democracy,” the Greens write in the introduction to the section. “We seek to rescue that heritage from the erosion of citizen participation.”
They continue: “Moreover, we seek to dissolve the grip of the ideology…that government is intrinsically undesirable and destructive of liberty and that elected officials should ‘starve the beast’ by slashing all spending on social program, in the name of freedom. We challenge that tactic by calling on all Americans to think deeply about the meaning of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In a democracy, individuals come together to form structures of governance that protect and advance the common good. We the citizens are the government…”
There is not a hint of a class analysis here, or any suggestion that the pretensions of democracy under capitalism, even under the best of conditions, are illusory and compromised to the core by the underlying reality of the bourgeoisie’s economic dictatorship, founded on its ownership of the means of production, and its ruthless exploitation of the working class based on these economic relations. The Marxist truth that the state is an instrument of repression of the dominant economic class—played out in the daily lives of workers and youth in the form of police violence and the crushing machinery of the so-called “justice system,” with its vast prison complex—is rejected. Instead, one gets the pauper’s brew of banalities and fictions typical of what passes today for liberalism.
The Greens can provide no explanation as to why the American political system has become so totally unresponsive to the needs and desires of the broad mass of the population. To the extent that they offer one, it is to suggest that this situation is the result of the apathy of the population itself and the supposed “fact” that the people are under the sway of conservative ideology. The argument that the growth of political reaction reflects defects within the masses themselves is common to all middle-class tendencies, which reject a class analysis of political developments.
The Green Party platform: Reformist politics in the service of imperialism - World Socialist Web Site