Some stuff

A little discussion from a branch meeting I want to take up; the trouble with making things up as you go along is you're liable to wander from the point and get snobbily dismissed.

(1) Let's not overestimate how incoherent the Tea Party is. It might not have a 'programme for government' but it expresses the class interests of a large and wealthy middle class (the genuinely middle class America). It is financed by ruling class figures, and so it represents the hegemony of a fraction of the ruling class over the middle class, the kind of ruling class Jacobinism described by Mike Davis in City of Quartz.

The Tea Party is based in a group of people who gained out of resegregation started by the Nixon regime, maintained by presidents since. The chief gain being the diversion of government resources from big cities to the suburbs and then the exurbs. The stars of the Tea Party may not state this but their programme is a hard-right programme for holding down the American working class.

(2) Why has the American left failed to breakthrough? By breakthrough we mean why has there not been one working class party to permanently influence public life? It won't do just to say it could have done but it didn't (but it still could) and then list a series of people and movements (throw in the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, the IWW and Eugene Debs). To fully answer that you'd need an exhaustive history of the American working class, and you're not going to get that here. A good place to start, especially when you're looking for objective obstacles to a left breakthrough, is in the size of the country.

America is big. It is something obvious and simple that can get overlooked. America is big and power is dispersed. In a war of movement, such as a strike or an uprising, there is ample room for the American ruling class, which enjoys all the advantages of organisation, to reorganise in a different area to the insurgents, concentrate their forces and retake the city. For example, the American ruling class has let Los Angeles burn to the ground twice in living memory. The 1965 and 1992 riots strictly speaking precipitated a decline in working class fortunes – miniature examples of disaster capitalism in practice. If San Francisco was a closed shop, San Diego was an open shop. Go back; how was the issue of slavery and control of the west resolved? Through a vast civil war. Building a movement of working class solidarity over such a wide area as the United States is incredibly difficult.

(3) America is big, but the Russian Empire was big, it stood for centuries, and yet it was conquered. What was the objective reason for its downfall? (We know the subjective reason). The rise of imperial competition, culminating in World War One shook the Russian state loose. What possible violent interruption could shake the American state? Who's going to invade the USA? It's hard to see in the short term. Perhaps there will be a second coming for Atzalan, or maybe the Tea Party will get some sort of geograhpical hold, start becoming a separatist movement.