The Dems Could Learn A Lot by Listening to the Marxists

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The anonymous leaders of the Democratic Party should take notice of an unusual outlet that has a better political sense of the U.S. than their army of expensive pollsters and “political consultants.” 

Even better, the methodology of this very insightful publication, which clearly explains the loss of Kamala Harris, is over 100 years old and has been accurate about some of the political movements that have shaped political movements worldwide over the past two centuries.

The publication is the People’s World, the Daily Worker’s successor, and has offered a unique perspective since its establishment in 1924. As the national daily paper of the  U.S. Communist Party, it provides a viewpoint often overlooked in mainstream political discourse.

In a post-election day analysis, the paper’s Managing Editor, C.J. Atkins, offers six reasons why Kamala Harris lost to Trump, including the broad observation that Kamala’s expected victory was shaped by “detached idealism, which the ruling class uses to hide or distort the real essence of things.”

This may help explain why so many political experts and full-time commentators predicted wrongly that Harris would win.

Well-paid pundits—Lawrence O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg, Michael Moore, James Carville, Sunny Hostin, Joy Behar, Joe Scarborough, Chris Christie, Allan Lichtman, Al Sharpton, Nate Silver, Nicole Wallace—fell for the “margin of error” excuse, but missed the forest for the trees. 

Viewers now have every reason to question the credibility of mainstream pundits and consider turning to alternative sources, such as the People’s World (PW), to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the concerns of the global working class.  Had the Democratic Party embraced this diversity of perspectives, they might have crafted a platform more in line with the needs of the working class rather than the neoliberal one advanced by some in the Biden administration.

Insights from the People’s World

The D.W. election insights are credible due to the publication’s long history of studying the global working class. This historical perspective, applied to the unique characteristics of each nation and time frame, provides a depth of understanding often lacking in mainstream political analysis.

The six Marxist analysis insights from C.J. Atkins will surprise Democratic political experts because they sound very similar to what the corporate critics have offered.  The difference is that this Marxist analysis is straightforward and buttressed by history, providing the reader with an explicit and informed perspective.

Mr. Atkins, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto, makes these points:

  1. The U.S. is entering a period of intensified class struggle.
  2. Many people stayed home.
  3. The election may have been lost at the grocery store and the gas station.
  4. People are tired of war.
  5. Fascism wins by appealing to actual demands, not only hatred and fear.
  6. The movements will survive; the resistance starts now.

These points are all bolstered by solid observations and historical context so that you can see them at this site.  But he does include a valuable quote from Georgi Dimitrov, one of the famed anti-fascist leaders of the 1930s, who wrote:

Fascism not only inflames prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses but also plays upon the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions. Fascism aims at the most unbridled exploitation of the masses. Still, it approaches them with the most artful anti-capitalist demagogy, taking advantage of the deep hatred of the working people against the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, the trusts, and financial magnates.”

This is strong language for the corporate media to repeat, so we don’t see or hear it on cable.  But the involved parties (the plundering bourgeoisie, the banks, the trusts, and financial magnates.”) are well-known to most American consumers who read the economic news and the SEC securities violations rosters.

Naming these parties is also anathema for the Democrats since they are also people they count on for donations.  It’s impossible to criticize and turn away the hand that feeds you.  This makes the leaders of the Democratic Party stand in for the same people who victimize their voters, aka the masses and working class. Their only source for a working-class perspective comes from Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Hakim Jefferies.  But the establishment Dems have marginalized this group.  When Hillary Clinton ran for office, she spent significant time trying to derail Bernie Sanders for ideological reasons.

And for the record, “the Communist Party USA – like the bulk of the broad democratic, labor, peace, and people’s movements in the country – has prioritized the defeat of MAGA fascism and Republicans’ Project 2025 agenda as the primary task of its participation in the 2024 elections.”  The publication also supported Kamala Harris’s candidacy for president and has a platform that mirrors much of what progressive Democrats would agree with.

But the Dems could also learn from a macro-economic view of contemporary American capitalism, which explains why prices remain high as more products are produced. The answer is that there are too few competitive corporations in most economic sectors, so competition is limited and prices remain inelastic.

In the seminal book, “Monopoly Capital” by Paul Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, commentator Paul Mattick writes:

“What makes ‘monopoly capital’ so extraordinarily profitable? “Declining costs,” Baran and Sweezy say, “which imply continuously widening profit margins.”  This was of course true throughout capitalist development and explains this development. According to Baran and Sweezy, however, there is a difference with respect to ‘monopoly capital’, which, in distinction to ‘competitive capital’, is no longer a ‘price taker’ but a ‘price maker’, and “owing to the nature of the price and cost policies of the giant corporations, there is a strong and systematic tendency for surplus to rise.”  In brief, it is simply by administered prices, that is, by keeping them artificially high while costs are lowered, that ‘surplus’ is piled up.”

Time to Replace Dem Consultants and Pollsters

All the Democratic party “consultants,” who spend a lot of time on cable news panels, also failed to pick the coin toss. The money the Democratic Party wastes on these “consultants” and pollsters to fool the party leaders is self-serving. That’s why no one in top Democratic Party leadership had the guts to tell Biden to step aside three years ago in favor of developing a replacement and preparing for an open convention.

Instead, Biden’s ego and vanity led him to drag down the whole party. This was exacerbated by the Democrats’ failure to address working-class issues, as well as all the other points noted in C. J. Atkins’ incisive article.

The Dems should hire C.J. and dump their neoliberal pollsters. The People’s World Perspective is more objective than the many U.S. pundits who are well-paid and out of touch and favored Kamala Harris out of pure hope and emotional projection rather than scientific worker-centric ideology.  

Marx and Bill Clinton were correct when they said it was “all about the economy, stupid.”  Federal Reserve data indicates that as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 30.9% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%. Biden never listened to the message from the working class, even as millions of disaffected young people, Blacks, Hispanics, and women found something to like about Trump.  This video explains how the top 1% skew wealth statistics.

Now, the U.S. will be making a smooth transition to Fascism, something that has rarely been done before.  Trump pulled off a right-wing, billionaire-inspired coup.  The plutocrats can come out of the shadows. The Federal government is now theirs to loot.

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