Short History of Liberal Myths….

wv wrote:

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Counterpunch

link:http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/24/a-short-history-of-liberal-myths-and-anti-labor-politics/

by Sam Mitrani – Chad Pearson

“The working-class and the employing class have nothing in common.”

– preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World

Democrats, liberals, and Social Democrats have been throwing up their hands about Donald Trump’s victory and the loss of the traditional white working-class base of the Democratic Party. Maybe Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton didn’t “pay enough attention” to workers, or perhaps those workers have been convinced to “vote against their own interests” by Trump’s racist demagogy.

These arguments miss the central problem with liberal politics. Those politics, and their social democratic left flank, assume that business owners and workers have some basic interests in common. These include the “national interests” that Obama, Clinton, Trump, and the rest “defend” in other countries. They include imprecise phrases like “the economy.” They also include infrastructure, education, and other basic services. But this core assumption is fundamentally wrong. The problem with the politics of Obama and Clinton from the perspective of the working-class is not that they “ignored” or “forgot” workers – it is that, like the Republicans, they carried out every policy from the perspective of business, which meant that their policies hurt working-class people. ….
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…The history we have sketched out challenges some long-held assumptions, including the notion that the Democratic Party once truly championed the concerns of the working-class but shifted to the right under Carter or Clinton—years shaped by what commentators fashionably call “neoliberalism.” The problem is much deeper, and one does not need to look far to find many examples of liberal or Democratic Party involvement in anti-working-class activities during all periods after the Civil War. Instead of always crying about “the rise of the right,” sober-minded observers must acknowledge that liberals deserve a considerable amount of blame for our current crisis.

That is why the working-class needs its own political organization, one that puts its interests first. We need a political party that is not limited to elections, but recognizes that the mobilization of the working-class is the only thing that can change the balance of forces in our favor. Such a party would demand, at minimum, that no company making a profit should be allowed to lay off employees, and that if there is not enough work, any remaining work must be divided with no loss in pay. It would demand that corporate subsidies and tax breaks be banned, and that the wealthy and the corporations be taxed to pay for schools and services. We realize this is far from an original proposal, but the working-class has not had a political party representing its interests since Eugene Debs’s day. A small group in Michigan got a Working-class Party on the ballot this year and did reasonably well. But to organize a real working-class party on the scale of the country requires that we first stop listening to what Cornel West aptly calls the “dishonest liberal establishment” and break with the two capitalist parties for good.

Sam Mitrani is an Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009 and his book The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 is available from the University of Illinois Press.

Excellent article, WV. The whole thing. But especially the parts in bold.