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October 28, 2004 by mim3@mim.org
No one remembers now, but the Red Sox had to win another playoff series in 2004 before beating the Yankees. Although Anaheim could have won and potentially opened a new rivalry, the weight of history was in the Yankees-Red Sox conflict. Likewise, today, George W. Bush's experimentation with the Amerikan presidency is novel, but feels to this writer like a prelude to a larger conflict.
If Kerry wins, we want to be prepared for the next round of conflicts. The rumors about Clinton taking the presidency of the UN are perhaps typical of the struggles ahead. Clinton at the UN typifies how the bourgeois internationalists may want to reassert authority after a Bush presidency that emphasized unilateralism, breaking of treaties and attacks on other bourgeois competitors like Saddam Hussein.
The temptation of the Bush presidency is mainly political. The question is what extent the Amerikan rulers can rally the trailer-trash with a Bush-like strategy. Then what can they accomplish with that political basis. Clearly there is a sense that Amerikan imperialists can make military offensives with the trailer-trash behind them that would not otherwise be possible.
Sean "P. Diddy" Combs complained that Bush and Kerry are not campaigning in the big cities. He is passing out "vote or die" t-shirts while calling himself a revolutionary. The problem is that with the possible exception of Detroit, large cities are all in states that are reliable Democratic Party bastions--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago etc. The social basis of the Bush vote is hillbillies and trailer-trash who look down on Blacks. It is the states part-hillbilly and part-urban that are going to decide the election and it is in those states that Bush and Kerry campaign.
Politically, the Bush-type of presidency is doomed in rather short order even if it wins this election. The basic social forces that Bush calls forward are never going to have much global influence. The Third World, Europeans and even some Amerikans do not like Amerika-first politics.
The Bush presidency makes for a bargaining position with other countries' capitalists who might not realize how far the trailer trash of Amerika would go along these lines. Coming from the diplomat/CIA bourgeois internationalist Bush family, Bush Jr. makes this even more evident than say if a Reagan son had taken the presidency.
If Bush wins the presidency we also want to be ready. We do not have any room for gloom and doom. In fact, the danger to the imperialists of the Bush Jr. innovations is that he may speed up the revolutionary struggle considerably. MIM may be smashed and several new wars may start, but if Bush continues on course, he will bring down capitalism fastest. In actual fact, Bush places a crucial lynchpin of global capitalism on the least stable basis that capitalists would dare consider short of a major threat from the proletariat.
Along these lines, it's time for the Europeans to stop spectating and start acting. We are thankful for all the well-wishing from people who want to see Amerikan reaction have its butt kicked and we are thankful for all the European signatures on petitions to free Mumia. We say: keep it coming, especially those who do not find any excitement in fighting their own imperialists. Those who want to obsess about Amerikan politics: we welcome you. Do not back down, no matter what the stupid whites say--and realize that it is a problem of Amerikan whites, especially the rural and suburban ones. That's just another reason Europeans do have a positive role to play. The crackers do not listen to anyone else. Recently a bourgeois English newspaper started a campaign to write letters to undecided Amerikan voters. That's just a start--a justified start that the whole world can partake in.
We say to the Amerikans: don't be surprised when the rest of the world chimes in on your election choices. When you try to govern the whole world, the citizens of your empire start to demand input. It's something called "democracy," a movement of the last couple centuries. The Pentagon budget is bigger than that of other governments in their entirety. That money is spent administering territory outside u.$. borders. In actual fact, there is nothing surprising in the interest of foreigners wanting to know how that money is going to be spent. It's Amerikans who stepped outside their bounds and invited this interest. The British are even the least justified in this interest, but they are just a harbinger of things to come. Other countries have even more reason to involve themselves in Amerikan politics.
Right now, the world's majority is in disbelief about Bush. It wants to believe he is not really reflective of Amerikans when in fact he is--even if he loses by a few percent in November. At the very least, the global majority wants to believe Bush will be gone soon.
This brings us back to how Bush is like an Anaheim distraction. The danger to the imperialists is that they will unleash an anti-Amerikan alliance that they cannot tame and with quick and unforeseen consequences--and much quicker than if they had proceeded to the expected main course of bourgeois internationalist versus proletarian internationalist conflict. Had the capitalists stuck with their "equal opportunity" exploitation routine, we could have expected a UN ideology to have benefitted the Amerikan status quo in a very stable way.
If the Amerikan investor class decides for a combination of ideological and tax reasons that it wants Bush, then we certainly welcome the chance. If Kerry comes to power, we expect that bourgeois internationalism versus proletarian internationalism will become the order of the day. The bourgeois internationalists will seek equal opportunity exploitation and we will finally have a chance to unite our proletarian class on an easy international basis. The GATT, UN, World Bank etc. will only make it easier for our class to see its unity. Thus a Bush presidency makes it easier for us to organize on a national basis against Amerika, with both cultural and anti-Amerikan bases. A Kerry presidency is more likely to help our class see its global unity, strength and interests. We're betting that in the long haul the imperialists believe they have a better turf to fight on by going to bourgeois internationalism, thanks to the national and cultural divisions of our underdog class. That's why we suspect that not Bush but Clinton is the real showdown with the proletariat's equivalent of the Yankees. At the same time, we should be prepared for a struggle either way.
Note:
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=205443