Primaries And Electoral politics

I have been watching so much on the primaries and the approaching elections and I have reinforced my belief that the process needs a major overhaul.

For instance, the campaigns in the primaries should be 90 days. They should be publicly funded and winner takes the state. Then once a candidate is picked from each party, then the election process should be 6 weeks long and publicly funded. Issues only! No dragging family into it.

This would help give the campaigns and the elections more significance. And stop the brain drain on the population.

Democrats Last Chance

Yesterday's vote on the bill that would set a limit on the time between deployments may have been the last chance for the Democrats to influence the Iraq War strategy. The vote was 56-44 and the bill was defeated because of the lack of a 60 vote majority. All dems voted for the bill and 43 repubs voted against it along with 1 independent and guess who that was.

This may well have been the last opportunity that the Dems will have before the election. And then they will only be able to pray that they can gain a little more party people in the Congress.

The big story is the defeat of the bill. Why does not someone tell the rest of the story, the troops are the ones that will suffer and there is the point that should be attacked by the Dems. These asses miss opportunity after opportunity to gain public support by not highlighting the lack of concern of the Repubs for the troops. Instead they whine and find excuses for their lack of success. CRAP! Admit that the Repubs beat you at the game and find new ways to attack their positions. The Dems will never get anything accomplished as long as they sit around licking their wounds and whining about the other side.

It will be telling if these losers are serious about their positions, if they let this chance slip through their fingers, then they are in this for the game not what is best for the people.

CHUQ

A Critique Of Marxism

I found this while surfing and I liked it and wanted to pass it on.

by Karl Korsch

1. It no longer makes sense to ask to what extent the teaching of Marx and Engels is, today, theoretically acceptable and practically applicable.

2. Today, all attempts to re-establish the Marxist doctrine as a whole in its original function as a theory of the working classes social revolution are reactionary utopias.

3. Though basically ambiguous, there are, however, important aspects of Marxian teaching which in their changing function and applying to different locations have until today retained their effectiveness. Also, the impetus generated by the praxis of the old Marxist labor movement has been presently incorporated into the practical struggles of peoples -and classes.

4. The first step in re-establishing a revolutionary theory and practice consists in breaking with that Marxism which claims to monopolize revolutionary initiative as well as theoretical and practical direction.

5. Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism.

6. The following points are particularly critical for Marxism: (a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.

7. The results of these conditions are: (a) the overestimation of the state as the decisive instrument of social revolution; (b) the mystical identification of the development of the capitalist economy with the social revolution of the working class; (c) the subsequent ambiguous development of this first form of the Marxian theory of revolution by the artificial grafting onto it of a theory of the communist revolution in two phases; this theory, directed on the one hand against Blanqui, and on the other against Bakunin, whisks away from the present movement the real emancipation of the working class and puts it back into the indefinite future.

8. This is the point for insertion of the Leninist or Bolshevik development; and it is in this new form that Marxism has been transferred to Russia and Asia. Thereby Marxism has been changed; from a revolutionary theory it has become an ideology. This ideology could be and has been used for a variety of different goals.

9. It is from this viewpoint that one comes to judge in a critical spirit the two Russian revolutions of 1917 and 1928, and it is from this viewpoint that one must determine the functions fulfilled by Marxism today in Asia and on a world scale.

10. The control of the workers over the production of their own lives win not come from their occupying the positions, on the international and world markets, abandoned by the self-destroying and so-called free competition of the monopolistic owners of the means of production. This control can only result from a planned intervention by all the classes today excluded from it into a production which today is already tending in every way to be regulated in a monopolistic and planned fashion.