The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.34           September 28, 1998 
 
 
No Scandalmongering Trap  
"The working-class vanguard must not fall into the trap of thinking that simply `exposing' the dissoluteness and corruption of bourgeois politicians helps the workers movement. It's barking up the wrong tree. The problem with the capitalists and their political representatives is not that they are immoral, hypocritical people as individuals. The scandalmongering is an effort-organized from within bourgeois politics, largely by its ultraright wing-to exacerbate and profit from middle-class panic and to drag workers along with the declining class itself down into the pit of resentment and salacious envy."

Jack Barnes

Imperialism's March Toward Fascism and War

There is nothing good for the working class in the current saga around the sex scandal threatening Clinton's presidency. Only the ultraright and those pushing fantastic conspiracy theories benefit from it.

Class-conscious workers need to remind fellow unionists and others that decrying the filth and degeneracy of the ruling elite became the stock-in-trade of Hitler's Nazis in the 1920s and '30s.

The latest scandal is not a well-orchestrated right-wing plot. The pornographication of bourgeois politics, set in motion as capitalism's world disorder grows, has unleashed a process that is not under the control of any of its promoters. What will happen to this president is not a given. But working people need to reject the notion that the talk of impeachment represents the use of democratic institutions to deal with misdeeds of elected officials.

The United States, as all other imperialist democracies, is run by a tiny aristocracy of bankers, industrialists, and landlords who profit from the wars and from the class exploitation and racism and sexism of the capitalist system. This small minority controls both the Democratic and Republican parties - from the corrupt politicians in city halls across the country right on up to the equally corrupt "statesmen" in Washington.

The cries for Clinton to resign or be impeached for lying about an affair cover up the real problem - the system of class rule, a system that is by necessity built on corruption, on secrecy, and on lies. Virtually every single Democratic and Republican politician - from those who sit on the congressional judiciary committee debating how and when to publicly release yet another salacious piece of material to those across the nation defending "family values" - is guilty of conduct similar to Clinton's.

Against this "family values" twaddle it's important to remind ourselves of the clarity of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. "On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?" the founders of scientific socialism ask. "On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.... The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.... Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives."

As working-class resistance to the bosses' offensive on working people's standard of living and democratic rights continues to spread, class-conscious workers will have more openings to convince broader layers of our class and its organizations to chart our own course independent of the bourgeoisie and its opinion makers. To develop our own values built on human solidarity out of collective working-class political practice. And to build proletarian organizations that can lead the toilers to take power out of the hands of the ruling wealthy minority and end once and for all the system of class exploitation that oils its wheels with corruption, lechery, and deceit.

 
 
 
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