Letter From A Reader:

On the Importance of the Death of John McCain and the Struggle Within the Ruling Class

August 29, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

To the editors:

John McCain’s death is being treated by the major media as an event of extraordinary import.  He is being lionized as an American hero and exemplar of principle.  Why?  What does it have to do with actually making revolution and, in the current context, driving out the Trump/Pence regime?

For this is indeed MAJOR.  Only 32 people have lain in state in the Capitol in U.S. history, as McCain’s body is now doing.  Sunday programming on CNN and MSNBC was almost totally given over to McCain, including quite a bit on his antagonism toward Trump.  But it went further: McCain and those around him arranged to release a posthumous “deathbed” statement clearly intended to serve as a rallying cry and cohering position for the opposition to the regime (more on this statement shortly).  Further still, McCain not only left instructions that Trump was NOT to be invited to his funeral, he also arranged for the former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to speak at it. 

The refusal to invite Trump is not a fit of pique (“McCain’s famous temper”) but rather a very calculated move intended to directly question the legitimacy of the entire regime.  The invitation to the two former presidents, who have serious differences with each other and can be said to represent two sections of the opposition to the Trump/Pence regime within the ruling class, is, like the deathbed statement, meant to use his own death to cohere the opposition.  By the same token, Trump’s refusal—at first—to continue to fly the White House flag at half mast and then his caving into this under pressure also shows the depth of what is being fought out.

In a word: What is being done in relation to the extensive memorials around McCain represents a “patrician clarion call” for “bipartisan rescuing of the Republic” on the basis of long‑established “norms” and “principles,” and on that basis to ensure the ongoing primacy of the U.S. in the world. This will have a spontaneous appeal well beyond sections of the ruling class, reaching well into much of the middle class, and even some of the basic masses.

In fact, McCain was a dedicated, loyal, and aggressive representative and fighter for this system and its role as a dominant force in the world, who adhered to and fought for the “norms” and “principles” of this system—and did so in the last years of his life in sharp opposition to what is represented by Trump and his trampling on those “principles” and “norms.” On the part of McCain and those who are now engaging in a massive effort to celebrate his life and hold him up as a great hero and model, one of their main indictments and focuses of struggle against Trump is that they believe what Trump is doing is undermining the dominant role of America in the world.  And the truth is that this system, and the “principles” and “norms,” and the dominant role of the USA in the world—which McCain, and others, have adhered to and championed—have embodied and perpetrated brutal, murderous, truly monstrous oppression and exploitation, plunder and destruction, here and all over the world, from the founding of this country down to today.

Why Is This Conflict Between Rulers Important?

To get a sense of why this is important, and how to view it, let’s go back to the two paragraphs that we run on this site every week.

The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent.  We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.

This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers that be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this (and this is a point that must also be repeatedly driven home to people, including through necessary struggle, waged well) is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, “the struggle from below” —for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and actions and what the stakes are for humanity.

Let’s get into this.  Conflicts within the ruling class do not in and of themselves make for a revolution or even the fall of a regime.  But Bob Avakian, drawing from Lenin and applying his insight further, has gone into how such splits can stimulate struggle “from below.”  Depending on how that struggle then develops, this can blossom into a full-blown fissure through which, as Lenin put it, the “indignation” of the masses bursts through, which holds the potential for positive radical change.

At the same time, splits among the rulers also exert a magnetic pull on the masses of people away from fighting in their own interests and toward lining up instead with one or another side of the bourgeoisie.  This relates to another point from Lenin that BA has emphasized and developed: that there is a “striving” on the part of the masses—and not just the middle strata—to “come under the wing” of one or another section of the bourgeoisie.  The masses come into motion but they do so, if not immediately then fairly soon, spontaneously gravitating to the banners, slogans, programs and watchwords of those who represent the interests of other classes.  To do otherwise requires a “step into the unknown.” 

For this, there needs to be leadership prepared to reveal the class interests behind the honeyed words of the ruling class and their mouthpieces. Further: people need to be organized to make that step into the unknown and that requires both the sharpest agitation and the ability to identify, speak to and break through on questions that are pulling masses away from that step.

Otherwise people will again become played.  Lenin said:

People always were and always will be the foolish victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes.

Think about it: when ruling class figures from both parties, and the major media repeat in a loop over and over that McCain was an American hero who stood for principle, whose interests are they promoting: the people all over the world and here who have been murdered and maimed by U.S. bombs and discrimination and police terror? Or, the interests of the system in seeing this perpetuated?  People are drilled in what BA has called the Great Tautological Fallacy that, since Americans are the “good guys,” then everything America does is by definition good—no matter how horrible the atrocity would seem were it done by a different force that is NOT America and hence NOT a “good guy.”  This gives all the more emphasis and importance to Lenin’s point.

So while it certainly won’t do to fixate on such splits, neither can you ignore them… if you are serious about revolution, or any major change for that matter.  These splits and those tendencies form a major part of the terrain on which revolution would be made or on which any major significant social change short of revolution will be fought for. 

On What Terms Is This Unity Being Forged?

Let’s go further into WHAT it means to attempt to make McCain the unifying symbol of the opposition.  The article previously run at revcom.us makes clear the horrendous crimes carried out by McCain personally and the bloodthirsty militarism he came to champion as a political figure, and I won’t repeat all of that here.  McCain fanatically supported every act of military aggression by the U.S. in the past six decades and his only criticisms were that the U.S. either hadn’t been aggressive and brutal enough in one or another of these aggressions, or else had not undertaken it. McCain, in the 2008 election, ran on the platform of escalating the war against Iraq (a point conveniently glossed over in all the tributes).  The recent grotesque and ominous bill that Trump put forward to jack up military spending was literally named after McCain (a move by forces in the Senate that Trump bridled at but had to go along with). 

What we began with on the character of the conflict between McCain and the regime (the “norms” of how America should dominate and plunder the world, not whether) is highlighted in McCain’s deathbed statement.  The heart of the statement says:

“Fellow Americans”—that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

While taking full note of this conscious deception wrapped in a god-given “blessed” patriotism, which has been and is at the core of the fascism that is now concentrated in the Republican Party, this is clearly a call to be more aggressive (it is rather bald, though true and unwittingly quite revealing, how McCain links America’s acquisition of “great wealth and power” to these wars).  But the key thing is his insistence on waging war under the banner of so-called “American ideals” and not under an open and blatant white supremacist America-uber-alles chauvinism.  McCain’s remark on walls is also significant.  McCain represented a section of the bourgeoisie that viewed immigration in the context not only of U.S. economic necessity (the super-exploitation of Mexican labor has always been the cornerstone of the capitalist economy in the southwest and western U.S.), but as one part of maintaining domination over Latin America and Mexico in particular, in part through “soft power” (that is, economic, political and cultural domination in conjunction with the brute force bullying that sometimes seems to be the only chord in the Trump/Pence theme).  He, like the Bushes and Obama, sought to forge an arrangement where immigration could continue but under greater U.S. control. 

It is telling that McCain’s statement does NOT say anything about white supremacy or misogyny.  Here I have to say that one of the greatest failings of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) is that there has never been an alert about one of the most damaging epidemics in America, which is the amnesia intentionally spread by the media. Let’s go back to 2008, when McCain campaigned against Barack Obama.  Let’s remember that McCain chose as his running mate Sarah Palin.  Palin was a relative unknown, but McCain knew enough to know that she was an open rabid racist and would play the role of giving voice to the really raw racist shit that the Republi-fascists need to gin up their core supporters and intimidate their opponents.  By the end of the campaign, not just Palin’s rallies but McCain’s as well were over the top with people foaming at the mouth and literally screaming out racist epithets and calling for Obama’s death, to the point where other members of the ruling class felt compelled to privately intervene with him on how dangerous this was getting to larger interests.

One would almost have to laugh—if the stakes were not so high—at how the media has now conveniently put that all at the doorstep of Palin (as if she were somehow snuck into the campaign under McCain’s nose).  And they have glorified McCain’s supposed “profile in courage” moment when he told a supporter that Obama was “not an Arab, he’s a decent family man.”  Really!?!  Think about the logic here.  The whole argument rests on the assumption that Arabs are not “decent family men,” Obama is a decent family man, therefore Obama is not an Arab.  It is also not mentioned that by this point in the campaign the predominant forces of the ruling class had united around Obama as the one for the moment—America was in serious crisis over both the failed Iraq war AND the financial meltdown which had just occurred—and it was clear that McCain was going down.  In this case, with this pallid (and, again, essentially racist) demurral McCain fell on his sword or, to use today’s language, took one for the team.

Let’s be clear: McCain, had he been president, would have been another in the line of the Republi-fascist presidents since Nixon who have been steadily transforming the U.S. political structure and ideological consensus into a fascist one.   

So the attempt now to cohere ruling class opposition to Trump on the basis of McCain and “McCainism” is not only significant but frankly ominous.  Up to now, those forces opposed to the regime have not been able to find a champion.  Name one significant ruling class figure who has come forward to openly call out the regime.  Indeed, the Democratic Party has spent the current election campaign refusing to even articulate an overall program of opposition, still less to sharply call out and fight the Trump/Pence fascist attacks on women, immigrants, Black people, war, and the environment.  Democratic candidates range from those “on the right” (many of whom are former military who make that their appeal to Trump voters who won’t even mention or openly oppose Trump (and his regime) to those “on the left” who try to appeal to Trump voters by going after cronyism, corruption, and advocating common “bread and butter” economic interests of Trumpites and the masses who are the Democrats’ base.  This is true of Democratic Socialists who want to reform the Democratic Party but who advocate or conciliate with American chauvinism. The “f-word” these candidates most seek to avoid is… fascism.

Now, rallied around the corpse of McCain and his program of extreme militarism and aggression founded on a heavy “America right or wrong patriotism,” along with the white supremacy and male supremacy he stoked, agitated, and supported through legislation, there is an attempt to cohere the basis for an opposition—on terms that are themselves fascist!

Yet many people who sincerely and deeply oppose this fascism will spontaneously rally around this because the very presence of powerful ruling class figures and the familiarity of the program will feed the illusion of a relatively painless exit from what seems to be the Trump/Pence death-grip on the current situation.  But should such a program come to dominate an upsurge against the regime, should this become what people take on as their goal and defining political outlook, it would have extremely negative consequences to say the least. This would be tantamount to the tragic spectacle of masses in the streets of Egypt in 2011, revolting against the extremely repressive regime there headed by Hosni Mubarak under the slogan “The People and the Army Are One Hand”—only to have the army later come down to crush the people and install an even more repressive regime.  The lesson there is NOT that the masses should not rise up… but that there must be a vanguard force that can bring clarity around what to rise up around, and how to carry through.

Communists, and not only communists but all those who truly oppose fascism, need to go very broadly to masses of people and struggle with them to see the truth about what they are being rallied to, and win them to what they have to be won to—a true struggle against the regime as a whole and its entire program and apparatus, and not just its figurehead and some elements of its policies.  This need will almost certainly become greater as the funeral on Saturday approaches and in its aftermath.

Back to Basics

Once again: these differences among ruling class figures are differences over how BEST to enforce exploitation, plunder, and misery all over the world… how BEST to keep people in a situation where they are forced to put up with truly horrendous and truly unnecessary suffering.  This is important and fundamental. 

At the same time, and as a conclusion, it is worth repeating the quote with which we began:

The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent.  We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.

This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers that be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this (and this is a point that must also be repeatedly driven home to people, including through necessary struggle, waged well) is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, “the struggle from below”—for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and actions and what the stakes are for humanity.