A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHT’S BOOK: “U.S. DEMOCRACY”: THE U.S. EMPIRE’S INDISPENSABLE MYTH
Transcript of A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHT’S BOOK: “U.S. DEMOCRACY”: THE U.S. EMPIRE’S INDISPENSABLE MYTH
-
7/31/2019 A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHTS BOOK: U.S. DEMOCRACY: THE U.S. EMPIRES INDISPENSABLE MYTH
1/4
A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHTS BOOK:
U.S. DEMOCRACY: THE U.S. EMPIRES INDISPENSABLE MYTH
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples Struggle
25 February 2012
(Read at the book launch at the ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam)
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Ray O. Light speaks from the vantage of a proletarian revolutionary, a long-time trade
union leader in the U.S. and a firm proletarian internationalist. In his book, he succeeds in
exposing so-called U.S. democracy as a fraud and as an indispensable myth enabling the
U.S. monopoly bourgeoisie to deceive, exploit and oppress the American proletariat and
people of various nationalities as well as the worlds people in a vast empire.
He debunks the notion that US monopoly capitalism is a democratic exception to the
teachings of Lenin on the economic features and political character of imperialism. His
articles compiled in the book, which cover the period of 2000 to the present, provide us with
accurate insights and analysis of the workings of the two-party US political system and the
resulting policies which serve the unified interests of U.S. monopoly capitalism.
In looking at U.S. elections, Ray O. Light is guided well by his lead quotation from Lenin:
Nothing can be done in our times (by the imperialists) without elections; nothing can be
done without the masses, And in this era of printing and parliamentarism it is impossible to
gain the following of the masses without a widely ramified, systematically managed, well-
equipped system of flattery, lies, fraud, juggling with fashionable and popular catchwords,
and promising all manner of reforms and blessings to the workers right and leftas long asthey renounce the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
So-called U.S. Democracy and Periodic Elections
Ray O Light demonstrates that the periodic elections in the US and the debates between the
Republican and Democratic parties before, during and after the elections are meant to
conjure the illusion of democracy, obfuscate the anti-democratic class dictatorship of the
monopoly bourgeoisie, preempt the center stage of U.S. politics, preclude the voice of the
proletariat and people and confine the masses to a superficial choice between two brands of
the same kind of product, like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola.
In a U.S. presidential election like the one in 2008, the Democratic Party candidate Obamaglibly passed himself off as better than the Republican Party candidate McCain, who was
very much burdened by the disasters brought about by Bush. But even during the electoral
campaign, the two presidential candidates competed to trumpet their loyalty to monopoly
capitalism and the bankrupt neoliberal policy and agreed to bail out the big banks and
corporations from the economic and financial crisis that these had made. While never
denouncing the U.S. wars of aggression, Obama sought to underscore some of his
differences with Bush regarding Iraq and Afghanistan and certain issues of human rights.
1
-
7/31/2019 A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHTS BOOK: U.S. DEMOCRACY: THE U.S. EMPIRES INDISPENSABLE MYTH
2/4
But since he became president, Obama has continued the Bush policy of aggression on the
pretext of combating terrorism and the policy of bailing out the financial oligarchy. Thus, he
has failed to revive production and employment. He has gone into a series of compromises
with the Republican Party regarding economic policy, domestic repression and the war
budget. He has expanded the overseas deployment of U.S.military forces for intervention
and aggression. He has extended the USA PATRIOT Act and has signed into law the
authority of the U.S. military to detain Americans indefinitely without due process.
No US president can escape the confines and dictates of the ruling system of the monopoly
bourgeoisie and the financial oligarchy. The Democratic and Republican parties engage in
debates to conjure the illusion of democracy. They do so not only to compete for votes
among the electorate but more importantly to win campaign money, media support and
other favors from the monopoly bourgeoisie. Directly and through various instrumentalities
inside and outside of the U.S. government, the US monopoly bourgeoisie can compel
bipartisan agreements and shape what amounts to a Republican rule in the name of
national interest and national security.
The U.S. monopoly bourgeoisie misrepresents its interests as the golden mean or the
moderate middle between the extremes of Left and Right and likewise between theDemocratic and Republic parties which in fact compete in clinging tightly to such
malevolent kind of middle. Concurrent with its rise and persistence as No. 1 imperialist
power, U.S. monopoly capitalism has relentlessly pushed the Republican and Democratic
parties more than ever before towards the Right even as the myth of U.S. democracy is used
against the cause and forces of proletarian revolution and national liberation.
Ray O. Light exposes how Browderite revisionism and the continuance of such mode of
thinking have assisted US imperialism in perpetuating the myth of U.S. democracy. As
leader of the Communist Party of the USA, Earl Browder touted U.S. monopoly capitalism
as exceptional for being supposedly democratic and as early as 1940 used this claim as
ground for bringing the CPUSA out of the Third Internationale. He eventually blared out
the call for peace and democracy under the auspices of the U.S. and decided to liquidate the
CPUSA and replace it with the Communist Political Association, with an open aversion to
the revolutionary objective of overthrowing the monopoly bourgeoisie.
Violence Behind the Democratic Facade
Behind the democratic facade of electoral struggles between the Republican and
Democratic parties is the long chain of violence to violate the rights of the American
proletariat and people and make them submit to capitalist exploitation. The U.S. acquired
and expanded its territory by using brute force to grab land from the native American
tribes and the northern third of Mexico. It subjected the African-Americans to slavery for a
long period of time and even after the Civil War continued to regard them as three-fifths
human and deprived them of civil rights, including the right to vote, until the civil rights
movement won victories in the late 1960s.
The U.S. provoked the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in order to grab Puerto Rico,
Cuba and the Philippines from a decrepit colonial power. This was one of the three major
wars signalling and defining the emergence of monopoly capitalism as modern imperialism
at the close of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Since then, U.S.
imperialism has intensified its exploitation of the American working class, including the
2
-
7/31/2019 A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHTS BOOK: U.S. DEMOCRACY: THE U.S. EMPIRES INDISPENSABLE MYTH
3/4
African-Americans, Latinos and Asians and has acquired colonies, semi-colonies, dependent
countries and spheres of influence.
The US collaborated mainly with British imperialism in expanding economic territory for
exploitation in Latin America and Asia. It made profits from war production before
entering late World Wars I and II and collected the lions share of the spoils of war. It took
over colonies from its imperialist allies and promoted neocolonialism in Asia, Africa andLatin America. It became the No. 1 imperialist power and spearheaded the Cold War
against the socialist countries. It stepped up war production and deployed US military
forces on a global scale. It carried out wars of aggression, as in Korea and Indochina, and
instigated massacres as in Indonesia.
U.S. propaganda about so-called U.S. democracy has been so effective that US imperialism
has so far succeeded to evade full accountability for such colossal crimes as the following:
the murder and maiming of millions of people in U.S. wars of aggression and massacres as
in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia; the extreme exploitation and oppression
of people under the dominance of the US in one form or another; and the ceaseless
extraction of profits from the American working class.
Let me say a bit more about U.S. democracy so-called in the Philippines. U.S. imperialism
murdered 1.4 million Filipinos from the start of the Filipino-American War in 1899 to 1914.
And it coopted the liberal bourgeoisie that had drawn inspiration from the French
Revolution and led the old democratic revolution in the Philippines. It did so by
embellishing the US colonial rule with the language of Jeffersonian democracy and by
undertaking a few reforms to shift the economy from a feudal to a semi-feudal one.
The U.S. misrepresented its colonial rule as a period of tutelage in democracy and further
Christianization. Since after the US granted nominal independence to the Philippines in
1946, turning it into a semi-colony, the Filipino puppet politicians have patterned their
concept and practice of sham democracy after the U.S. model. The electoral contests
conjure the illusion of democratic choice for the people, even as the reactionary politicians
of various parties serve the interests of the U.S. and the local exploiting classes of big
compradors and landlords.
In the last three decades, the US monopoly bourgeoisie and its political agents in the
Republican and Democratic parties have been guided by the neoliberal economic policy.
They have blamed the stagflation of the 1970s on wage inflation and big social spending by
government and have pressed down the wage level and cut back on social spending but
stepped up military spending and every way, like liberalization, privatization and
deregulation, to aid the monopoly bourgeoisie to make bigger profits and accumulate
productive and financial capital.
The crisis of overproduction has recurred more frequently and more severely. Every
attempt to override it through debt financing at the levels of the state, corporations and
consumers and through one kind of financial bubble to another have only led to a worse
economic and financial crisis. A severe and increasingly worse public debt crisis has come
about due to the bailout of the banks and corporations and profligate government spending
to benefit the financial oligarchy, the military-industrial complex and the high bureaucracy.
3
-
7/31/2019 A REVIEW OF RAY O. LIGHTS BOOK: U.S. DEMOCRACY: THE U.S. EMPIRES INDISPENSABLE MYTH
4/4
The inane reaction to the rising public deficits and public debt is austerity measures at the
further expense of the people, thus aggravating the economic decline and the high rate of
unemployment. The most reactionary forces in the U.S. undertake something like the Tea
Party movement in order to obscure monopoly capitalism as the root cause of the crisis,
scapegoat the African-Americans, the immigrants and other people and push the Obama
regime towards actions that aggravate the crisis. But the widespread social discontent is
bursting out and developing into a resolute and militant resistance of the people at the verycenter of global capitalism. The Occupy Movement has burst out and can lead to larger and
more militant actions of the proletariat and the people.
Global Crisis and the Need for Resistance
A global depression is now wreaking havoc on the lives of the people in both the imperialist
and dominated countries. For quite sometime already, the imperialist powers have failed to
solve the economic and financial crisis, because of their blindness to the internal laws of
motion of capitalism and their dogmatic adherence to the neoliberal economic policy. The
crisis is now engendering fascism and aggressive wars. On the surface, these appear as
directed against recalcitrant countries of the third world and the long-oppressed peoples
but they are part of the inter-imperialist struggle for a division of the world.
The rapidly worsening crisis of the world capitalist system is inflicting grave hardships and
suffering on the people of the world. At the same time, it is compelling the people to resist.
There is an urgent need for intensifying the anti-imperialist and democratic struggle of the
people on a global scale. There is at the same time, as emphatically pointed out in his book
by Ray O. Light, the urgent need for the leading role of the revolutionary party of the
proletariat in the revolutionary mass struggles in various countries and for the
strengthening of the international communist movement. ###
4