Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
He was a marine. He loves his country. He’s a small business owner.
These are the reasons the petty bourgeois socialists love Graham Platner. They’re reasons for principled Communists to dig deeper.
What does My Little Totenkopf have to say for himself on the subject?
“Of course I have a cushion.” He means that his father financed his mortgage. Daddy was a state prosecutor in Maine and owned a law firm for 30 years. He also chaired the board of a non-profit with ties to powerful politicians. Grandaddy was a wealthy architect. “I don’t think that means I don’t work for a living. I don’t think it somehow offsets the fact that I did four tours in the infantry and served my country in intense combat.” He always wanted to be a soldier. He went to a series of private schools, then did three tours of duty in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and then became a gun-for-hire. His Dad bought him a $200,000 house. He pays Daddy $954.83 a month for it. He bought his oyster company from a friend. Through that company, he owns a 6-acre aquaculture lease, a California Skiff, and equipment worth $100,000. He reportedly chooses not to draw salary so he can also collect his $5,000 monthly killer’s benefits from the VA. He does, however, pay his wife a salary. That way he can keep his disability, the clever clogs!
Imperialist murderer. Petty bourgeois business owner, paid on the taxpayer’s dole while he siphons money out through his wife. Defender of SS lightning-bolt tattoos as just part of “Marine culture.” Possessor of his very own Nazi totenkopf emblazoned right on his chest, which he covered up with more ink in October of last year after he decided to run for office.
Graham Platner is the settler-socialist everyman.
Some readers will undoubtedly remark that it’s easy to be a cynic. What’s not easy is unlearning all the rules society teaches us about how to evaluate someone’s politics. In fact, it’s hard to have hope.
The issues with the Amerikan state run deeper than surface critiques, which is one of the reasons why we can’t just vote our problems away. No politician that emerges organically from the bourgeois party system can ever serve our needs. That system exists to reinforce the control of the ruling class and secure the loyalty of petty bourgeois professionals, local business owners, HOA boards, Chambers of Commerce, and imperialist (traitor) unions.
In order to challenge the capitalist rulers of the Amerikan empire we need to do more than phone bank, door knock, fundraise, and vote. First, we must subject everything, every aspect of our lives and organizing efforts, to the most searching critical analysis. We can’t swallow the propaganda of the imperialists and their lackeys day in and day out, on the television news, in our favorite shows, written down in schoolbooks, and taught in lecture halls without internalizing at least some of it. We have to root it out.
What is Platner’s class position? What class does he represent? These are the questions that will tell us his true politics. These questions are the fundamental guide to revolutionary politics, and as long as we keep them at the forefront of our analysis we won’t be lured into blind alleys.
Platner is representative of the right-wing petty bourgeois trend in socialism that reduces all questions to economism. How can I get higher wages? How can I own a house? How can I get cheaper healthcare? As a result, that kind of politics reinforces rather than challenges the bourgeois state. This is because the bourgeois bargain that underpins that state and has underpinned it for the past century is that the petty bourgeoisie and the white labor aristocracy will support imperialist wars and the capitalist world order in exchange for some limited input in politics, access to relatively cheap land, houses, pensions, high wages, high purchasing power, and low cost consumer goods. This is what Platner and all the jarheads, big city socialists, and Sanders dead-enders are working toward.
Does that mean its categorically incorrect to run a candidate on a Communist ticket? No. Not at all! But there are prerequisites.
For a Communist candidate to stand on their own, they need to be part of an organization that can hold them accountable. They need an articulated Communist platform; that is, a platform that stands in directly opposition to the continued existence of the bourgeois state. They need political education, militancy, discipline, and they need to accept that they will immediately be attacked by bourgeois elements. The purpose of a Communist politician within a bourgeois system can never be to govern according to the bourgeois law, to compromise and horse-trade with the bourgeois state or its representatives. The point is to cause a rupture, to demonstrate the brittleness, the bankruptcy, and ultimately, the fragility of the bourgeois state.
That work begins with you.
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