Engels on third parties in the USA
[I’ve read this before, but recently came across it again. It seems
as true now as it was 114 years ago.]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92_01_06.htm
Engels to Sorge
[…]
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The
divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in
that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are
represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the
locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class
has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large
degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans
on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of
the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together
is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the
plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only
when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the
speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more
difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the
time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the
basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and
speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-
born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a
generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from
speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But,
of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There
are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to
be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in
forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too
rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three,
and four farms in succession in different states and territories,
immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and
economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but
to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who
speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the
big parties afterward.
The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback
humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-
Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a
superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity,
by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out
of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.
[…]