by Norman Markowitz

In 2003, Irish film-makers released a remarkable on the spot documentary about the attempt by rightist elements to overthrow Hugo Chavez democratically elected government in Venezuela. The Bush administration supported that failed coup and gave sanctuary to some of its plotters The documentary was titled "The Revolution will not be televised."

I thought of that documentary as I watched the televised attempted "coup" against the Obama administration that is going on today. Obama is not being held hostage and threatened with possible murder as Chavez was a decade ago. His cabinet is not encircled in the White House the way Chavez Cabinet members were encircled in the Presidential Palace. And commercial television is not repeating directly the propaganda of the coup plotters as they were in Venezuela. But they are not doing what the press and mass media is supposed to do in a democratic society, that is speak to and inform the citizenry about the vital issues facing them.

In Venezuela, mass demonstrations eventually led elements of the police and military who had been sitting on the sidelines to turn against the coup plotters and restore Chavez and his government. Here mass demonstrations are mounting as the political crisis deepens.

Here it is not a case of the military and the police turning against the rightwing Republicans. It is a case of the Republican leadership throwing in the towel and ending the "shutdown" before a major constitutional crisis is precipitated.

Political Affairs, as a Marxist journal of opinion and analysis, of course focuses on the economic and class struggle foundation of events. As was said nearly a century ago by a Marxist revolutionary, "parties don''t decide; classes decide." Here the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class, who have funded the "tea party" Republican right, representing a recycled version of the worst of the Reagan and George W. Bush policies of the last three decades, have gone beyond even their political pale to force a government to surrender to them and largely abandon the Affordable Care Act. If that means that millions of people who depend on grants from federal programs have there lives disrupted, that does not matter. If that means the all sorts of government offices and programs are closed to the public, that does not matter. If that means that these actions lead to an economic catastrophe on the stock market, in the bond market, one that will cost the capitalist class many billions and which they will of course seek to pass on to the working class, that too does not matter. All of that, to use a Reagan era term for the effects of military interventionism, is "collatoral damage" to the right Republicans. In the comic words of the great Negro Leagues baseball pitcher Satchel Paige, "It's mind over matter. I don't mind and you don't matter." That is a sinister way is what the Republican right is saying to the American people.

President Obama is standing firm against these "coup makers" If they win and get their way, it will be an affront to representative government, due process, centuries of struggle enacted in laws and constitutions against dictatorial regimes, whether they be monarchs, warlords, or oligarchies who cease power and then rewrite the rules to suit them.

We must increase in and throw all venues the opposition to this "coup" against representative government. We must call upon the elected representatives of President Obama's party, who have failed both him and the people many times in the past, to stand up at least with the unity that the Republicans who have created this crisis have shown. The people are with the President and them overwhelmingly. There is no room for compromise here, since "compromise" can only reward the political perpetrators of this assault on representative government.

In the short run, this is a struggle to save and implement the Affordable Care Act. In the long run, and that may not be so long, it is a struggle by labor, the working class, and all peoples movements to defend constitutional democratic government