Perhaps it is only fitting in this strange year, between decades, centuries, and millennia, that the contradictions in American bourgeois politics have come to a head. The Democratic Party has revealed the outlines of its intended platform, the major planks of which, whether debt reduction or lower taxes for the rich, could well have been embraced by McKinley or Coolidge. It is as silent on the overwhelming political question of our time as was its lineal ancestor, the Democratic platform of 1856, on the paramount issue of human slavery.

The widespread existence of indenturement in the American colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries included both Africans and Europeans, predominantly British, whose five to seven years of servitude, whether as house help or as field hands, was regarded as payment for their passage, whether voluntary or not. Subsequently, both black and white became freemen, and by the 1770s, the backbone of the American Revolution.

The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 utterly changed these circumstances. Its effect on society was as transforming as the harnessing of steam or electrical power. Economically, the new technology made cotton the most lucrative of commodities. Its first and most horrible social consequence was the institution of true chattel slavery. The African-American indentured servants were stripped of all human rights and condemned, together with their posterity, to bondmen's lives of eternal bitter toil.

Within no more than a generation, the "peculiar institution" so dominated the American South that "Cotton is King" became its creed, and a rapidly growing slave system the source of fantastic enrichment of the master class.

By the late 1830s, the results of such a system -- the impoverishment of the Southern small farmers and the super-exploitation of the new Northern working classes -- became ever more evident. The valiant and persecuted Abolitionists began their agitation with roughly as much political power as, one might say, today's American Socialists. Both major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, regarded the abolition of slavery in the same light as this year's two bourgeois presidential candidates view the common ownership of the means of production.

By the 1850s, however, the slavery question had become so overwhelming that all other political issues, from the settlement of the West to the conduct of foreign policy, and from the consequences of mass immigration to the incipient realities of the class conflict, were submerged in its shadow.

In 1854, two small political sects, the Greenback and the Free Soil Parties, met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to form a new organization that they named the Republican Party. This new third party was not abolitionist, but it did stand for the curtailment of slavery in the new states and territories. The Republicans' first presidential candidate, Fremont, suffered a landslide loss to Buchanan, the Democratic nominee in 1856.

This triumph of the slavocracy, however, could do nothing to resolve the contradictions between the Northern and Southern economic systems. In 1858, in New York City's Cooper Union, an Illinois lawyer, a former Whig named Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech entitled "A House Divided," the heart of which is contained in its last lines -- "this nation can not exist half slave and half free."

When the still-new third party nominated Lincoln for president in 1860, the abolitionists threw all their passionate energy into his campaign, despite the fact that neither he nor the Republican Party platform called for an end to slavery itself. It is the author's contention that this political decision by the abolitionists should be considered and evaluated by every contemporary American radical and revolutionary.

In the seminal election of 1860, the Democrats fielded two candidates, the Whigs one, and the Republicans Mr. Lincoln. When the ballots were counted, the six-year-old party had gained sufficient electoral votes to win the Presidency for the the man who was to become the Great Emancipator.

In mid-19th-century America, the struggle over slavery was a noisy one. Our national passion for substantive debate, an essential to any genuine democracy, was consummated in taverns, public squares, and, above all in the columns of a cantankerous, competitive, and ideologically diverse free press.

In our time, alas, such conditions do not exist. A nearly monolithic mass media may still allow us a few small-circulation magazines such as The Nation and The Progressive, or a few hours of Michael Moore on cable TV, but the great sources of information, whether the press or the air waves are owned or controlled by the giant corporations.

And it is the role of these international monopolies that is the central political question of our country and of the world -- a question no less pivotal and burning than was slavery in its time.

Even during the vigorous heyday of 19th-century competitive capitalism, Marx and Engels were able to discern the economic laws of development that the new system would inevitably follow. The appearance of the joint-stock company and the Societé Anonyme, they wrote, heralded the future of the capitalist system, one that would see the triumph first of national, then global monopoly and the dominion of an haute-bourgeoisie, immeasurably more powerful than the feudal nobility. And no less tyrannical or corrupt.

According to the fathers of what we like to call "Scientific Socialism," the only alternative to this dismal prospect lies in the organization of the working people in labor unions and the formation of a political party that would serve their interests, the first of which are freedom and democracy. They also warned that the new capitalist ruling class neither would nor could reform the system, any more than its predecessor, the landed aristocracy, had reformed feudalism.

In the United States, the popular reaction to the obviously growing power of the corporations led to the elections of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. The "trust-busting" of these reformers proved to be a palliative to the electorate, more designed to undercut the growing appeal of Debs's Socialist Party than to actually tame the corporative monster.

The failure of such bourgeois reform can best be judged by an examination of the 1920s. The Jazz Age was marked by an accelerated march toward monopoly, with its concomitant crusade against the labor movement. With the stock market crash of 1929 and the consequent Great Depression, it became evident to all that the pre-war reforms had proved worthless.

It is difficult today to realize the depth and gravity of the "American Earthquake." The capitalist system was shaken to its foundations. With commerce moribund, millions homeless and hungry, and despair reigning even in the corporate boardrooms, the specter of revolution appeared everywhere. It must be remembered that Stalin had not yet succeeded in destroying the workers' state in Russia, and that the Soviet Union and the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the minds of many American workers, still stood as a shining contrast to their own country's ruin.

The most vivid example of this radical change in the political temperament remains the Oneida, New York milk strike of 1931. The desperate upstate New York dairy farmers managed to organize themselves sufficiently enough to call a strike and a boycott against the milk processors, their major clients, who were paying them less for their product than it cost to feed the cows. They attempted, occasionally with force, to halt the delivery of raw milk to the processors, who responded by hiring armed men to ride shotgun on every milk truck. Next, these York State farmers (among whom the writer was born and bred), who were predominantly WASP, generally God-fearing, and Republican to a man, began to remember their own Revolutionary heritage of Oriskany and Saratoga and reached for their hunting rifles. At first they shot at the gun-bearing goons, and then, mirabile dictu, at their replacements, armed troopers who represented the awful majesty of the New York State Police.

Such violence, of course, was soon crushed by the unmatched power of the modern state. But armed revolt from such a conservative sector of the population struck terror to the heart of the ruling class. The more enlightened in its ranks recognized that drastic changes in the capitalist system had to be made in order to save it.

The presidential election of 1932 presented such a possibility. The Republicans gallantly re-nominated Hoover, whose name had become a curse word in most American homes, and worse among the homeless. The Democrats picked Franklin Roosevelt, Governor of New York (and thus, Commandant of the State Police). The already Stalinized Communist Party and, alas, the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, both proved incapable of denting the two-party structure.

Since the end of Reconstruction, the South had been the mainstay of the Democratic Party. Most of its presidential candidates were Southern white supremacists. The party reached its nadir in 1924, when it nominated Davis. His politics were still obvious thirty years later when he re-emerged as a defender of segregation in the historic Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education that laid the legal foundation for the Civil Rights Movement.

With the GOP nominating Coolidge, a political cypher who had succeeded the equally weightless Harding, and the Democrats running the racist Davis, a progressive Republican senator from Wisconsin, LaFollette, announced his own candidacy as an alternative choice. He garnered five million votes, a considerable percentage of those cast in 1924. The results of his campaign were two-fold; in the short run Coolidge was re-elected, indicating that LaFollette drew more support from Democratic voters than from Republican ones. By far the more important effect of his run, however, took place in the Democratic Party. The professional politicians, as they studied the returns, began to realize that if their careers were to prosper, they should appeal to the working masses whose numbers now dominated the electorate. Such an appeal, of course, was to be made well within the constraints of Capitalism.

Accordingly, at the next election they nominated Al Smith, then Governor of New York, who had earned some genuine, pro-labor credentials. He was also an Irish Catholic, a son of a people who knew something of the effects of oppression and exploitation.

In 1928, Smith was defeated by the Republican Hoover, but his nomination marked a movement to the left by the Democratic Party that endured for two generations.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was elected on a fairly conservative platform, which even promised, in the midst of cataclysm, to balance the federal budget. When in office, however, this man of "first-rate spirit, second-rate intellect" (Oliver Wendell Holmes) demonstrated sufficient intelligence to realize the enormity of the American agony. From the "first hundred days" until Pearl Harbor, the New Deal, through its legislation empowering the regulatory agencies, made the federal government a powerful counter-weight to the great corporations, in effect saving them from their own suicidal greed. Also, in keeping with the Preamble to the Constitution, the Democratic Congress passed laws creating such benefits as Social Security and the minimum wage that actually attempted "to promote the General Welfare." This was before Reagan made welfare a dirty word and Clinton effectively scuttled it.

Historically, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was the passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act in 1935-36. The might of the corporations had reduced Union membership in this country to less than three million workers. Most of them were adepts of the skilled trades and thus difficult to replace by the army of strikebreakers that served the bosses. When the Wagner Act made it possible for their workers to form or join a union, if they wished, five million thronged to the new CIO and eight million to the AFL. This development frightened the ruling class worse than had the armed dairy farmers. Its whole considerable power was concentrated on "Labor's Magna Carta" and, with the Republican 80th Congress of 1946-48, corporate puissance pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act. With the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Bill, another crippling amendment of the Wagner Act in 1959, it has become next to impossible for workers to organize in this country outside the public sector.

During the 20th century, the first business of a totalitarian state has been the hobbling or crushing of the workers' organizations, whether labor unions or socialist parties. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and their tinpot emulators all recognized that the true and consistent enemy of the corporate (or bureaucratic) state is the labor movement.

In this country, the one-sided victory of Nixon in 1972, due primarily to a resurgence of white racism, marked a turning point in bourgeois politics. The Democrats became Republicans and the Republicans unspeakable, while the corporations grew ever stronger and more united. The Reagan administrations presided over the dismantling of most of the New Deal reforms -- even Social Security is in jeopardy -- and, under the aegis of deregulation, removed all hindrances to the monopolist juggernaut.

The results of these reactionary victories has been a steady decline of the mass standard of living, masked in part by the dominance of television, the true opiate of the people, and the fantastic enrichment of the corporate ruling class and its satraps.

These facts, despite the soothing syrup of the kept media, are now evident to all. The author, whose practice it is to pose political queries to everyone unfortunate enough to engage him in conversation, can report that he has found not one American of either sex or any race who will deny that the giant international corporations call the tune to which we all must dance.

This radical change in the American consciousness returns us to the election of 1860. The irrelevance of Bore and Gush has produced a mass political ennui, broken only by the contrasting passion surrounding the person of Ms. Clinton.

But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. It is the author's contention that a third-party candidate, who can convince the electorate that he is a genuine and resolute foe of corporate fascism and an ally of the working people, could yet save the republic. The litmus test that would distinguish him from the fraudulent radicalism of a Buchanan or a Perot is a simple one. It is a demand for the repeal of the union-busting Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin acts that underlie the triumphs of the corporate rich.

Such a candidacy may be taking shape. Given the historical realities of our time, it is no more quixotic than was the Republican cause of 1860. And fellow Americans, a hundred and forty years later, the author prays that you will remember one thing: a ballot cast for Abe Lincoln was no throwaway vote.