Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 919	29 August 2008

Why Marxists Oppose Capitalist McKinney/Green Party Campaign

(Letter)

2 May 2008

A recent letter to WV (25 April 2008, No. 913) by R.S. speculated that Cynthia McKinney, not Ralph Nader, will likely be the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate. R.S. went on to note that:

“A February 6 editorial by Workers World Party [WWP] enthuses that McKinney [etc.].... These reformists previously endorsed McKinney’s successful campaign in 2004 to return to Congress on the Democratic Party ticket.

“Blacks don’t have a lot of illusions in Ralph Nader, but some do in McKinney.... Of course, she...is running to hold the Democrats ‘accountable.’ The role of ‘progressive’ bourgeois politicians like McKinney is to head off and contain any potential social struggle, keeping it safely within the confines of the capitalist system.”

These comments by R.S. echo present and past characterisations of McKinney by WV and the Spartacist League/US (Nos. 913 and 850). To note that McKinney’s political role is as a shill who has been husbanded by the left wing of the Democratic Party to head off and contain effective social struggle is, of course, a principled stance and a crucial warning for those who would grasp desperately at blunt weapons that leave the workers’ movement open to certain defeat. That reformist outfits such as WWP would take the class into such deadly traps is no surprise.

However, R.S.—and the Spartacist League (SL/US)—miss the point. Left unanswered is the question of how the class vanguard is to intervene to broach the social phenomenon around McKinney’s constituency. This failure is a rank act of absenteeism by the League and leaves the League open to a correct characterisation as “sectarian” by its detractors.

In 2004 I called SL/US’s attention to the need for the vanguard party to step into the breach and expose McKinney’s political role by the traditional means of offering critical support in defense of her right to hold office, regardless of party, while warning the class that her politics is the politics of one of the two parties of capital and that her “solutions” are a recipe for defeat. I personally know Cynthia McKinney’s father, State Senator Billy McKinney, who is also her political advisor. She and her father have long taken the desperate course of running as Democrats because they can see no pragmatic political alternative. I was present when her mother Viola was knocked down to the pavement at the entrance to McKinney’s 2004 primary watch by Government agents posing as reporters and her bodyguard bloodied. Careful observers need not look far to see why she and her father see no pragmatic alternative to the Democratic Party. Leaders who emerge from the African-American community as champions of their fellow minority citizens can find no succor in the revolutionary workers’ movement because the movement rarely offers them solutions which they can offer to their constituency, outside of the occasional defense of victims whose political role is largely beyond question (Mumia Abu-Jamal, for instance) and the perennial attempts of honest revolutionaries to create transitional organs of social defense (the SL/US’s Labor Black League for Social Defense is exemplary in this regard).

I think that historically the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (a Jewish member of the French general staff!) by the international workers’ movement in 1890s Europe offers us an essential parallel. The defense of Dreyfus reinvigorated the European socialist movement at a time of profound social reaction. It must be mentioned that the failure of the socialists to deal effectively with French anti-semitism during the Dreyfus Affair was also the occasion for the birth of Zionism, a reactionary movement to derail class-conscious Jews into desperate, dead-end nationalism that eventually brought us the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian People. Of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, who took up the leadership of the socialist defense of Dreyfus, Leon Trotsky once remarked: “During the Dreyfus Case, Jaurès said to himself: ‘Whoever does not seize the executioner’s hand poised over his victim will himself become the executioner’s accomplice’...” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/profiles/jaures01.htm).

The politics of McKinney, anymore than those of Dreyfus, is not the essential point. The point is to intersect the struggles of an oppressed minority to defend its dedicated leaders against government intrigue and racist backlash with the vanguard party’s program for social revolution. In my opinion, the Spartacist League lost a crucial opportunity, in 2002 and again in 2004 and 2006, to intervene with its revolutionary program in the defense of Cynthia McKinney as the European socialist movement did over 100 years ago in the post-1871 Dreyfus Affair.

B.B.
Atlanta

WV replies: The letter by B.B. expresses at bottom the perennial “fight the right” opportunism of the reformist left, though in less crass terms than appear in the pages of, for example, Workers World, which is openly campaigning for McKinney. As such, it provides us with an opportunity to elaborate on the treatment we have given to the McKinney/Green Party campaign and our fight for the political independence of the working class. We refer readers to our article “Democrats, Republicans, Greens: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed—For a Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!” (WV No. 917, 4 July).

From the standpoint of the interests of the proletariat and oppressed: McKinney, like the Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama, is a bourgeois politician. This was the case when she served as a Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia, and is the case today as she campaigns as the small-time capitalist Green Party’s official presidential candidate. B.B.’s attempted sleight of hand willfully conflating defense of elementary democratic rights of black elected officials when those are under threat with any manner of political (“critical” or otherwise) support to them is bogus from the standpoint of Marxist program and principle.

The Green Party’s current niche in American electoral politics is to pressure the Democratic Party, the other major bourgeois party of racism and imperialist war. This was the case when petty-bourgeois lawyer Ralph Nader ran in 1996 and 2000 and David Cobb in 2004. McKinney’s June statement on Barack Obama made this clear: “While congratulating Senator Obama for a feat well done, I would also like to bring home the very real need for change…. I encourage the Democratic Party and its new presumptive nominee, Senator Obama, to embrace these important suggestions for policy initiatives.”

Even if the Greens genuinely sought to be “independent” of the Democrats and Republicans, we would still oppose them as a third capitalist party, just as Marxists in the U.S. opposed previous capitalist “third parties”—from Republican “Fighting Bob” La Follette who ran on the Progressive ticket in 1924 to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president Henry Wallace in 1948. The parallels between Progressive Party Wallace and McKinney are striking, and their purpose is the same: the candidates’ talk of “peace,” “justice” and a better deal for the little people is meant to corral dissatisfaction with the two main bourgeois parties into yet another capitalist electoral vehicle. It’s not surprising that the tendency within the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1948 that wanted to support Wallace was grouped around Sam Marcy, who later went on to form the Workers World Party, which has endorsed McKinney’s presidential run today (see letter, page 2). In fighting Marcy’s capitulation to bourgeois politics inside the SWP, James P. Cannon, in his summary speech on socialist election policy at the February 1948 SWP plenum, pointed out: “The maneuvers of the Bolsheviks were always within class lines. I don’t know of any effort made by the Bolsheviks to maneuver within the parties of the bourgeoisie. On the contrary their whole tactical line, maneuverist as it was, was to make a sharp cleavage between the working class organizations and those of the bourgeoisie.”

However, Cannon’s principled struggle was undermined in the course of the SWP’s degeneration from a revolutionary Trotskyist party into centrism, and then fairly quickly into reformism. It was one hallmark of the degeneration of the SWP that in 1965 they supported the supposedly “independent” black candidate Carl Stokes in his first run for mayor in Cleveland. Stokes was a well-known machine Democrat. He was a former assistant prosecutor and a member of the Ohio House of Representatives who sponsored a measure empowering the governor to send in the National Guard troops to clamp down on black unrest—which is exactly what he did as Cleveland mayor in 1968 in the Glenville area. He was the first black mayor of a major American city, winning election as a Democrat in 1967 and 1969, an exemplar of that wave of black Democratic Party machine politicians who were chosen to oversee the bourgeoisie’s crackdown on the black ghettos.

The role of black Democrats is different today only to the extent that class and social struggle has ebbed and even phony “radical” rhetoric is not currently necessary to squelch mass, militant upheaval. Masses of black workers and ghetto youth once found inspiration in the eloquence of Malcolm X, a truth-teller alienated from both capitalist parties, including the pacifist preachers of the Martin Luther King ilk. Condemning the con game of the Democrats and Republicans, calling them the wolf and the fox, Malcolm X was feared and despised by the liberals, both black and white. While no Marxist, he was on more than one occasion to the left of those ostensible “socialists” busy tailing the liberal wing of the civil rights movement (see “Malcolm X: The Man, the Myth, the Struggle,” Black History and the Class Struggle No. 10, February 1993).

That McKinney is painted as some sort of “left” alternative on offer to the black population says a lot about the present level of political consciousness and general dearth of class struggle—thus B.B. describes McKinney as one of the “dedicated leaders” of the black population. He alibis McKinney and other black bourgeois politicians by referring to their “desperate course of running as Democrats because they can see no pragmatic political alternative.” Such is the “politics of the possible” which has deepened in the post-Soviet period among the reformist left with its “death of communism” servility to the rule of the bourgeoisie. To such class-collaborationist schemes, we counterpose a class-struggle road to black liberation. As we explained in the Preface to Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “What Strategy for Black Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism” (September 1978):

“Any organization which claims a revolutionary perspective for the United States must confront the special oppression of black people—the forced segregation of blacks at the bottom of capitalist society and the poisonous racism which divides the working class and cripples its struggles. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party. Moreover, there is no other road to eliminating the special oppression of black people than the victorious conquest of power by the U.S. proletariat.”

This perspective of revolutionary integrationism—as opposed to liberal integrationism as well as petty-bourgeois nationalism and separatism—entails the understanding that black workers are destined to play a vanguard role in the American socialist revolution, including as leaders of the Leninist party at its head.

As for the Green Party, this (very white) petty-bourgeois capitalist party pushes among its “Ten Key Values” support of “independently owned and operated companies,” i.e., capitalism. The “values” also include, “without being naive about the intentions of other governments,” recognizing “the need for self-defense”—i.e., American imperialism’s military might! Such “defense of the fatherland,” the most powerful and bloodthirsty military power on the face of the planet, is consistent with McKinney’s record in Congress as well. Three days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, McKinney—along with everyone else in Congress except Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee—voted for the resolution giving President Bush a blank check for war, which promptly translated into the brutal invasion of Afghanistan. Although a small “fringe” party in U.S. politics, the Greens in power in Germany, along with their Social Democratic Party cohorts, attacked working-class living standards. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer deployed German jets, tanks and troops for the 1999 U.S./NATO imperialist war against Serbia and in support of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Domestically, McKinney’s record includes her August 1994 vote for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a Clinton administration measure that expanded the number of police and prisons, extended the federal death penalty and imposed mandatory sentencing. In 1998, along with much of the Congressional Black Caucus, McKinney voted for the House resolution supporting the 1977 frame-up conviction of former Black Panther Assata Shakur and demanding her extradition from Cuba. Like McKinney’s opposition to Pentagon “waste,” a focus of her long-term service on the House Armed Services Committee, these positions express loyalty to capitalist imperialism, to the patriotic sentiments of those like the Greens who want to “clean up” some of the “excesses” of the wretched system whose destruction requires nothing short of international socialist revolution.

Fake Left at McKinney’s Service

The record above is in no contradiction to the fact that McKinney stands on the left of the spectrum of bourgeois politics in the U.S. today. She is wont to adorn the platforms of various events organized by the reformist left. Donkey work on her behalf from the likes of Workers World is payment in return. Having joined a substantial element of U.S. rulers in concluding that U.S. imperialism’s interests are not best served by the Iraq occupation, McKinney finds it expedient to call for “our troops” to withdraw from Iraq, and even bemoans the Afghanistan occupation as well. She was a keynote speaker at the San Francisco May Day rally—one of whose central organizers was International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 Executive Board member Jack Heyman—that coincided with the West Coast port shutdown against the Iraq occupation and in defense of the union in the midst of contract negotiations. The rally, dominated by bourgeois politics, was politically no different from many liberal peace crawls. The port shutdown was a powerful display of union muscle that was nonetheless wrapped in red-white-and-blue American chauvinism by the ILWU International bureaucracy and subordinated to the union tops’ endorsement of Obama, with all mention of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan deep-sixed. (See “Labor: Break with Democrats, ‘National Unity’ Patriotism! ILWU Shuts West Coast Ports on May Day,” WV No. 914, 9 May.)

McKinney has similarly appeared at events sponsored by the Bay Area Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (aka “the MOBE”), chaired by Jeff Mackler, who is also the leader of the reformist Socialist Action (SA) organization. SA and the MOBE have subordinated the fight for Mumia’s freedom to bourgeois liberals and capitalist politicians, just as SA and other reformist leftists subordinated the fight against imperialist depredations in Iraq (and Afghanistan, on the rare occasion when it was mentioned) to “Anybody but Bush” boosting of the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party (and/or Greens). At a May 18 MOBE event, McKinney, speaking as “someone who has been sort of laboring in the field of electoral politics,” naturally used the event to push bourgeois electoralism, participation “in the political process,” being “serious about our right of representation,” etc. It was left to speakers for the Spartacist League-initiated Labor Black League, after defeating Mackler’s attempt at silencing us, to speak the truth. In the words of one LBL spokesman: “The system that pushed Mumia in jail and condemned him to die is the capitalist system itself.” Such basic Marxist statements are anathema to the likes of Mackler, not least as they would “alienate” the likes of McKinney.

As a final footnote to the squalor of B.B.’s “pragmatic” road, McKinney and her vice presidential running mate, Rosa Clemente, have apparently run afoul of elements within the Colorado Green Party in the run-up to the Denver Democratic National Convention (DNC). According to an August 14 statement signed by McKinney and Clemente, Colorado Greens opposed the participation of McKinney/Clemente in various events surrounding the DNC, including those featuring Workers World honcho Larry Holmes; the World Can’t Wait outfit, initiated by the Revolutionary Communist Party; Pam Africa and the MOVE organization, among others. McKinney insists that she will participate nonetheless, “as we all attempt to hold the Democratic Party accountable for its complicity in all of the crimes of the Bush Administration.” Or, more bluntly put, pushing the Democrats to adopt, as McKinney put it, her suggestions for “policy initiatives,” under a (very) little pressure on the street.

The Dreyfus Affair: A False Analogy

B.B.’s attempt to conflate the questions of defense of democratic rights with political support led him to attempt an analogy between Cynthia McKinney and Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Here he has qualitatively overreached. The Dreyfus case in the 1890s provoked a serious social crisis in France. In 1894, French captain Alfred Dreyfus was tried for high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment in total isolation on Devil’s Island, the penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. It took many years for the truth to come out: Dreyfus was totally innocent and false evidence had been used to convict him. From its first verdict to his unequivocal exoneration in 1906, the Dreyfus Affair not only split French public opinion in general but also polarized the French workers movement, with some socialists failing to understand the need to defend this Jewish military officer against bourgeois reaction and anti-Semitism.

Against these socialists, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin argued that in such struggles it was necessary that the proletariat “take an active part in its solution and to accomplish the solution in its own, proletarian way” (“Political Agitation and ‘The Class Point of View’,” February 1902 [emphasis added]). Referring to the Dreyfus Affair and other cases, Lenin also made clear the nature of bourgeois democracy in his classic polemic against the social democrat Karl Kautsky, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918):

“The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie. The learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied this ‘law’ of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus case in republican France, with the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and Ulster in democratic Britain, with the baiting of the Bolsheviks and the staging of pogroms against them in April 1917 in the democratic republic of Russia.”

There was another aspect to the Dreyfus Affair from which Marxists derive another principle, i.e., the impermissibility of the participation of revolutionary socialists in a capitalist government. As we explain in “Down With Executive Offices!” Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 60, Autumn 2007:

“To defuse the social crisis and liquidate the Dreyfus case, the new prime minister (président du conseil) called for the socialist Alexandre Millerand to be seated in a government of bourgeois Radicals and republicans, with the butcher of the Paris Commune, General Galliffet, as minister of war. Millerand obliged, entering the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet as minister of trade and industry in 1899. Millerand’s betrayal, supported by Jean Jaurès, divided the French Socialists. Characteristically, the Second International gave an ambiguous answer to ministerialism.... An amendment put forward by Guesde that sought to forbid participation under any circumstances was rejected. The revolutionary wing of Social Democracy including Lenin and Luxemburg vehemently opposed Millerandism. Luxemburg wrote, ‘The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as it is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state’ [‘The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case,’ 1899].”

The same Spartacist explains that at the Fifth Conference of the International Communist League, of which the SL is the U.S. section, we noted that the issue of Millerandism was not pursued to a satisfactory conclusion with the Third (Communist) International. We adopted a position against running for executive office as a way of recognizing and codifying what should be seen as a corollary to Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917) and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which were really the founding documents of the Third International. We noted:

“The fundamental line between reform and revolution is the attitude toward the bourgeois state, i.e., the reformist view that one can take hold of the existing state apparatus and administer it in the interests of the workers, versus the Leninist understanding that the capitalist state apparatus must be smashed through proletarian revolution. The problem with running for executive offices is that it lends legitimacy to prevailing and reformist conceptions of the state. There is a rotten history of social-democratic and Stalinist reformists administering the state in the interest of capitalism. The executive authority commands the ‘armed body of men’ who are the core of the state apparatus; the revolutionary shattering of that state inevitably entails reckoning with the executive. Even in the great bourgeois revolutions in England and France, the Cromwellians and Jacobins who established a base in parliament had to get rid of the king and set up a new executive organ.”

Of course we defend black capitalist politicians against racist assault, but this has never meant political support. For example, when black Democrat Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983 and faced a vicious racist backlash, we wrote: “Washington has the right to take office with all the normal prerogatives. Blacks have a right to elect whoever they want to office” (WV No. 326, 25 March 1983). As opposed to many on the reformist left, at the same time we refused to give an ounce of political support to this longtime Democratic machine politician.

In McKinney’s case, it was indeed a racist provocation when she was grabbed by a cop as she was entering a Congressional office building in the lead-up to the 2006 election. Outrageously accused of assaulting the cop, McKinney was then subjected to a grand jury investigation before the case was dropped. But the funding of McKinney’s opponents by Zionist reactionaries and “cross-over” voting by Republicans in 2002 and her 2006 loss in the Georgia Democratic primary amid accusations of gerrymandering and voting “irregularities” are the nasty, corrupt, racist, sexist standard operating procedure of U.S. elections (hardly unknown on the Democratic Party side). While we are fully committed to defending McKinney’s democratic rights, from our class perspective, this has not been and is no Dreyfus case. And B.B. to the contrary, the politics of McKinney—i.e., the class line—is the essential point.

McKinney’s blandishments to the oppressed and exploited, as contained in her Green Party acceptance speech, that “whatever it is that we want in the realm of public policy, we can get if we have the right elected officials in office,” is a lie and a hoax. As we wrote in “Black Disenfranchisement and American ‘Democracy’” (WV No. 833, 1 October 2004):

“While the ballot is a fundamental right, a right we tenaciously defend, fundamental change will not come through voting. It was not by the ballot that slavery met its demise; it was not by the ballot that Jim Crow was ended. Union rights did not come from Congress or the president. All the gains working people and black people have made came through their seizing them, by mass struggles on the battlefields, in the factories and on the streets, from the racist rulers.”

It took a social revolution, the Civil War, to smash chattel slavery in this country. And it will take a third American revolution, a socialist revolution, to emancipate the proletariat from exploitation, to accomplish the liberation of the black population, to smash from within the imperialist colossus that is the main enemy of the world’s working class and oppressed masses. It is with such a program that we seek to answer B.B.’s question of “how the class vanguard is to intervene,” which requires not conciliation of the “progressive” upholders of the capitalist order, but rather their exposure as class enemies. Our aim is to fight to build a class-struggle workers party that fights for a workers government. This is tied to the struggle to oust the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class—the trade-union bureaucracy, which is the chief vehicle through which the working class is tied to their class enemy. Being “pragmatic” means accommodating the system of capitalist private property that is responsible for monstrous oppression and brutal exploitation throughout the world.