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	Workers Vanguard No. 967	22 October 2010

Electoral Circuses, No Bread

For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

Democrats, Republicans: Partner Parties of War and Racism

While workers suffer the impact of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with unemployment and foreclosures threatening the livelihoods and lives of millions, including those with no “safety net” whatsoever, the 2010 midterm elections are a circus, and a sick one at that. The capitalists’ ideologues and editorialists tell you to take your pick: the Wall Street Democrats or the billionaires’ club of the Republicans, with their racist and socially retrograde Tea Party wing. Parading as rebels against “big government,” the Tea Party movement, composed mainly of enraged elements of the petty bourgeoisie, is funded by big bourgeois interests for electoral purposes. It’s the usual shell game, the bosses’ con, with the labor misleaders and black bourgeois politicians mobilizing working people and minorities to “fight the right”—i.e., vote Democrat.

In this game, the racist capitalist rulers always win, as the working people once again are lined up, against their own class interests, behind the supposedly more benign face of this system of exploitation, oppression and war. A recent memo from AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman obtained by the New York Times documents a massive campaign to get out the union vote. The memo complains that corporations and right-wing groups “are spending record amounts of undisclosed money to lie to voters about which candidates will fight for the middle class” and raises a call to fight for “economic patriots who will stand with working people.” Here in capsule form is the class collaborationism that defines the outlook of the labor misleaders. For them, wage workers are a part of a great “middle class” of Americans who share common national interests with the capitalist exploiters.

This myth is ingrained in the dominant bourgeois ideology, which obscures the class line dividing the tiny class of capitalists—the owners of industry and the banks, whose driving interest is profit—from the working class—i.e., those who sell their labor power to the capitalists. As the bosses’ labor lieutenants, the union bureaucracy has increasingly sacrificed the class-struggle weapons that built the unions in the first place—strikes, plant occupations, mass labor protest. As a result, the union movement is at a historic low point, at a time when the capitalists are trying to make the working people pay for the economic crisis.

All over the capitalist world, the working class is facing austerity measures and union-busting. In response, Europe has seen an outbreak of defensive labor struggles, sometimes massive. These have been directed against capitalist governments of both the right, such as Sarkozy’s in France, and the left, such as Zapatero’s Socialist party regime in Spain. As we go to press, a national day of action is taking place in France, where strikes and protests mainly against attacks on pensions have recently drawn in public employees, oil refinery workers and truck drivers as well as working-class and minority high school youth. But the workers’ reformist misleaders are simultaneously pushing virulent economic protectionism, which binds the workers and their unions to “their own” ruling classes, whipping up racist reaction against immigrants and dividing workers along national lines. That program disarms the workers, blocking the road to the only way out of capitalism’s ruinous boom-bust cycles: proletarian revolution, leading to a Socialist United States of Europe.

In this country, the anti-immigrant drums are pounded not only by the Republicans but also by the chauvinist trade-union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party in which it invests its members’ dues and political activity. The Obama administration has exceeded the Bush White House in carrying out deportations and sent even more troops to the Mexican border. As Marxists, we call for the unions to mobilize in defense of immigrants, demanding full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Labor must fight to organize the unorganized, not least in the open shop South, which requires a hard struggle against entrenched black oppression as well as anti-immigrant bigotry. A new, class-struggle labor leadership would link the struggles of workers in the U.S. to those in Latin America and beyond under the call raised by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto: Workers of the world, unite!

Even by the government’s minimizing standard, the number of Americans living in poverty today is the highest since Washington started keeping such statistics 50 years ago. There is no “recovery” for the record numbers of people suffering long-term unemployment. The federal, state and local governments are slashing services to the bone, hitting hardest at the poor. There is a desperate need for class struggle, placing a revived labor movement at the head of the ghetto and barrio masses in a fight against the common capitalist class enemy.

Such struggle needs a political expression: a workers party organized independently of, and in opposition to, the Democratic and Republican parties of capital. The U.S. is the only advanced capitalist country without a party of the working class, even one with a reformist leadership. The lack of this basic level of class consciousness is based in the main on the ethnic, religious and, especially, racial divisions in the working class that have historically been fostered by the capitalists: native-born against foreign-born, white against black.

The Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs aim to win working-class militants, anti-racist fighters and revolutionary-minded youth to the perspective of forging a workers party that fights for a workers government. The bloody imperialist carnage in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the drive to extract ever more profit from workers’ labor, the grinding oppression of black people, the all-round social bigotry—all these are part of a system of capitalist rule. Only when that system is destroyed root and branch by victorious workers revolution—when the capitalist state is smashed and replaced by a workers state—will the proletariat and the oppressed be emancipated.

Elections 2010: Starving Workers, Bashing China

V.I. Lenin, leader of the Russian October Revolution, wrote in his 1918 polemic, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky: “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” The satirist Juvenal coined the term “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) in tracing the decline of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire, with its spectacles of gladiator combat and showering of bread upon the plebeian masses. In American imperialism’s decline, they’re withholding the bread but giving us the spectacle of electoral circuses.

Who cannot find the “I’m not a witch” ad by Delaware Republican Christine O’Donnell hilarious in a sick way, or find the Nazi “re-enactor,” Ohio Republican and Tea Party favorite Rich Iott, a grotesque insult to just about anyone but a card-carrying fascist? Who did not recoil in horror at New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s rant against gay people, fresh on the heels of a rash of suicides by gay youth and the horrific torture of gays by a gang in the Bronx?

All this may give ammunition to the Democrats, the supposed “friends of labor” and the downtrodden. But the writer Gore Vidal, one of the most incisive American political and social commentators, put it well in an interview with TV host Bill Maher in April 2009:

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently…and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

In Obama’s version of this picture, when racist yahoos “get out of hand” he bends over backward to accommodate them, as seen in the firing of black Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod after a Tea Party operative concocted a lying story of her “racist” treatment of a white farmer (see: “Shirley Sherrod Thrown Under the Bus—Obama: CEO of Racist American Capitalism,” WV No. 963, 27 August).

Faced with this “choice,” much of the Democrats’ historic base might well sit this one out. So up step the craven union “leaders” and the likes of the NAACP to rally support from the workers, black masses and youth for the “lesser evil” of the Democratic Party. Teamsters Local 237 president Gregory Floyd put it succinctly in New York’s Amsterdam News (7 October):

“We cannot allow misguided voters to change the course of history this November. Every voter who supports public policies that promote broad-based prosperity and equality must understand that not voting is the same as voting for the other side.

“We must take our own anger—our passion—to the polls and make sure we protect people with the interests of our community at heart. We are also angry, but we must show that emotion by storming the polls and demonstrating that we are truly one nation working together.”

As Barack Obama has made clear in hitting the campaign trail, the aim is to rekindle the “spirit” of 2008, when the elections placed the first black president in the White House. The truth is that the plight of the black masses, like that of the working class in general, has demonstrably worsened on Obama’s watch. There is no mystery here. The race-color caste oppression of black people has always been a defining feature of American capitalism. Compare black incarceration in prison hellholes with black university attendance, now even more attenuated by the economic crisis and the last gasps of affirmative action; compare the massive level of black youth unemployment with any other sector of the population; look at the daily cop terror in the ghettos. It will take a third American revolution, a socialist revolution, to fully emancipate the black masses, a revolution in which black workers are destined to play a leading role.

Having overseen the continued hemorrhaging of jobs and slashing of social services, the Democrats are dishing out a heavier dose than usual of national chauvinist poison, especially the anti-Communist type directed against China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state. While both capitalist parties bash China, it’s the Democrats who have been in the forefront. The New York Times (9 October) reports: “Democrats, in particular, have been eying China as a line of attack. This spring, national Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, began to encourage candidates to highlight the issue after reviewing internal polling that suggested voters strongly favored eliminating tax breaks for companies that do business in China.”

The Democrats have been flooding the airwaves with ads attacking Republican candidates for taking secret contributions from foreign interests and, in particular, supposedly selling out American jobs to China. Running point for the Democrats are the same labor bureaucrats who have proven utterly bankrupt when it comes to defending their members against the profit-bloated U.S. bosses. In USA Today (30 September), AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka railed, “We’re in a trade war with China,” declaring, “It’s time for action.” On October 15, the United Steelworkers bureaucracy hailed Obama for accepting the union’s complaint against China’s “predatory” trade practices—i.e., its state investment in energy-producing technology and other industries, which has helped China’s economy grow by huge strides while the world’s capitalist economies have been mired in recession.

Although administered by a parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, and despite capitalist inroads resulting from “market reforms,” China’s core economy remains based on collectivized property, providing examples of what can be done when the guiding principle is not the generation of profit. As Trotskyists, we unconditionally defend the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution. Simultaneously, we fight for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy and place power in the hands of workers and peasants councils committed to the fight for world proletarian revolution.

October 2: Sniveling Reformism in Action

When the AFL-CIO officialdom and NAACP called for a national demonstration in Washington, D.C., to get out the vote in November, the reformist left jumped all over the rally. The October 2 demonstration was held under the slogan “One Nation Working Together” and explicitly supported by Obama. One of its backers, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), noted on its Web site: “The demonstration had been planned for months, but an obvious spur that motivated many participants to make such sacrifice to attend was the Aug. 28 ‘Tea Party’ rally staged by right-wing media personality Glenn Beck on the National Mall.” The reformists are quaking in fear of a Republican victory, having done their part two years ago to help the Democrats gain control of the White House as well as Congress. Their framework is to mobilize people “in the streets” in order to pressure the capitalist state to do the right thing by workers, blacks and others, through the agency of the Democrats in office.

Since the bloom is off the Obama presidency, the reformists’ current tack is to hold up the sacred image of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s. The Progressive Democrats of America Web site (4 October) put it baldly: “When FDR was confronted with unemployment and the Great Depression, it was the progressive movement that met with him, just as we’re going to be on the streets to hold our president accountable. And at that time FDR said, make me do it. Well, we are here to remind Barack Obama to get on and do it.” In the Democrats’ tow, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which endorsed the October 2 march, opined (socialistworker.
org, 4 October) that Roosevelt was “forced by both pressure from below and the intractable economic crisis to take bold and risky actions—and put people to work.” (For more on the ISO, see article, page 2).

Roosevelt was indeed able to finish off the Depression—by cranking up industry to prepare for World War II, an interimperialist conflict which the U.S. fought with the aim of world domination. His New Deal reforms were seized upon by the reformists of the day to tie labor’s fortunes to the capitalist Democratic Party.

The nostalgia of the “progressive” movement for FDR’s reforms is rife with “national unity” appeals. Indeed, the October 2 demonstration was a sea of red-white-and-blue. Adding a pink tinge to the patriotic outpouring was the self-styled “Socialist Contingent” sparked by Dan La Botz, formerly a leader of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and currently Socialist Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Ohio. Joining this lash-up were, among others, the ISO, Socialist Action (SA), Solidarity and Socialist Alternative. From our vantage point, it appears that two unifying principles were supporting suing the unions in the bosses’ courts and bashing China.

SA’s Jeff Mackler, while making some noises about the “lesser-evil” electoral scam, raved: “The power that working people generate in Washington on Oct. 2 with their sheer numbers can serve to remind them they are a social force capable of great deeds” (Socialist Action, October 2010). In fact, the purpose of the rally was to galvanize as many voters as possible. By giving some left gloss to this flag-waving, Democratic Party mobilization, Mackler, the ISO et al. do their bit, as always, to herd working people across the class line.

This is also the effect of the PSL’s candidacy for California governor on the ticket of the petty-bourgeois Peace and Freedom Party, as well as the Workers World Party’s support for black Democrat Charles Barron, running for New York governor under the auspices of the “Freedom Party.” The Freedom Party’s “independent” posture is belied by the fact that it originated after Barron and others complained that the Democrats were not running enough black and Latino candidates. Campaigns such as the PSL’s are nothing new. The ISO, for one, has run candidates for the small-time capitalist Green Party. As we wrote in “Parliamentary Cretinism—ISO Goes All the Way with Capitalist Greens” (WV No. 866, 17 March 2006):

“The avowed socialists of the ISO are trampling on the most fundamental of Marxist principles: the political independence of the proletariat. More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx argued against calls for the German workers to support a petty-bourgeois party. In his 1850 ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,’ Marx declared, ‘The proletariat would lose its whole independent, laboriously achieved position and once more sink down to being an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This union must, therefore, be most decisively rejected’.”

Upholding the political independence of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, a workers party might well run for and even serve in Congress or in local or state-wide legislative bodies—but only as a revolutionary opponent of the capitalist state and all its institutions. In keeping with that understanding, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, opposes on principle running for executive offices of the capitalist state—e.g., mayor, governor, president. As we wrote in “Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State! Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009):

“The question of the state is a life-and-death question for a revolutionary workers party. It is the question of revolution. In adopting our position against running for executive offices of the bourgeois state and in critically reviewing the policies and practices inherited from our forerunners, we seek to illuminate the political gulf between the ICL and all the opportunists who falsely claim to be Marxists and to represent the historic interests of the working class. Our task is nothing other than the organizing, training and steeling of the proletarian vanguard parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International, necessary for the seizure of state power and the establishment of workers rule around the globe.”