No Choice for Workers in 2004 Elections
Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!
U.S. Out of Iraq Now!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 832, 17 September 2004.
With a peculiarly war-crazed and oddly demented administration sitting in the White House, there is a strong sentiment among many working people, minorities and young activists to vote for “Anybody but Bush.” It is not so much that people want to vote for Democrat John Kerry, but that they want to vote against Bush. While wanting to see Bush ousted is a wholly understandable sentiment, to throw one’s vote to another competing capitalist politician runs counter to fighting to defend the interests of working people and the oppressed. The policies pursued by the Bush regime that rightly elicit opposition and indignation (like the Iraq war and occupation, the “war on terror” and evisceration of democratic rights, the attacks on the rights of black people, immigrants and women, etc.) are not simply the product of a particularly vicious administration. War, racism and repression are endemic to the oppressive capitalist system under which we live. To defend and pursue the interests of working people and the oppressed, what is required first and foremost is a break with all capitalist parties—beginning with the Democrats, the other party of war and racism—and the forging of a revolutionary workers party that fights to get rid of the capitalist system through workers revolution.
While the country is becoming ever more sharply polarized as the elections approach, the differences between the two candidates are ever narrowing. This could be easily gleaned from the recent Democratic and Republican conventions, both of which were unabashed displays of patriotism and militarism (as well as police repression against protesters—see article on RNC protests on page 6). Bush launched the Iraq war; Kerry voted for the war and says he would vote for it now even after the exposés of the grand lies the administration used to invade Iraq. Bush is for maintaining the bloody occupation; Kerry is for maintaining the bloody occupation. Bush wants to continue waging the “war on terror”; Kerry promotes himself as a more effective fighter in this sordid “war,” which is a war against immigrants, black and working people, and a means by which the capitalists try to deny the population its democratic rights and civil liberties. Even on those issues where the candidates disagree, like abortion rights, Kerry proclaimed that he would have no problem appointing an anti-abortion judge to the Supreme Court.
It’s not simply that the policies of Bush and Kerry are so alike, but that the two parties of American capitalism are so alike. Both parties represent the interests of the capitalist ruling class. In a “state of the union” speech 32 years ago, America’s great essayist and novelist Gore Vidal aptly noted, “We have only one political party in the United States, the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat.” Today, Vidal adds, “Although the secret core to each presidential election is who can express his hatred of African-Americans most subtly (to which today can be added Latinos and ‘elite liberals,’ a fantasy category associated with working film actors who have won Academy Awards), and, of course, this season it’s the marriage-minded so-called gays. So-called because there is no such human or mammal category (sex is a continuum) except in the great hollow pumpkin head of that gambling dude who has anointed himself the nation’s moralist-in-chief, William ‘Bell Fruit’ Bennett” (Nation, 13 September).
In 1948, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon explained how Marxists define the class character of a party:
“It is not determined by the class which supports the party at the moment, but rather by the class which the party supports; that is to say, by its program. That is the basic meaning of a political program, the support of one class rule or another. The class character of a party is also determined by its actual practice.... Another factor to be considered is the composition of a party. A bourgeois party of the classical type is easily recognized because it has all three of these qualities—it is bourgeois in program, in practice, and in composition.”
— “Election Policy in 1948,” printed in “Aspects of Socialist Election Policy,” Education for Socialists (March 1971)
To move forward and to effectively fight for their rights and interests, working people and leftist youth must begin with the understanding that American society, like all capitalist societies, is divided between two fundamental classes: the capitalist class and the working class. The capitalist class owns the means of production; in turn, the working class, in order to survive, is forced to sell its labor power to the capitalists, and through its labor generates the surplus value that the capitalists reap as profit. The working class is the only objectively revolutionary class in capitalist society; it has its hands directly on the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation systems of modern industrial capitalism—and the social power and interest to overthrow capitalism.
The fundamental problem, though, is political consciousness. It is commonplace for American workers to identify themselves as “middle class.” This bourgeois ideology, or false consciousness, is transmitted to the working class by the conservative pro-capitalist AFL-CIO officialdom. It is reinforced by ostensible socialists who give open or backhanded support to the Democratic Party and capitalist politicians like Ralph Nader as “lesser evils” or “realistic” choices.
Whatever rhetoric they put forward, every capitalist politician—whether they be Democrat, Republican or Green—serves and pursues the interests of the capitalists and their system of exploitation. Fundamentally, the government under capitalism is nothing but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, serving to manage the affairs of the capitalist rulers. To defend its rule, the bourgeoisie has its own capitalist state—its cops, courts, prisons, military—that uses both force and deception to maintain the rule of capital.
Democracy under capitalism is nothing but democracy for the capitalist rulers. It is the means by which the bourgeoisie disguises its rule with the appearance of a popular mandate, and maintains its deception of those who oppose its systematic violence. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin captured it in his 1917 work, The State and Revolution, “To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.”
Because the bourgeoisie not only controls the media, schools and political life of the country, but also the “special bodies of armed men,” as Lenin called the apparatus of the capitalist state, capitalism can never be voted out of office. The capitalist state—an institution of violence against working people and the oppressed—can never be made to serve the interests of working people and the oppressed. It has to be smashed through a workers revolution that puts in place of the capitalist state a new and different kind of state: a workers state based on a planned and collectivized economy in which production serves to satisfy human need rather than capitalist profit. The establishment of proletarian rule—in the U.S. and internationally—will lay the material basis for the rational expansion of production and the elimination of scarcity, allowing for an unprecedented development of human freedom in all spheres.
The struggle for socialist liberation requires above all the building of a workers party to educate the working class about its historic role as the gravedigger of capitalism and to lead it to power—a revolutionary workers party whose primary arena is not the ballot box, but the shop floor, the picket line and the street.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
It would be false to say that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans. But the difference is one of style rather than content. The Republicans seem to revel in seeing and inflicting suffering on working people and the oppressed; in turn, the Democrats put on a more kindly face, posture as “friends” of labor and blacks, all the better to deceive the working people in order to give a more popular and democratic facade to pursuing essentially the same policies as the Republicans.
In that context, the role of “progressive” Democrats like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney and others is to head off and contain any potential social struggle, keeping it safely within the confines of the capitalist system. This was clearly displayed during the antiwar movement, for example. While most Democrats in Congress voted for the war, just about every major demonstration organized by fake-Marxist outfits and their coalitions—like Workers World Party and its International ANSWER coalition—was tailored to provide a platform for “progressive” Democrats. These Democrats (and the “socialists” who promoted them) did everything to bill the Iraq war as simply “Bush’s war” and to advocate “regime change” at home (i.e., voting Democrat) to the millions who came out to protest the war.
But the horrors inflicted upon the Iraqi masses through war and occupation—like U.S. helicopter gunships firing missiles on Iraqis gathered around an attacked American armored vehicle on September 12, a deliberate act of mass murder and collective punishment against civilians—are not simply the products of a deranged American government. They are an expression of the very workings of capitalist imperialism, the competition for resources and “spheres of influence” between the major imperialist powers, and, consequently, the raping and bleeding of semicolonial countries like Iraq.
Meanwhile, the role played by “third party” candidates like Ralph Nader is to legitimize the American capitalist electoral system in the eyes of the many disillusioned youth and others, and, as Nader himself has repeatedly made clear, to steer the Democrats in a more “progressive” direction. Ralph Nader is a bourgeois politician who neither calls nor pretends to call for ending capitalism, only for giving breaks to “little capitalists” against “big capitalists.”
In principle, Marxists will not give any political support to any capitalist party or politician because that would mean joining the bourgeoisie in deceiving the workers and further tying the workers to their class enemy. At the same time, Marxists are not indifferent or opposed to participating in elections. In opposition to comrades in the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party who wanted to support the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace (a capitalist politician dripping with populist rhetoric), Cannon outlined a Marxist approach to bourgeois elections in the same 1948 speech quoted earlier:
“We proceed from a principled line. The basic aim of our principled line is to assist the development of independent political action by the workers and turn it towards a revolutionary culmination.
“There is the reformist conception that a labor party, by its very nature, must necessarily be a reformist party, and that reformism is a necessary and inevitable stage of the development of a working class political movement. Against this is the Marxist conception that a reformist stage of working class politics is not necessary and not preferable; we do not advocate that the workers pass through a stage of reformism on the road to revolutionary Marxist politics.”
Here in the U.S., there has never been a mass workers party. The American ruling class has been highly effective in exploiting deep divisions within the proletariat, first along religious and ethnic lines and later along racial lines. Segregated at the bottom of society yet integrated into the economy, constituting a key component of the working class, black workers are a doubly-oppressed race-color caste. Black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism. If it is to fight for its own emancipation, the multiracial proletariat must take up the struggle for black freedom. Black rights and labor rights will either go forward together or fall back separately. The working class will transcend its division only through class and social struggle. Socialism in the U.S. will be achieved only by the common struggle of the multiracial working class under the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party.
Every gain working people have made in this country was wrested through hard struggle. To hold onto and expand these gains means politically combating the current pro-capitalist union leadership, which in a thousand ways impedes class struggle by tying the working masses to the capitalist order, primarily through support to the Democrats. It will be through the struggles of working people that a new class-struggle leadership will be forged in the unions. From the militant strike waged by UFCW grocery workers earlier this year to the potential strike by hotel workers on the West Coast and Washington, D.C., there is a palpable sense among workers and the oppressed that they have to fight to defend their livelihoods and better their conditions of life. The question is one of educating the working class that it must not only fight against expressions of its exploitation, but to overthrow the very capitalist system that breeds its exploitation.
For us, the call to break with the Democrats and build a workers party is not just words but the guideline for politically independent class-struggle action. Exemplary actions initiated by the Spartacist League, Labor Black Leagues and Partisan Defense Committee are powerful examples of the kind of fighting workers party we seek to build. We built the 9 February 2002 united-front protest against the Patriot Act and Maritime Security Act in Oakland, California—the first union-centered demonstration in the U.S. against the anti-labor and anti-immigrant “war on terror” after September 11. On 23 October 1999, while Democrat Al Sharpton fought for a permit for the race-hate terrorists of the KKK to rally in Manhattan, we initiated the mass mobilization of several thousand opponents of KKK terror around a proletarian core of support. Actions like these give workers and youth a taste of the potential for victory when one is unshackled from ruling class parties.
“Anybody But Bush” Reformists
In keeping with the “Anybody but Bush” sentiment so shamelessly pushed by the reformist left during the antiwar demonstrations, most ostensibly socialist organizations have failed to draw even the crudest class line in these elections, and have instead acted as the best builders of “Anybody but Bushism.” For Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization (ISO), this means signing on to the Nader/Camejo campaign—in the case of the ISO, only recently openly after some initial coyness on the question. While Nader makes no secret of the fact that he is not anti-capitalist, his running mate is a “progressive” stockbroker whose political career took him from the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) through several unsavory incarnations until he gave up the ghost to any “socialist” pretensions altogether. Even the ISO, which supported Nader in 2000, admits: “There are reasons for the left [to] be critical of Ralph Nader—his courting of the right-wing Reform Party’s endorsement, for example” (Socialist Worker Online, 10 September). Yet in the same article, the ISO writes: “A vote for Nader is the best way to say no to the evil of the Bush agenda, in both its greater and lesser forms—and to contribute to the building of a future political alternative.”
There are times when a revolutionary communist organization can offer critical support in an election—but only to an organization in the workers movement, never to a bourgeois candidate. There are times when Marxists can choose to run their own candidates in elections, as we have in the past, in order to take advantage of the heightened political interest during election time to gain a hearing for our program. But Marxists are opposed in principle to taking an executive office (like president)—i.e., to the administration of the bourgeois state apparatus. We run on a program for socialist revolution as the only solution to the exploitation and racial oppression inherent in capitalist society.
In countries where mass reformist workers parties exist, a small communist organization might, under certain circumstances, call for a vote to such a party in order to show workers with illusions in that party that once in power, it would defend the interests of the capitalists and not the workers. Lenin described the tactic of critical support as offering “support...in the same way as a rope supports a hanged man.” In the U.S., where there is no such party, we have sometimes advocated critical support to a candidate in the workers movement whose electoral program in some key way represents a break with capitalist rule. In the current election, none of the left groups running their own candidates merit even savagely critical support.
The Workers World Party (WWP) is fielding John Parker and Teresa Gutierrez, who are running on a vague program to further “mass action and class struggle.” WWP states: “These two working-class candidates will be running against the pro-war, pro-intervention, pro-big business politics of George W. Bush and John Kerry” (Workers World, 3 June). But this lip service to some opposition to both capitalist parties was belied by WWP’s work through their ANSWER coalition in the antiwar movement where they actively courted Democratic politicians. Most recently, WWP urged a vote to “progressive” Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney. A July 22 editorial in Workers World gushes: “Workers World Party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates, John Parker and Teresa Gutierrez, send Cynthia McKinney heartiest well-wishes for victory!” So much for WWP’s “independent” campaign, a campaign virtually disappeared by WWP itself at the RNC protests, the better to blend in with the “Anybody but Bush” crowd.
We are not calling for a vote to the SWP either, whose quirky reformist program along with its nominal existence do not make it a particularly appetizing prospect. During the California recall elections last year, we did apply the tactic of critical support to the SWP’s gubernatorial candidate because, as we explained: “The SWP’s election platform, which presents, in however crude a way, a working-class line, allows us to make concrete and clear-cut our opposition to Davis while at the same time expressing our opposition to the Republicans’ attempted electoral coup” (“California: Vote Yes to Recall Davis! No Vote to Capitalist Parties!” WV No. 810, 26 September 2003). There is no such merit to advancing such a tactic in this presidential election.
We Spartacists are not alone in refusing to call for a vote to any of the candidates in the elections; both the RCP and Progressive Labor Party (PL) have the same position in the pages of their respective newspapers. However their radical-sounding rhetoric masks reformist and opportunist practice. Thus, the RCP talks a lot about revolution and its youth group, the RCYB, waved red flags during the RNC protests while adulating the RCP’s supreme leader, Bob Avakian. RCYBers chanted: “The earth is quakin’/Follow Bob Avakian/The empire’s shakin’/Follow Bob Avakian.” However, following “Chairman” Avakian led, during the antiwar movement, to the RCP’s leading role in the class-collaborationist Not In Our Name (NION) coalition, no less eager than its ANSWER counterpart to promote Democratic Party politicians. To make it crystal clear, the RCP’s Revolutionary Worker (29 August) advises: “Go ahead and vote for Kerry if you feel you really have to, but put your efforts toward recasting this polarization.” Logic was never these Maoists’ strong suit, but it should be clear this blessing to a vote to the Democrats is class betrayal.
During the RNC protests, PL was one of the few left groups that had a clearly anti-capitalist contingent with chants that drew a crude class line. PLers are sporting a T-shirt this year with the slogan: “Revolt! Don’t Vote.” PL also openly proclaims its desire to fight for communism and can look pretty militant in comparison with the rest of the reformist left. However, PL’s posture is in flat contradiction to the work they do on the ground for capitalist candidates. The August 18 issue of Challenge, for example, carried a letter by “A comrade,” which states that she “worked with the Dennis Kucinich campaign, which had a strong, vocal opposition to the war in Iraq.” In the same issue, PL printed without comment a letter by a “Chicago Reader” criticizing Barak Obama, the black Illinois Democratic Party politician who made a big splash at the Democratic National Convention. The letter, however, goes on: “During the Senate primary race I volunteered at his South Side office.” Why? “Chicago Reader” goes on to say that they’ll explain later “how communists working in his campaign must deal with the contradiction of ‘being in it to win it,’ (one has to be among the masses to win them to PL’s politics) while exposing the ruthless core of liberal fascism as the great danger to the working class.” So, PL tells workers not to vote for “liberal fascists” while uncritically publishing the views of those who work in such campaigns!
A socialist program has to begin by telling the truth about this class society, the necessity for revolution. To end imperialist war, racist oppression and capitalist exploitation, there is no other way than to build a revolutionary workers party. No vote to capitalist politicians! For a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government! For international socialist revolution to open a new period of human freedom!