Democrats: A History of Knifing Labor and Blacks

We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Down With the Occupation of Iraq!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 833, 1 October 2004.

The nasty, brutish and long 2004 electoral campaign is pounding into its final weeks as the two capitalist candidates, Bush and Kerry, contend for the bloody mantle of imperialism’s Commander in Chief, each claiming to be the best war president, the hardest on “terrorism.” Democrat Kerry says it’ll take another four years, but he’ll “finish the job in Iraq and refocus our energies on the real war on terror” (New York Times, 25 September), while Bush arrogantly claims everything is great in Iraq, lecturing the United Nations and parading his toady Ayad Allawi. But the U.S. occupiers and their loathed, dictatorial puppets face growing chaos, as the American empire brings war, disease, hunger and death to the people of Iraq.

We call for the unconditional, immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq! Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered, and over 1,000 American soldiers have died, sent to kill and be killed to maintain the power and profits of U.S. imperialism. An article in the New York Times (26 September) titled “What If America Just Pulled Out?” captured why no capitalist politician is calling for an immediate withdrawal: “Withdrawal in the absence of stability would amount to a devastating admission of failure and a blow to America’s world leadership. The credibilty of the United States, already compromised, would be devastated. More than 1,000 young [American!] lives would appear to have been blotted out for naught.” Well, yes.

Against the bloody occupation of Iraq, the American working class should take a side: with those fighting against the neocolonial occupiers and against the U.S. workers’ own rulers, who enforce exploitation and racist oppression abroad and at home. Every blow struck against the U.S. occupiers, their allies and Iraqi puppets is a blow struck against the enemy of workers and the oppressed all over the world.

Insofar as the insurgent forces on the ground in Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers (including the over 20,000 private mercenaries operating in the country), we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. However, we vehemently oppose the fundamentalism, terrorism, communalist violence, car bombings that indiscriminately blow up innocent people on the street, the kidnapping of civilians, as the opposite of everything we Marxists stand for. We are for national and democratic rights for everyone, for the liberation of women, for abolishing the capitalist profit system and taking the oil fields and factories out of the hands of the capitalists and putting them under the ownership and control of the working class, so that the wealth of society will serve human needs. It will take working-class struggle, throughout the region and internationally, to achieve these goals.

Our standpoint is that of the international working class, the only class that can liberate all humanity from capitalist exploitation through socialist revolution, most centrally in the United States, the most powerful imperialist power on earth. We judge every question from that perspective, including the elections in the U.S. There’s no choice for working people in this year’s presidential elections. The two capitalist politicians obviously represent their own capitalist class interests, counterposed to ours. Ralph Nader’s eccentric small businessman campaign represents no break with capitalism and is opposed to socialism. Fake-Marxist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which calls for a vote to Nader, claim that such is a vote for “peace.” Hardly. Nader is for an “expeditious” withdrawal from Iraq and for the United Nations, filthy handmaiden of U.S. interests, taking over. He owes much of his ballot status to Patrick Buchanan and the Reform Party, who are obviously pushing him as a spoiler against the Democrats.

The main political obstacle to our perspective in the U.S. is the continued hold of the capitalist Democratic Party over the labor movement through the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy. We say workers and black people must break from the Democratic Party—the other party of war and racism—and build a revolutionary workers party to fight for a workers government. The following presentation, edited for publication, was given in Chicago on September 11 by Spartacist Central Committee member Ed Clarkson. Comrade Clarkson motivates our Marxist perspective in the context of the last half-century of American imperial politics, faithfully carried out by both the Republicans and Democrats.

I have a large “9/11” written here because I realized I was giving this forum on September 11, and the destruction of the World Trade Center has some significance in the current election campaign. The attack on the World Trade Center was a criminal act, perpetrated against people who had done nothing wrong except to go to work. As we pointed out at the time, the people who carried out that act think approximately in the same way that imperialists do, that is, that ordinary people are guilty for the crimes of their rulers. Unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. But as we wrote in Workers Vanguard (No. 830, 6 August): “That recognition does not make the attack an ‘anti-imperialist’ act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people—in this case, the passengers on the plane as well as the maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon.”

The September 11 attacks were seized upon as the reason for the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. The imperialist powers, when they attack smaller countries, almost always need to manufacture something as a reason. Of course, if you think about it, the idea that Afghanistan’s a danger to the United States is, on the face of it, ridiculous. In this case, the act of terrorism provided U.S. rulers with what they construed to be a reason. But it’s not the real reason. And then of course, Bush had to invent the “weapons of mass destruction,” just like during Vietnam Lyndon Johnson invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and just like in the beginning of U.S. imperialism’s entry on the world stage—the 1898 war against Spain—it invented the “Remember the Maine” incident. Such inventions are really rather common.

We’re in a subscription drive, and so we’ve been asking people on campuses what they think about the elections. For the most part they’re not too impressed with Kerry. On the other hand, they’re scared to death of Bush. So pretty much what we hear is that although they’re not sure Kerry’s any good, they’ll probably vote for him and against Bush, and that’s understandable on both sides. Kerry really hasn’t said much that’s any different than what Bush has to say. On the other side, Bush does seem a little bit mad—as we’ve described him, oddly demented. In addition to two wars, we’ve had the not-so-surprising torture at Abu Ghraib. Not surprising because Bush is after all the guy who put out “Wanted Dead or Alive” contracts for Osama bin Laden and Hussein, and describes as “evil” people who were fighting the U.S. It’s hardly surprising that the U.S. did evil things to those people.

Then there are his loyal supporters, the vacant-eyed, largely racist Christian fundamentalists, who give people pause. One Oregon woman supporter of Bush, from that particular portion of the population, described the reason for her vote, that god is in the White House. Now as a Marxist, materialist and an atheist, I was actually kind of pleased to have a believer finally admit that god was a vastly ignorant, bullying and lying Texan. These types are rather scary. It’s not just that they believe. But they think belief is superior to facts and reality. Thus Cheney, who knows this audience well, drones on and on about how Saddam and Osama used to play croquet every day on the palace lawn, and nuclear weapons were stacked like firewood on the streets of Baghdad. Now those things are lies, but 50 percent of the U.S. population thinks that they’re true.

There are some differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. If you looked at the conventions on TV, the Democratic Convention looked a little like this room—a little of this, a little of that, a little black, a little Hispanic, a lot of women. At the one four years ago, 28 percent of the delegates were trade unionists. It was probably as high this time. The Republican Convention was sort of “Unpleasantville”: people that are kind of strange, that you may not want to know. On the one hand, the Democrats play to a base that’s largely composed of liberals, working-class people, blacks, and so they tend to express concerns for things like health, jobs, education, sometimes even peace. Republicans, on the other hand, like to emphasize small government, low taxes, fiscal responsibility, no restrictions on enterprises, and tend to push the idea that if the rich are really rolling in it, everyone profits. “High tide raises all boats,” as they say. And this plays well to the very wealthy. It also goes for small businessmen, who think if their employees are real frugal and watch their diet, they can get by on three or four dollars an hour just fine.

The Republican Party, in the process of history, has gone from the party that led the progressive Civil War in the middle of the 19th century to becoming the main party of racist reaction. The Democrats held that job for a century or so until the ’60s and ’70s. Usually the top members of the KKK were also Democratic Party members and often elected to office as such. The Republicans tend to push America the strong, the pure, the just: jingoism. The Democrats do that normally through the vehicle of “America First” protectionism for workers, which is sold very much by the labor bureaucracy. It’s the same message, but it’s wrapped rather differently. So young people tend to hope perhaps that the Democrats will be less cruel than the Republicans. In this they are assisted by the anarchists and socialist groups, like the International Socialist Organization, that pander to the “anybody but Bush” campaign. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out who the anybody is that they’re asking you to vote for.

The short form of this presentation is that it’s the American imperialist rulers and their capitalist system, and not particular governments, whether Republican or Democrat, which are responsible for war, exploitation, the race-caste oppression of blacks in this country, for the shredding of our rights, for our lack of access to health care and education and, indeed, in some ways, for our lack of access to a future. So it’s really the system that’s got to go, and that requires a socialist revolution in this country, which means we must link the cause of black freedom to the fight against all exploitation and injustice. Note that the situation of black people probably hasn’t been mentioned in the context of a presidential election in perhaps three decades now. It’s just not considered polite. A vote for any one of the bourgeois candidates is a vote of confidence, in fact, in their imperialist system, a vote that says that this system can be fair and humane, and a vote against the crying need for a socialist revolution and for building the revolutionary working-class party that is necessary to have such a revolution.

From Truman to Kennedy: From Hiroshima to Vietnam

Let me go through my experiences as I was growing up with this process. The first election I remember was Harry Truman’s in 1948. I was nine years old, already a Democrat—it came with the neighborhood. If you had asked me, I would have said, sure, vote for Truman, even though I knew he just nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I didn’t think that was especially charming. It seemed more like an act of terror than an act of war. But I was pleased when he was elected: it was actually a big upset. Those of you who know a little bit about history know the august Chicago Daily Tribune printed a headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Well, he didn’t win, Harry did.

But then the aftermath gave me some pause. Because it was the Democrats, under Truman’s leadership, who launched the Cold War, what has come to be known as McCarthyism. It’s actually an inadequate description, because McCarthy was a latecomer. The Democrats drove the reds out of the trade unions by 1950, using their “America First” supporters in the unions, and that’s when McCarthy appears on the scene. The Cold War, what it meant for me as a kid, was that every day I got on my knees and faced the wall of my classroom, put my head down. That’s an atomic bomb drill—it was supposed to keep you safe. And as we said at the time, “and kiss your ass goodbye.” Because we all were kind of aware that this was not going to defend us from atomic attack.

The red purge of the trade unions was something I didn’t exactly understand, nor did I understand why it was “bad” to be a socialist. Socialism certainly seemed to me not an insane thought, and one perhaps Americans should be permitted to hold. I can’t say I was a socialist myself. The Cold War seemed to me to make no sense, because after all hadn’t we just been the allies of the Soviet Union, who seemed to have done a very nice job mopping up the Nazis, without much help, incidentally, from the United States. And then they put the Rosenbergs on trial under Truman. They weren’t executed until 1953 when Eisenhower came into office.

Most scary for me was the Korean War, because then I was a little older, I was then 11 or 12, and I was getting close to draft age. In the Korean War, in about the same time frame that this Iraq war has gone on, 30,000 American soldiers died. It was hot, plenty hot. And no one in the country much liked it. At the time I wondered what business the United States had interfering in those affairs, which shows you I wasn’t a Marxist. Now I know why the United States interferes in those affairs. Most of the country really didn’t like it, except it was the McCarthy period, so you couldn’t say anything, or else you’d be driven out of your job and harassed by Congressional investigating committees.

Instead, people elected Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who had a tremendous preference for golf, and who did immediately end the Korean War by simply drawing a line in the sand and not signing a peace treaty, and walking away from it. There is no peace treaty with North Korea to this day. The Republicans are supposed to be good for business. But in Eisenhower’s eight years in office, there were two major recessions. I said, jeez, this doesn’t make much sense. I was looking for a job in the second recession and didn’t find much. Eisenhower’s response to the civil rights struggles in the South was essentially to let the racist mobs be. On those occasions when the government intervened, it was usually when black people were doing something to defend themselves. So that didn’t seem very promising.

Then the 1959 Cuban Revolution happened at the end of his term, and I remember being kind of pleased with that. Actually Castro came to the United States, appeared on the Jack Paar show at the time, stayed in Harlem, which was smart. And of course Eisenhower hated it, but he couldn’t do anything about it because of the Korean War—too many bodies already. I mean, the reason people in the United States didn’t like Korea is they just fought a major war and they didn’t want another one. But Eisenhower did stonewall, and probably actually influenced the Cuban regime in the final steps it took, in the sense that Castro decided there was to be nothing forthcoming from the American imperialists, so he nationalized everything on the island of Cuba.

I’ve never voted for a bourgeois candidate of any sort. I came close once with a presidential candidate. Before I turned 21, which was both the voting and the drinking age at that time, I became in my mind a communist with the help of some friends who convinced me of the essentials of the Marxist analysis of capitalism—that is, the fundamental motor of the system is the drive for profits. The fundamental classes in capitalism are, on the one hand, the class that owns everything, the bourgeoisie, and on the other hand, the class that makes everything, the proletariat. Imperialism was in fact the exportation of this system of exploitation to backward and weak countries. Some of us had connections with the working class, and the giant civil rights struggles were going on, beginning in about 1955 or so and escalating throughout the period. So we were very much convinced that unless you fought racism in this country, the necessary working-class revolution would not be able to occur. We did not understand the race-caste oppression of blacks in this country, but we understood that if it wasn’t fought there was no way the American working class was going to be able to unite. So Kennedy didn’t get my vote. And he doesn’t even know it.

But those ideas compelled me then, and they compel me now. In any event, JFK didn’t seem very appetizing, although he was dressed up like a Boston liberal, as is Kerry today, and was Catholic and all that. He ran to the right of Nixon. He ran on a program of rearming American imperialism, accused Eisenhower of having given the store away because of the revolution in Cuba. And I had just sort of been there, under Harry Truman, and I didn’t particularly think that was very appetizing. Sure enough, Kennedy gets in office, we have the Cuban Missile Crisis, when every thinking person in the United States thought it could well be over. You had the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba before that, which was only dropped because nobody showed up for the CIA-led invasion, and Kennedy kicked up the level of the U.S. in Vietnam a little bit.

Part of the Way with LBJ?

So Kennedy disappears, for reasons we all know, and LBJ takes his place. Now we come to the point of my weakness, the election that pitted Lyndon Baines Johnson against Barry Goldwater. LBJ was kind of a typical New Deal Democrat—but Southern, and at that time, that meant he hadn’t exactly played a great role on the race question. He was better than some, but pretty much in that bloc. The essence of the campaign was about what was going to be done in Vietnam. Barry Goldwater had this very interesting idea. At that time the United States was not bombing North Vietnam. He thought it would be good to bomb them back into the Stone Age, and was even prone to consider using nuclear weapons to do it. This guy was quite crazy. I thought, maybe in this case I should go for LBJ. And if this reminds you somewhat of the current Bush regime, this is why I bring it up. But fortunately, I had a friend in Progressive Labor Party who convinced me that “a boss is a boss is a boss.” I didn’t make it to the polls, though I was highly tempted.

So we know what Johnson did. There was some civil rights legislation passed in response to the mass battles for civil rights that occurred, mainly in the South, but also in the North of this country. There was a “war against poverty” that evolved out of the ghetto upheavals, in an effort to buy people off. But, it turns out, Johnson then went on and bombed the north of Vietnam. The U.S. in fact dropped more bombs on Vietnam than had been dropped in the entire European theater during the Second World War. Three million Vietnamese were dead as a result. So it goes to show you.

Johnson, unlike the myth about Democrats raising taxes, raised no taxes, which is almost impossible in a war because you have to spend. As a result, at the end of his term, the U.S. was on the ropes economically. And the reason he didn’t raise taxes is that he wanted to buy off the black population with some measures—and in some sense there were some genuine progressive measures there, especially the end of de jure segregation—and he also wanted to buy off the working class by not making them pay for the war. Johnson figured, rightly, that raising taxes would have further inflamed antiwar sentiment. Well, since the working class didn’t begin to strike until the end of this period, in that sense he was successful. In turn, what the civil rights legislation and the “war on poverty” did was give an excuse for the black Democrats, some of whom are still around today, like Jesse Jackson Sr., to return to the fold of the Democratic Party. The Panthers and others who thought social justice hadn’t been achieved yet, quite correctly, but didn’t quite know how to get there—they were left out there on the streets by the black Democrats who for the most part allowed them to be mowed down by the FBI without much of a protest. Over thirty members of the Black Panther Party were killed in the aftermath of that.

The next candidate of interest was Jimmy Carter, who was sort of the opposite of what you would construe as a Democrat. In fact he looked a little like George Bush does. He said people shouldn’t expect justice in this society, “life is unfair,” we’re going to have to give up some things, we’re getting a little too fat. He talked about family values and the importance of religion—all that kind of stuff. Mostly he was interested in rebuilding the strength of the United States, which had lost its ability to intervene in the world. This was the result of the fact that the Vietnamese, with justice, drove the U.S. out of Vietnam. That war wasn’t very popular amongst the population. And Jimmy Carter thought this was unfortunate, and he should change this.

The people who voted for Jimmy Carter weren’t very impressed with what he had to say once he got into office, so they immediately elected Ronald Reagan. The air traffic controllers union, PATCO, went on strike, and he smashed the union. It doesn’t exist today. What most people don’t know is he did it with a plan devised by Jimmy Carter when he was in office, because the strike had been pending for some time. He also had a tax cut. One of the things about the PATCO strike that tells you something about the current leaders of the American trade union movement was that they let that union sink. Normally you’d think of the trade union tops as bound to the Democratic Party. But remember Reagan was in office. Some of them go Republican occasionally. But their real allegiance is to the system of capitalism. That’s what’s behind their allegiance to the Democrats. All they had to do was close down the airports. Period. That strike would never have failed. One week, and it would have been over. The heads of some of the unions that refused to do that called themselves socialist—like Winpisinger in the machinists.

Ronald Reagan did a very uncharacteristic Republican thing—he was a fiscal conservative, small government, and all that. But he spent more money and expanded the government more than any Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He did this because he had intensified what we describe as “Cold War Two,” which started under Carter. There was immense, vast, military spending, again without taxation, which again put the U.S. in hock, so that George Bush Senior, his successor, had to suffer the consequences, and he was voted out of office.

Bush Sr. was replaced by Bill Clinton, who I think in some ways is the most amazing president of the 20th century. Anybody who watched the convention saw that they would have re-elected him, fellatio or not. If they could have done it, they would have brought him on again. I mean, they were ecstatic when he was on that stand. And there’s no question he’s quite personable and seems to have a certain charm; he plays the saxophone, eats bad food and gets down and talks to people. If you look at what happened during his regime—and you know, Clinton is still a big favorite among many black people—more black men went to jail during the Clinton years than has ever happened. Look what happened in Iraq during the Clinton years. More Iraqis were killed by Bill Clinton, by far, than have been killed by either of the Bushes to date. Over a million by his UN sanctions policies. All the “anti-terror” legislation, people now being deprived of their rights, immigrants being picked up on the street, etc.—all passed by Clinton.

So this guy is really a consummate political swindler. Which shows you the task we have, the obstacles to forging a revolutionary party, because there are a lot of illusions in this country. And insofar as they tend to exist among working people, they tend to exist in the favor of the Democrats. It also simultaneously shows you the disservice the rest of the left does by giving a backhanded vote to these guys, because what that does is of course add to those illusions, that there is a possibility for fundamental reform there.

Now the interesting thing is, my father could have told me exactly the same story about a vastly different America than I was raised in, just as the America I was raised in is vastly different than the one that exists now. He could have told me about two presidents, both Democrats, who ran on peace platforms and then immediately went to war. He could have told me about the first war against terror in this century, which was called the Palmer Raids, which was launched under the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, in which thousands of socialists were imprisoned and immigrants—and that’s what the American working class was at that time, immigrant—were deported. Some of them went back and joined the Bolsheviks, which is quite good. He could have told you about the roaring ’20s, when the working class had the boot in its back, and how the initial Roosevelt measures against the Great Depression were actually pro-boss. And that nothing really happened in this country until the giant class struggles that built the CIO, that is, from 1934 and after.

U.S. Government: Executive Committee of the Capitalist Class

Why do I bring this all up? Imagine you’re a Martian now; you’re taking your course on U.S. history. You’ve been told what the Democratic Party says it is, and you’ve been told what the Republican Party says it is. And then I give you some of these incidences that I’ve just gone through: the Korean War, the Cold War, the destroying of PATCO. You could not guess, from the incident, which party was in power. Nor could you guess what the politics of the particular president were. Because all that, in the final analysis, is hype. It’s window dressing. It’s not what’s involved.

What the government is, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, is what Marx and Engels called “the executive committee of the ruling class.” Its job is to realize the dominant program and aspirations of the American ruling class and of American imperialism. If it fails to do so, it will be replaced in one way or another. Sometimes, in some countries, this has been through military coup. Now what are these dominant aspirations of the American ruling class? Fundamentally, they’re to increase profits and to increase the ability to make profits. And what that requires, of course, is a constant effort to reverse and combat the working class in its struggles against the capitalist system, and also the rest of the oppressed. And of course occasionally, when subjected to mass struggle, the ruling class gives out a few goodies. But then of course, subsequently continues to take them away. And as I said, imperialism is really just the exportation of this, in a meaner way, to countries in which people really starve to death.

Now one very important counter-manifestation to this, since the Bolshevik Revolution, is something we call the “Russian Question.” In the Russian Revolution the working class took power and kicked out the capitalist exploiters. Isolated, increasingly impoverished and surrounded by hostile imperialist powers, the young Soviet workers state went through a conservatization. Stalin took the political power away from the working class by 1923-24, and went on to eventually consolidate a dictatorship based on a bureaucratic caste. The primary appetite and the task of the American imperialists since Day One, as the most powerful imperialist country on the planet, was to destroy the Russian Revolution, the most historic and fundamental gain of the working class. Secondarily, they’ve also operated to attenuate the unions. The bourgeoisie has operated, with its willing labor lieutenants in the labor movement, to pretty much hamstring and domesticate the organized labor movement, and also simultaneously to reduce it considerably in size, so now it’s about 10 percent of the workforce.

Trotsky pointed out that if you don’t fight for past gains, you can’t fight for future ones. Thus our position defending the Soviet Union, where the last remaining gains of the Bolshevik Revolution were overturned in 1991-92, with Yeltsin at its helm. Our position towards the remaining societies where capitalism was overthrown—North Korea, Cuba, China, Vietnam—is that we defend them against the bosses, against any attempt to restore capitalism. In the same regard we defend the trade unions from attacks by the bosses. We recognize that the political leadership in these societies does not operate in the interest of proletarian revolution, and so we are for a political revolution to overturn them, just as we are for, in this country, replacing the existing leadership of the trade unions with a class-struggle leadership.

Our socialist opponents are rather different in that regard. They didn’t defend the Soviet Union, in fact they rather cheered when it fell apart. The immediate effects of counterrevolution on the population in those areas have been devastating. But also that counterrevolution is responsible for what the U.S. is able to do to the world right now—war after war after war. It wouldn’t have happened if the Soviet Union was still around. Not in that way, at least—because the USSR was a military counterweight against the U.S. But the fake-Marxists all cheerled. Now they tend to hide that. And they did not defend Iraq or Afghanistan against imperialist attack. They didn’t call for what is sort of elementary, that is the defense of the victims. The absence of such defense on the part of the working class signifies that the working class is still tied to the program of its imperialist masters. And unless that tie is broken, the working class cannot proceed to try to realize its historic aspirations, which are to liberate humanity from all forms of constraints except those imposed by biology and the pursuit of sex. Or, as some would say, love.

Fight for Socialism!

Now, Kerry. He’s for increasing the U.S. military, for increasing the war against terror, which I assume will eventually lead to cavity searches at the El stops. As we’ve noted, in the recent period, under Bush and under Bill Clinton before him, and evidently under Kerry and the Democrats, who are really worried that Bush hasn’t made us “safe” enough, the government has operated in such a manner as to essentially assert that citizens have no rights that the government is bound to respect. Like most Democrats, Kerry is interested in increasing pressure on North Korea, as part and parcel of what the Democrats consider to be the appropriate role for U.S. imperialism, which is to drive off the map any societies that have expropriated capitalism. He’s very much for what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, which is potentially genocidal in nature. He wrote a little tract called “The Cause of Israel Is the Cause of America.” The good thing, he says, is “help is on the way”; there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Well, unfortunately it is a train, I believe.

There’ll be no substantive change in the condition of working people unless there is class struggle in this country. Wages will go up and down. Some more will be hired or not hired. But the general direction is down, unless there’s struggle in the factories and struggle in the streets. Eighty percent of the delegates at the Democratic Convention were against the Iraq war. And yet Kerry isn’t. Why? The reason is the American imperialists cannot abide the idea of giving up their position in the Near East, which has both geopolitical and oil resources of untold importance. And so they can’t, in any meaningful way, pull out. They might end the military hostilities in some way, although it’s still a mystery how they’re going to do that. But they cannot really give up their influence in that part of the world. This could happen through a couple of mechanisms: either proletarian revolution in the area, or if they lost it to their imperialist competitors. And this the American imperialists are not going to abide. No bourgeois candidate could promise, in fact, to get out of the Near East, and indeed Kerry doesn’t.

Nor does Ralph Nader, for that matter. He says he’ll leave expeditiously. I have to admit I have trouble seeing what people find in Nader. He’s in many ways a typical small businessman. He doesn’t like unions in his business, doesn’t like Chinese imports, not a word about black people, worries about immigration, too many people coming in, supports capitalism but thinks the big corporations are unfair. I mean, this is not very exciting, and his main purpose for running, as he states it, is to pressure the Democrats. Nevertheless, there are a couple groups, the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative, that are hyping him in the elections, which reveals, I think, their reformist core. That is, what they really stand for is not socialism, but a reform of the capitalist order. Socialist Alternative describes this as “critical support.” Now sometimes in fact we, the Spartacist League, have given critical support to working-class parties. Nothing wrong with that. But what is critical support of a capitalist? It can only be construed as critical support of capitalism. Moreover, Socialist Alternative calls on Nader to build a workers party in the country. As my daughter would say, “what have these guys been smoking?” How can somebody who’s not fond of trade unions form a workers party in this country?

Elections and voting can be good for some things. But the government is the executive committee of the ruling class, and the core of capitalist class rule is the cops, the army and the courts. In the final analysis, it’s the gun. Guns don’t respond to votes. The cops and the army, those class institutions, have to be smashed if there’s going to be a socialist revolution.

If there was such a party in power, the immediate effects would be: Free health care for everyone, next day. Free education at all levels for everyone, next day. A move to end the forced segregation of blacks in this society, next day. A move to employ everybody in this society, next day. Everybody’s wage is livable. That’s easy. And then we begin to build for real, for a real socialist future.

Now we’re not that party. Our numbers are too modest, our influence in the working class is too small. But we do have elements: we have the program and we have the will. We have the program for socialist revolution, which comes from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, applied to these circumstances. And we have the necessary will to fight to forge that party, and never to cave in to one liberal or bourgeois fad or another, as do our opponents. Our opponents generally accuse us of not doing much. Actually, if you were to join us, you would do more than you wanted to. There are leaflets to write. There are things to be learned about socialism, about the history and structure of the thought of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. There are demonstrations to be had. There are interventions to make, to expose the people who prop up this system through their illusions.

So there’s lots of work. We built demonstrations against the Klan, in the urban centers, a couple around Chicago. We built a demonstration out in Oakland several months after September 11, which called for “Down with the war on immigrants! Down with the Patriot Act!” In proportion to our size and abilities, we carry out such actions as we can, around a program that is for the working class. So, to those of you who burn, I guess that would be the word, at the current injustice, oppression and slaughter that we have been offered by the capitalist system, you can of course continue to vote and hope that things don’t get worse. The odds are they will. Or, you can join us and consider fighting for the end of injustice, oppression and exploitation for all time. And that’s not a bad deal.