Mackler Campaign—A Crude Class Line Against Greens, Dems

Critical Support to Socialist Action in Senate Election

California

In the run-up to the 2006 midterm elections, the working masses are again being subjected to the “choice” between the dual parties of capitalist exploitation, imperialist war and racist oppression. It is a choice between the justly feared and despised Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal in power and a Democratic “opposition” campaigning for a more effective plan for prosecuting the very bipartisan “war on terror” at home and abroad—in particular, how best to cut the losses of U.S. imperialism in the bloody occupation of Iraq in order to more efficiently deploy its forces against the peoples of the world.

We of the Spartacist League, as revolutionary Marxists, oppose on principle support to any capitalist party and stand for the complete political independence of the working class. While rejecting the notion that the working class can gain power through the vehicle of bourgeois electoralism, we recognize that there are times when the intervention of revolutionaries into the parliamentary/electoral arena can provide a useful platform from which to put forward our program and goals. Such tactics include the revolutionary party standing its own candidates and/or offering critical support to such parties as draw even a crude class line against the capitalist parties.

In his powerful book on communist principles and tactics, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained: “It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise—not lower—the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win.” Lenin advised the fledgling British Communists to extend critical support to the British Labour Party in order to expose the Labour traitors’ pretensions to “socialism” and to break workers’ illusions in them.

Socialist Action (SA) is standing Jeff Mackler as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in California, not only against the Democrats but also the bourgeois Green Party and its “socialist” candidate—Todd Chretien of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Unlike the reformist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which is also standing in the election but is not counterposing itself to the Green Party campaign that is popular in petty-bourgeois circles, Mackler’s campaign thus draws a crude class line. On that basis, we are extending critical support to Mackler in the California Senate race. We will actively campaign for a vote to the SA candidate while at the same time exposing SA’s reformist program.

“Antiwar” Work: Socialist Action vs. Marxism

Socialist Action has adopted a somewhat left-sounding posture in its campaign material, wherein it writes: “To the reformist credo, ‘Anybody But Bush,’ we answer, ‘No to the twin parties of war and oppression!’ and ‘Yes to the independent organization and mobilization of working people!’” (undated SA campaign supplement). An excellent sentiment; one which, however, is utterly belied by SA’s deeds.

Thus, while Socialist Action raises the call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, SA has pushed, and continues to push, “antiwar” coalitions in which the interests of the exploited and oppressed are subordinated to those of the class enemy. SA has been among the “best builders” of exactly the “Anybody but Bush” credo it claims to abhor, for example, through its work in the class-collaborationist United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). Seeking “unity” with anything that passed for an “antiwar” Democrat, UFPJ refused to raise the elementary call for military defense of Iraq against the U.S. onslaught. Ditto the ANSWER coalition of Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Not In Our Name (NION) initiative of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The SL and Spartacus Youth Clubs fought against this class collaboration and forthrightly called for defense of Iraq, making clear that such defense implied not an iota of political support to the capitalist regime of Saddam Hussein—an all-purpose tool of the imperialists and butcher of Communists, Kurds and many others in Iraq. Against the parties of U.S. imperialism, the trade-union bureaucrats, who are tied in the main to the Democrats, and the reformist left, we seek to win the working class to the program of revolutionary internationalism, to class struggle in “the belly of the beast” against the depredations of its “own” ruling class.

In its social-pacifist “antiwar” work, Socialist Action is virtually indistinguishable from the ISO and a host of other groupings in what passes for the American left. SA embraces not the revolutionary Trotskyist tradition of the early Socialist Workers Party of James P. Cannon, but the tradition of the latter-day SWP in full reformist flower. SA issued from the SWP many years after the SWP’s qualitative degeneration in 1965, which was marked not least by its work as “best builders” of the popular-frontist National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) during the Vietnam War. In its statement “A fighting socialist campaign!” SA boasts of Mackler: “During the Vietnam War, he served on the National Committee of the National Peace Action Coalition.”

NPAC constituted the right wing of the movement against U.S. imperialism’s dirty losing war in Vietnam. While the best of the youth radicalized by the struggle against the Vietnam War stood for the military victory of the National Liberation Front/Democratic Republic of Vietnam (NLF/DRV) forces, NPAC was busy sealing its alliance with the defeatist wing of the bourgeoisie, which sought to cut U.S. imperialism’s losses in Indochina. This alliance was sealed with the blood of leftists. At a July 1971 NPAC conference, SWP goons viciously physically attacked members of the SL and Progressive Labor-SDS who protested Democratic Senator Vance Hartke, a keynote speaker at that conference.

Mythology about the “broad movement” that forced the withdrawal of American imperialism from Vietnam to the contrary, the U.S. was defeated on the battleground by the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants—a victory for the world working class. We in the SL not only called for the military victory of the NLF/DRV forces, we also raised the call: “All Indochina must go Communist!” The SL and SYCs continue to fight today for revolutionary internationalist opposition to the depredations of U.S. imperialism, insisting that only with the victory of socialist revolution will its wars, invasions, occupations and counterrevolutionary machinations be brought to an end. We also fight for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution—i.e., defense of those states where capitalism has been overthrown, namely Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and China.

The Russian Question: Socialist Action vs. Trotskyism

SA’s campaign program contains the pacifist, anti-revolutionary demand: “No to nuclear power and nuclear weapons!” Pandering to the same eco-faddist, petty-bourgeois milieu from which the Greens recruit, this demand is counterposed to the Leninist understanding of the need for dependent countries under imperialist threat, such as Iran, to have nukes for their defense. It is also counterposed to the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states. Given U.S. saber-rattling against North Korea and hostility to China’s nuclear arsenal, this issue is posed pointblank.

Despite any formal pretensions to Trotskyism it may claim, SA’s support to the forces of capitalist counterrevolution in the former Soviet bloc is programmatically indistinguishable from the openly “Third Camp” reformists of the ISO. Thus, the masthead of its newspaper, Socialist Action, is designed to imitate that of Lech Walesa’s Polish Solidarność. Solidarność —the only “union” beloved by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the CIA, the Pope and Western bankers—consolidated in 1981 around a program of counterrevolution against the Polish deformed workers state. As Trotskyists, we forthrightly supported the suppression of its counterrevolutionary bid for power. In contrast, in 1981, when still in the SWP, future SA honcho Nat Weinstein demonstrated alongside “Captive Nations” anti-Communists at a rally for “poor little Solidarność.”

The capitalist counterrevolution that eventually prevailed in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc states represented a profound defeat for the proletariat worldwide, decimating the industrial-military powerhouse of the non-capitalist world. We Trotskyists fought tooth and nail against counterrevolution, from the former East German workers state to the USSR. Today, triumphalist U.S. imperialism has its sights set on counterrevolutionary overturn in China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam. While SA calls for defense of Cuba, their defense combines sloganeering for such supportable but minimal demands like “End the blockade and embargo of Cuba!” with uncritical political adulation of the Castro bureaucracy. But the Stalinist, nationalist policy of “socialism in one country” pursued by Castro has undermined the defense of the Cuban Revolution. In Cuba, as in the other deformed workers states, we raise the call for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the bureaucratic misleaders and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky’s revolutionary internationalism.

Cuba is popular in rad-lib circles, and SA’s position costs it little. Rather it adds a little “left” gloss to SA’s stodgy, Stalinophobic reformism. Not so popular is the Chinese deformed workers state, a chief target of U.S. imperialist encirclement and economic pressure, which SA has written off as capitalist. Thus, SA’s 2005 Political Resolution stated: “Among the Stalinists, of course, are the Maoists, whose legacy is the restoration of capitalism in China and the immiseration of hundreds of millions.” Such a position echoes not only rad-lib sentiment but also the protectionist, chauvinist China-bashing of the trade-union bureaucracy. In contrast, we advance the necessity to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party to lead China’s huge and powerful working class, at the head of the peasants and urban poor, in a proletarian political revolution. In so doing, we seek to win working people in the U.S. to the necessity to defend the gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution against the machinations of the U.S. rulers and the labor traitors who serve them.

State and Revolution: Socialist Action vs. Leninism

Despite left-sounding verbiage in the SA campaign supplement that “We fight for a break with class-collaboration policies of both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win national federations,” the fact is that among SA’s first political acts after emerging from the SWP was to serve as goons for the San Francisco labor bureaucracy when thousands of Bay Area workers took to the streets to stop scab buses during the 1983 Greyhound strike. As for the elementary principle of keeping the bosses and their courts out of union affairs, a prominent SA supporter in New York City transit, Marty Goodman, was a longtime member of New Directions—a lash-up of union-suers—in TWU Local 100. SA’s words here are again contradicted by its deeds.

Then there are SA’s garden-variety reformist campaign demands to “tax the rich” and its utopian/Laborite call to “nationalize bankrupt corporations under workers’ control!” Marxists know that the interests of labor and capital are irreconcilable. But SA’s demands imply a touching faith in the existing system and its state to act in the interests of the working class, a stance counterposed to the revolutionary program of expropriation of the bourgeoisie through workers revolution and the establishment of proletarian state power.

Victory in the struggle for socialist revolution in the U.S. requires the recognition that a cornerstone of American capitalism is the oppression of black people, segregated at the bottom of society as a race-color caste. The unfinished tasks of the second American revolution—the Civil War which smashed the Southern slavocracy—must be finished by a third, proletarian revolution. The plight of death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal—award-winning journalist, former Black Panther and later a MOVE supporter—exemplifies the racist nature of the capitalist state, not least its use of the barbaric death penalty, a modern version of lynch-rope terror. At every level the courts have declared that Mumia, framed up for the killing of Philadelphia cop Daniel Faulkner, has no rights they are bound to respect. Mountains of evidence of his innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, killed Faulkner, have been dismissed by the judicial system.

SA and Mackler have been among the most prominent and consistent advocates of mobilizing under the call for a “new trial” for Mumia. That call is consciously tailored to appeal to mainstream bourgeois liberals who see Mumia’s case as an isolated “miscarriage of justice” rather than the conscious political frame-up it is. Such an approach demobilized millions who had earlier rallied to Mumia’s defense, including the worldwide outpouring of workers and youth in 1995 which stayed the executioner’s hand at that time. Recently, the misnamed, SA-led “Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal” held a June 9 rally in the Bay Area that encapsulated this failed strategy in the demands: “One court decision from execution! One court decision from new trial & freedom!” While advocating the pursuit of all possible legal proceedings on Mumia’s behalf, we place no faith in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. Rather, we place our confidence in the power of the multiracial organized workers movement, which has every interest in fighting for Mumia’s freedom and must be mobilized independently of the very forces of the capitalist state that framed him up and seek his death.

In The State and Revolution, Lenin emphasized Marx’s point from the 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto: “The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Lenin’s work on this document was “interrupted” by the Russian October Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party. Counterposed to the reformist SA, we seek to build a party on the model of the Bolsheviks, to lead the fight for new Octobers! The fake left longs to see the Democrats “fight”—including through the pressure tactic of support to the bourgeois Green Party. SA’s claim to stand as socialists against all the bourgeois parties is the basis for our extending critical support to it. At the same time, clearly, the reformist, “Anybody but Bush” content of SA’s program is an obstacle to revolution. Vote Jeff Mackler!