"We need to export our capitalism and our democracy. They go hand in hand." John Kerry, May 3, 2003 Democratic Party Debate
The Presidential election in the United States will be close. As the Democrats and Republicans compete for the same constituencies, they increasingly sound the same. One thing is certain: whoever wins the November 2nd election will be a dutiful representative of US imperialism and a leading member of its ruling class.
The 2004 US general election, including the campaign for the presidency, has been engaged for nearly two years with an estimated 2 billion dollars to be spent by the end of it. That is enough money to provide health care for 1 million families of the estimated 18 million American families who have no access to health care, to pay the benefits and salary of 40,000 new teachers for a year, to distribute twice what the United States has pledged but not delivered to combat the AIDS pandemic...or about two weeks of the colonial war in Iraq.
George Bush's America is one of war, fear-mongering, increasing poverty and environmental degradation. An America where the recession beginning in the Clinton administration is replaced with a "new economy" that we must all get used to. The character of this "new economy" is a dramatic ratcheting down of wages and living standards for US workers while retaining, even increasing, the amount of work necessary for survival. One where the rich pay even less than before in taxes and earn more than ever in a governmental giveaway of tens of billions of dollars in blood-soaked war contracts to the likes of Dick Cheney's Halliburton and the vultures of the Bechtel Corporation.
Tens of thousands of military reservists and National Guard (most of whom joined only for the extra money, college tuition, or skill acquisition) have been pulled from their families to deployment where many make substantially less than their civilian jobs. These are men and women, many people of color, in their 30s, 40s and 50s who never imagined they would see combat or years away from their homes. The pressure to supply more troops to the theaters of war as well as the seven hundred military bases in over one hundred countries around the globe will only increase. While US imperialism needs a draft to retain its aggressive posture the world over, a draft would be politically difficult and would be vigorously fought by many, including those hitherto outside the antiwar movement.
A victory for the Democrat John Kerry would be symptomatic of an increasing rejection of the Bush agenda by large segments of the US population. Still, it would be a symbolic rejection that poses no alternative. The massive demonstrations in New York City against the Republican National Convention in late August and early September are an indication of that rejection. The fact that most of those demonstrating against Bush and his wars will vote for a vociferously pro-war John Kerry is testimony to the strength of the spurious politics of "lesser-evilism" so permeating "progressives" in the United States.
This is compounded by the lack of a genuine alternative agenda being proposed by the mainstream leaders of the antiwar movement, whose duplicity and confusion has, in large part, demobilized the antiwar movement when the movement's maximum mobilization should be its highest priority in order to shift the discourse in the United States away from how the US could win the war in Iraq to why the United States should immediately end the occupation of Iraq.
Kerry, a strong supporter of GATT, NAFTA and the FTAA, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on May 3rd saying he would be a "better friend" to business than the Bush administration! Kerry, who mentioned the unions in his convention nomination address not once and has since proven that, though unlike Bush he may be able to pronounce the word "union", he is loathe to do so. That the trade union leadership would support Kerry, the richest man to ever run for President on the Democratic ticket, without a demand on their part and without concession on his, is yet more proof of the urgent need for workers to take back their unions and put in place a leadership that will pursue the interests of their class, rather than the interests of the class that exploits them.
John Kerry is not an opponent of Bush's wars. He is complicit in them. He voted for them, he argued for them, he says the he, not Bush, can actually win them. He voted for the Patriot Act and, in his own pandering way, says that while he may have problems with the Act, he still supports "ninety-six percent" of it. Instead of framing his experience in Vietnam by his then opposition to that war, he offers up his medals won in service of that criminal enterprise as proof of his imperial credentials.
His pro-Zionism is more fluent, but no less extreme, than Bush's evangelical Christian support for Israel. Indeed, Kerry's support for the Zionist cause has led him to threaten war on Syria and especially Iran. While the Republican Party's support for Israel has been one largely born of their own view of US national and imperial interests, the Democratic Party has long been Israel's ideological partner and "true believer" in the United States. Kerry only seeks to continue that relationship with its genocidal consequences for the Palestinian people. If Kerry wins, the people of Iraq and Palestine lose. If Kerry wins, it may in fact be easier for the US to engage in new imperial adventures, as he will offer to share the spoils of victory with the other imperialist powers. This is the difference between Bush's "unilateralism" and Kerry's "multilateralism".
Kerry's rejection of gay and lesbian marriage has put him at odds with the most basic of rights for gay and lesbian couples: to enjoy equally the benefits (unfairly) bestowed by marriage and the recognition of their full legal equality. He has said that he is personally opposed to abortion and would not use the upholding of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights as a "litmus test" for judges he would promote, even to the Supreme Court. His lip-service to the struggles of blacks, Latinos and the poor only highlights his lack of substance concerning the needs which precipitated those struggles.
If the mainstream leaderships of the movements against the war, of gays and lesbians, of women, of immigrants, of people of color, and of workers have been "given a place at the table" of the Democratic Party it is only on condition of their acquiescence and servility to what amounts to a continuation of the Bush agenda in all but a few places. But this may backfire. As John Kerry attempts to sound more and more like the Republicans in the dying hope that he will undercut their appeal, it is likely that many will simply vote for the real thing, many more will not vote at all, and a small minority will vote for a third or fourth candidate. John Kerry is as much an enemy to our interests as Bush, and those on the left who would equate opposition to Kerry with support of Bush seek to lasso the movements back into the fold of bourgeois respectability and political subservience from which they have partially broken in the last period. This should be rejected and its practitioners politically defeated in the movements.
The tasks at hand are truly urgent, truly great: building an effective antiwar movement that sees itself as a movement against imperialism, the struggle to complete the movement for civil rights and movements of national liberation through the "expropriation of the expropriators", the recomposition of the workers' movement, including the creation of a revolutionary working-class political party, a dramatic change in our societal relationship with the environment, and the ending of capitalism's reign of inequity and alienation. These tasks can only be completed in the process of the radical transformation of society: a socialist revolution conscious of its aims and based on the only class with the ability, the numbers and the organization to lead such a transformation. With active participation and alliance of many: the excluded, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised. The working class, in its diversity and multitudinous bond, is the central and fundamental vehicle for such a transformation.
But what kind of party can organize, give leadership and voice for the aspirations for all those on the losing end of the "new economy", the Iraq debacle and the never-ending War on Terror/Drugs/Immigration/Crime?
In Brazil the Partido dos Trabalhadores of Lula, born of a mass, militant workers' movement in the midst of dictatorship, long held the allegiance of the oppressed of that country, only to confirm that a party that abandons struggle for the Siren trappings of electoralism enters a cul-de-sac. It upholds the compromises necessary to "win" without fighting for power at the expense of the social movements that formed and sustained it and undermiones its base. The great promise of the PT has crashed against the rocks of the limits of the PT leaders' reformist perspective, leaving only compromise, retreat and betrayal as they finish the neoliberal agenda of their predecessors. The promise of the PT has been broken and a new party needs to be built, absorbing the lessons of the PT and drawing the conclusion from its dramatic birth and its ignominious and treacherous decline.
There are other models. A Labor Party built on the trade unions, long a demand of the left in this country, again poses the question: what kind of Labor Party? Tony Blair's New Labour? The discredited Old Labour? The tensions between those who would reform a system in which reforms are won or granted and nearly always revocable and those who seek to go beyond the narrow confines of what capitalism has on offer for the vast majority of working people, poor people and the oppressed would immediately pose the question of what next? Do we challenge the system, posing a radical socialist alternative or do we, yet again and without any precedents, seek to make the system work for us?
The Green Party, in the United States the only (small) mass formation to the left of the Democrats, may now be a place to argue for and campaign for a break from the status quo and a rejection of "lesser-evilism", but in the end the Green Party was formed in contradistinction to class politics and continues to be a party deeply contradictory and racked by competing interests as you would expect from a party with, at best, a populist understanding of class and the workings of the capitalist economy. Everywhere that the Green Party has joined governments or aligned themselves with bourgeois parties it has split. A minority occasionally seeks to engage in class politics, a majority seeks to accommodate themselves the ruling powers, whispering progressive things in the ears of bourgeois politicians, all the while giving left cover to war and austerity. By its nature the Green Party must eventually split, when it is forced to chose sides in the class struggle. At the end of the Green Party film the face of Germany's Joske Fischer hovers behind the party's rolling credits of austerity, immigration controls, "law and order", "civil society" and humanitarian war.
And then there is the general idea of "independent political action" or IPA in US parlance. Independent from what? The ruling class? The working class? Political positions? Principles? Elections? Struggle? The Democrats? The Republicans? In a world defined by the hegemony of the capitalists and the increasing barbarism of their imperialist world order independence of working class interests is the highest and most necessary independence to be won. These interests can only be made independent in the concrete, in the form of program, of struggle and organization. Otherwise it is a metaphysical independence without the ability to intervene and to shape the destiny of our class. This must be done consciously, without equivocation to other, competing interests. In its great diversity and multiplicity of experiences leading to a common, essential need: the replacement of the rule of capital with the rule of that vast majority humanity -- the international working class in alliance with the oppressed and exploited who have everything to gain. The democratic rule of workers allows for the possibility of a general human emancipation, while with the continued rule of capital catastrophe is guaranteed. Independent political action without class, while all around the class war rages, is not just ineffective it can only exist in a vacuum to be filled by the politics of response to the paradigm of ruling class hegemony instead of countering it with the institutions, policies and methods that would seek to define a new hegemony, one of human freedom and social emancipation.
Ralph Nader and former Trotskyist and Green Party candidate from Governor of California Peter Camejo are running for President and Vice President, consciously courting the vote of the "anti-globalization" and antiwar movements. This campaign, constantly vilified and undermined by the "Anybody But Bush" left and the Democratic Party, is weak and inadequate. But it has provided a voice for those who want to end the occupation of Iraq, those opposed to the "free trade" agreements of the capitalists, those who seek a sustainable ecological relationship, and those on the left who favor genuine and effective political independence from the Democrats. It has won to its effort many of the most conscious and committed activists in the social movements, and this alone would make it of interest. The Nader-Camejo campaign is not consciously anticapitalist and anti-imperialist, let alone socialist. Rather, it provides a space for revolutionaries to argue for those tasks as priorities and pose solutions to those tasks. It is genuinely independent of the big capitalists and their interests and is the only mass expression of opposition to the war and of the international movement against capitalist globalization.
The historic tasks of the US working class are enormous, and they are tasks that cannot be achieved in isolation. It is unimaginable that the US working class will come to its historic role without absorbing the lessons not only of the past, but of the ongoing, rich experiences of those in struggle, sometimes intensely, sometimes in the grips of life-and-death decisions of consequence around the world. From Italy and Korea, Argentina, Iraq, Palestine, South Africa and Brazil, Ireland and Indonesia, Cuba and Turkey the US working class has a duty to stand in solidarity and, consequently, the ability to learn what can only come from objective experience.
Anything that strengthens the self-reliance and organization of the US working class and its allies, the creation of an electoral voice for the social movements and the call of political independence to them is to be encouraged and built upon. This is a particularly US problem, where the working class has not yet built a party, not even a social-democratic party, of its own. This will be a process with zigzags, detours and setbacks. It will undoubtedly look familiar and entirely different from our feeble forecasts, but to be a part of that process, regardless of our success or failure, is the only option available to those who cannot abide the status quo and who can see a future worth fighting for as that future echoes, even now, in the daily lives and struggles of our class.
Without such a party it will not be possible for the working class to enter into history under its own banners and in its own name. The task of revolutionaries in the United States is to build, with others, such a party. And such a party can only be built in the firm rejection of the Democrats as a party and in policy. This is even truer at a time of extreme pressure on and from within the left, the trade unions and social movements to, yet again, get in line behind those who would exploit our fears, rather than give voice to our aspirations. And more than that, a political force able in and conscious of its role as organizing center of a growing resistance and, ultimately, the indispensable lever to bring the class struggle to its conclusion: the revolutionary socialist transformation of society.