On August 29 an estimated half million people protested the US war in Iraq and the Bush agenda on the eve of the Republican Party National Convention in New York City. The protest highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the class and popular struggles in the US today.
The demonstration was large, about the same size as February 15, 2003. The demonstrators were mainly workers and youth. They included small but important contingents of trade unionists, people of color, and military families opposed to the war. The demonstrators were angry. Their numbers and passion confirmed that the antiwar movement in the US has remobilized, overcoming its dismay after the worldwide outcry last year failed to stop the US attack on Iraq.
On the other hand, the demonstration did not have a working-class character, since few of the endorsing unions had organized contingents and the US has no mass workers' parties. The demonstration was disproportionately white, especially for multiracial New York City.
The demonstration was called by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the largest antiwar coalition, around the ambiguous slogan "The world says no to the Bush agenda". It was not formally pro-Democratic Party, but most of the demonstrators reluctantly supported John Kerry and John Edwards as the "lesser evil" to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Most did so knowing that the Democrats are a bought-and-paid-for corporate capitalist party and that Kerry and Edwards are fully committed to the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, the so-called "war on terror", and neoliberalism.
On the capitalist side of the class line, the rulers are also of two minds. They would like to continue the aggressive policy the Bush administration has pursued since September 11, 2001, but they're concerned that it has created too many enemies. The intensity of this year's billion-dollar presidential election campaign reflects the uncertainty on both sides of the class line.
The combination of a resurgence of the antiwar movement and support for the Democrats as the "lesser evil" is no surprise, since the strength of US imperialism retards political developments here. On the whole, conditions are relatively favorable for revolutionary Marxists, since workers and youth are thinking and acting.
The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the economic and political situation in the US as a basis for understanding these complexities and, directly or indirectly, intervening in them.
The US economy suffered a recession in 1991-92, stagnated in the mid-1990s, grew relatively rapidly in the late 1990s, suffered another recession in 2000-01, and stagnated in 2002-03. The gross domestic product briefly expanded at a rate of more than 4 percent from the second quarter of 2003 through the first quarter of 2004, enough to create nearly two million new jobs. But the expansion and job-creation faltered in the second quarter of 2004.
The most likely scenarios for the next few years are a prolonged stagnation as in the mid-1990s or possibly a delayed second dip of a double-dip recession as in the early 1980s. Either way, the corporations will try to maintain their profit rates by ratcheting up the rate of exploitation of workers and lowering their conditions of work and life.
The US economy is both like and unlike the rest of the world economy. Like the rest of the world economy the US economy expanded relatively rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s and has generally stagnated since then. By the early 1970s the corporations had massive excess capacity in most sectors and invested mainly to lower costs, not to increase production. They could maintain their profit rates only by increasing the rate of exploitation of the working class.
In the early 1970s the workers successfully defended their economic and social position and even made gains. The 1974-75 recession was a turning point. After that the capitalists began to take back many of the concessions they'd made to ensure social peace in the previous 25 years.
Corporations downsized, outsourced, automated, laid off workers, speeded up those who remained, substituted temporary and part-time workers for permanent full-time workers, instituted two-tier wage scales, eliminated cost-of-living allowances, cut pensions, and increased employee payments for health insurance. They demanded that the government reduce taxes, deregulate, privatize, and cut back social provision for the unemployed and the poor.
In all this the US economy is like the rest of the world economy. But it's also significantly different. The US is economically more advanced and has higher living standards than the semicolonial countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia and the countries where capitalism has been or is being restored: the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, etc. Partly this is the result of previous economic development. Partly it's the result of imperialist superexploitation, enforced dependency, and outright looting.
In a reversal from the 1950s and 1960s the US is doing better than its imperialist rival. For more than a decade the US economy has been growing faster than the economies of Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and the other capitalist powers, although much of the difference is because the US population is growing through immigration, while the populations of most of the other advanced capitalist countries are steady or declining. The US has a lower unemployment rate than Western Europe, although much of the difference is because the US has two million people in the military and two million in prison, where they aren't counted as unemployed.
The relative success of the US economy in capitalist terms is partly because the US corporations have been more ruthless and effective in their restructuring than their European and Japanese counterparts. They've raised their rates of exploitation more sharply.
Partly the relative success is because the US is the dominant capitalist power, which has allowed it to shift the burden of its economic difficulties not only to the semicolonies and former workers' states but also to the other advanced capitalist countries. Sometimes this is done through bullying, but often it's done with the consent of the ruling classes of the countries to which the burden is being shifted.
As a seemingly secure haven in an unstable world, the US attracts masses of capital that allow it to run huge balance of payments deficits. The inflow helps finance both investment and government budget deficits, which for now stimulate the US economy more than the trade deficits retard it.
The US cannot sustain its balance of payments and government budget deficits, which are each about 5 percent of the gross domestic product. Hypothetically, this could lead to a financial collapse, if the Japanese, European and Chinese governments refused to accept more dollars and the US government couldn't find buyers for the bonds it uses to finance its deficit. More likely, continued deficits would lead to a recessionary rise in interest rates and taxes and decline in corporate investment and government spending.
At this point, however, a financial panic seems unlikely, and the capitalists still have room to maneuver by letting the dollar fall in relation to the Japanese yen and the euro, forcing it to fall in relation to the Chinese yuan, and reducing the government budget deficits through cuts in social spending and, if necessary, tax increases and cuts in military spending.
The world capitalist system experienced a period of relative equilibrium, following the period of extreme disequilibrium and crisis from World War I through the aftermath of World War II. The capitalists survived the crisis mainly because the working class lacked an international leadership with the program, perspective and influence to guide it to power. The Stalinists and social democrats betrayed, and the Trotskyists were too few. The new equilibrium was the condition for the expansion of the world and US economies in the 1950s and 1960s.
The postwar equilibrium was both economic and political. The capitalists invested massively to rebuild after 35 year of destruction and to exploit the technological and social advances of the preceding period. They made economic and political concessions to the workers' and popular movements and reached deals with the Stalinist, social-democratic, and nationalist leaders in the framework of the cold war, decolonization and the "welfare state". In the US this was mediated by the Democratic Party and the reformist leaders of the unions and the black and other social movements. The result was an upward spiral that sustained itself for twenty years.
By the late 1960s the workers and the oppressed were demanding more than the capitalists were willing to give. In the US this was expressed most sharply in the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and then a general explosion of youth militance, including in the unions, in the military, and among women, lesbians and gay men.
For the first half of the 1970s the workers had the initiative and continued to make gains. But in the latter 1970s the capitalists regained the initiative and began pushing the workers back, economically and politically. In the US the turning point economically was the 1974-75 recession, and the turning point politically was the 1977-81 administration of Jimmy Carter, although the shift is most associated with the 1981-89 administration of Ronald Reagan.
The workers continued to resist through the early Reagan years, but by the mid-1980s the US had a "one-sided class war", to borrow the expression of Doug Fraser, a United Auto Workers president who did much to demobilize the workers' side. From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s the pattern was more a one-sided class peace -- little resistance from the workers and constant "peaceful" but often deadly encroachment by the capitalists.
Over the 1980s Reagan morphed from a cold warrior and union-basher into a kindly grandfather, Mikhail Gorbachev's friend. George Bush, Sr., called for a "kinder, gentler America" and a "new world order" of capitalism and democracy. He sought United Nations approval to whack Iraq, claiming his goal was to free Kuwait, not to consolidate US dominance as the "sole superpower".
Next Bill Clinton murmured sympathetically, "I feel your pain", as he intensified the pain through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), spending cuts and tax increases to balance the budget, counterreforms of welfare, immigration and so-called criminal justice, and the war on Yugoslavia.
The capitalists' overall policy was neoliberalism, that is, laissez-faire capitalism in which the government intervened only occasionally and only in ways beneficial to the capitalists. The US government still employed coercion, justifying its violence as "war on drugs", "war on crime", or "humanitarian military intervention". But mainly it let the markets enforce the capitalist order, masking the old-fashioned tyranny of the market with the modern term "globalization".
Neoliberalism cloaked in democracy worked for the capitalists so long as the workers and the oppressed accepted Margaret Thatcher's dictum: "There is no alternative". But by the mid-1990s the workers and the oppressed were beginning to resist.
For nearly twenty years the capitalists had ratcheted down the working conditions and living standards of the US working class, 80 percent of the population. The poor suffered most, hurt by layoffs and other restructuring, real wage cuts, reduced health insurance coverage, and more punitive social welfare programs. The majority got by only by having more family members work, mainly women. A new generation of youth came of age knowing that their prospects were worse than those of their parents.
More and more people changed their outlook from "There is no alternative" to "This is no alternative". A series of strikes, most dramatically the 1997 Teamsters strike at UPS, made the class struggle two-sided again. Youth rebelled, most dramatically in the 1999 Seattle events in which workers and youth protested the World Trade Organization and supported each other's demands. The 1995 French public sector strikes and the 2001 Genova demonstrations went much further, but even in the US the times were changing.
The capitalists as well as the workers became dissatisfied with neoliberalism cloaked in democracy. As the workers became less willing to give what the capitalists wanted, more voices among the capitalists said: "Just take it." George W. Bush's election in 2000 was a narrow victory for the political representatives of the capitalist hardliners.
The Bush gang had no mandate from the divided US ruling class, let alone from the divided electorate. They could do little during their first eight months in office. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave them the opportunity to pursue their policies, which they claimed were needed to fight a "war on terror".
The Bush administration declared a "get tough" policy at home and abroad. It quickly obtained bipartisan congressional approval for attacking Afghanistan, whose Taliban-led government it accused of harboring Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It expanded its repressive powers through the Patriot Act, sharply increased military spending, handed out lucrative contracts to its backers, and cut taxes modestly for the middle class and much more for the corporations and the wealthy.
The US military won a quick victory in Afghanistan mainly by providing air support to the Northern Alliance and tipping the balance in the Alliance's war against the Taliban. Leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the pre-Taliban warlords, the administration prepared to attack Iraq. Its goal was to act on its newly proclaimed doctrine of military preeminence and preemptive war and to assert its world dominance, particularly its control of the world's supply of oil and natural gas.
The Democratic Party, including senators Kerry and Edwards, supported the administration on the war against Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the war against Iraq, many of the tax cuts, and "war on terror" in general. The corporate media sycophantically repeated the lies used to justify these policies. The union bureaucrats and the leaders of most of the large black, Latino, women's, lesbian/gay, environmental, and global justice organizations retreated.
The position of the Bush administration was not as strong as it looked, however. Much of the US ruling class was still content with neoliberalism cloaked in democracy and skeptical of the administration's aggressive policy. The attitude of the ruling class as a whole was: "Try it. If you succeed, we support you. If you fail, you're expendable."
The "national security" hysteria did not convince workers to cave in to corporate demands, immigrants to accept persecution, or antiglobalization and antiwar youth to remain silent. The April 2002 protest against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington, DC, drew tens of thousands of antiwar, antiglobalization, immigrant rights, and Palestine solidarity demonstrators, including for the first time ever at a national demonstration, many Palestinians and other Arabs.
The antiwar movement grew rapidly as the Bush administration prepared to attack Iraq. The antiglobalization movement revived and merged with the antiwar movement. Many unions passed resolutions against the war and its consequences, including the cuts in social spending and the attacks on civil and immigrant rights. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the war in Washington, DC, in January and in New York City on February 15, 2003.
The US military quickly defeated and dispersed the Iraqi military. But then US imperialism's real problems began. The Bush administration had naïvely expected the Iraqi people to welcome their "liberation". Most Iraqis welcomed the downfall of Sadaam Hussein, but they rejected US occupation. First the Sunnis began to resist, then the Shias. The US found itself drawn into a classic colonial war in which most of the population, sympathetic to the resistance, became the enemy.
The US ruling class has reason to be pleased. Economically the US is doing relatively well compared to most of the rest of the world, including its imperialist rivals. Militarily it has no rivals.
The US working class is relatively quiet. The proportion of workers in unions is the lowest since the early 1930s. Unions rarely strike and rarely win. Antiwar and other protests tend to be small or, when large, more festive than militant. Most workers and youth perceive their peers as unwilling to fight, even if they themselves are willing.
The two-party system still serves the capitalists well. This year 100 million people, most of them workers, will vote for capitalist candidates who support the "war on terror", the occupation of Iraq, and neoliberalism, even though a majority opposes these policies. Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo, running for president and vice president against the Democrats and Republicans, will get one, two or three million votes, the only sizable electoral expression of dissent from the imperialist consensus.
But the ruling class has reason to worry. Its military is caught in a quagmire. Bush attacked Iraq with half the number of troops his father sent in 1991, when the US wasn't trying to occupy the country, and a quarter the number of troops Lyndon Johnson sent to Vietnam. The war was a military success, but the occupation is failing. Bush had naïvely expected to move from triumph to triumph. But now he can't extricate his army from Iraq to attack his next target, while Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba defy him. Internationally, the US is the most isolated it's been since the Vietnam War.
The US economy is growing too slowly to maintain profit rates and to raise living standards at the same time. The most affluent 20 percent of the population, essentially the middle class and the capitalists, now receive 50 percent of the income and hold 80 percent of the assets. This inequality can't be pushed much further without provoking a working-class backlash. The capitalists will have to reduce the share of the middle class too, causing it to polarize and further undermining support for their rule.
Union membership is down, and much of the bureaucracy is too corrupt to do more than loot the treasuries and abandon ship. But the dire situation is forcing some rethinking in the bureaucracy and much more in the ranks. In 1995 John Sweeny's "New Voice" slate displaced the AFL-CIO old guard, charging that they weren't organizing new members effectively. The Sweeny administration put more money and energy into organizing, but it hasn't been able to reverse the AFL-CIO's decline.
Now the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the newly merged textile workers union UNITE and hotel and restaurant workers union HERE have formed the New Unity Partnership (NUP) to reorganize the AFL-CIO and its member unions to be more efficient in their "business" of recruiting and servicing workers, presumably displacing Sweeny in the process.
The NUP's bureaucratic rationalization will fail, just as the "New Voice" failed, but it's existence is a symptom of discontent in the ranks. Young workers resent the two-tier wages. Workers with families resent the insecurity and reductions in medical care. Older workers resent the loss of pensions. Non-union workers at Wal-Mart and other low-wage employers resent their exclusion. The tension at workplaces creates the potential for another CIO upsurge as in the 1930s.
Labor Notes, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), and other dissident publications and caucuses promote the ferment with their calls for rank-and-file mobilization, union democracy, and militant struggle.
Across the country local coalitions have organized to fight for "living wage" ordinances, affordable housing, better schools and city services, welfare rights, and immigrant rights, and against rent and utility rate hikes, evictions, utility shutoffs, homelessness, environmental dangers, and police brutality.
On most college campuses and in many high schools students have organized against the war, in solidarity with Palestine, Venezuela and Cuba, to support workers' struggles, to protect the environment, for immigrant and civil rights, for affirmative action for blacks, Latinos and women, and for affordable tuition, financial aid, and better wages for student workers.
Locally and nationally women have organized to defend the right to abortion and for equal access to education and jobs. In April 2004 an estimated 800,000 people demonstrated "for women's lives" in Washington, DC. Lesbians and gay men have organized for nondiscrimination, including equal rights for same-sex partners and the right to marry, and against attempts to deny these rights.
The cross-class social movements are much less powerful than the unions, since they organize people where they live and socialize, rather than where they work. But an alliance between the unions and the social movements could greatly strengthen both. In the 1930s many unions took up social causes, including the needs of the unemployed, the poor, women, blacks and Latinos. Their "social unionism" helped transform the CIO, for a time, from an organization of struggle against particular employers into an organization of class struggle.
The potential can be seen in worker-community and worker-student alliances like Jobs for Justice, living-wage coalitions, save our schools campaigns, immigrant worker organizing, welfare rights organizing, campus labor solidarity coalitions, US Labor against War (USLAW), and many other formations.
The two-party electoral system is losing its effectiveness, as more and more people see no reason to vote and those who do despise the candidates for whom they vote. To everyone's surprise Ralph Nader, running for president against the Democrats and Republicans in 2000, got 2.8 million votes. He probably won't do as well this year, but he should get at least a million votes, despite the Democratic Party's rabid attacks on him. Nader himself offers no working-class alternative to the capitalist parties, but his campaign shows the potential for a working-class break from the two-party system.
For the moment the class and popular struggles in the US are modest compared to many other places in the world. They're contained partly by the timidity and corruption of the leaders of the unions and the social movements, who refuse to mobilize the ranks and try to enforce their bureaucratic rule against any democratic challenge. The leaders generally accept the imperialist framework and support the Democratic Party, asking only small reforms to ameliorate the effects of neoliberalism.
The struggles are contained also by the lack of class-consciousness of the workers, who often seem to be to the right of the leaders, which the leaders point out to justify their timidity: "I'd like to do more, but my members wouldn't go along." But the leaders' conservatism coincides with their social interests much more than the workers' conservatism coincides with theirs. The workers naturally hesitate to risk what they and their families have. But they're being pushed past this threshold by capitalism's unrelenting pressure.
Revolutionary Marxists can't know when working-class upsurge will overcome capitalist containment in the US. Historical experiences here and contemporary experiences in other countries show us that the containment can be overcome, but not when it will be overcome. Meanwhile, we must work as best we can to raise the level of struggle and to build a nucleus around which a mass revolutionary leadership could coalesce.
It's easy to describe abstractly what needs to be done. Build the ongoing struggles of workers, African Americans, Latinos, women, lesbians and gay men, and youth, the struggles at workplaces, in communities, on campuses, against war, against capitalist globalization, and against all the injustices capitalism perpetrates here and abroad.
Present a socialist perspective based on a system of transitional demands that form a bridge between the perceived problems and a socialist solution. Build rank-and-file committees to democratize the unions and social movements. Build a revolutionary party. Establish worker's councils and dual power. Overthrow capitalism. Institute workers' democracy and enforce the rule of the working class. Build socialism.
But how should we concretize this in a country in which imperialism still rules almost unchallenged and a dozen revolutionary socialist organizations together have only a few thousand cadres?
A key problem in building a revolutionary workers' organization in the US today is that the people most open to revolutionary Marxism are college students. Most are in college because their parents want them to get out or stay out of the working class, and they, perhaps ambivalently, concur. They tend to be radical during their college years and then to get careers, have families, and drop out of political activity. If they remain political, they tend to get jobs in universities, union bureaucracies, and community organizations. They seldom get jobs or live in communities where they could organize from the ground up.
This problem will be solved only when a working-class upsurge makes leading the working class more attractive than leaving it for young workers who today are being shunted from one political dead end to another. For now revolutionary Marxists should do what we can to encourage activists to turn or return to the working class, and to support those who decide to do so.
A second key problem in building a revolutionary workers' organization in the US today is the deep racial divide in US society. People of color make up about 30 percent of the population. The largest groups are African Americans and Latinos, mainly Mexican Americans, each about 13 percent of the population. Legal and illegal immigration is constantly increasing the proportion of Latinos and has already created nonwhite majorities in California and Texas, the two most populous states. Moreover, people of color, oppressed by racism as well as capitalism per se, tend to be more militant than whites.
A working-class organization in the US must be multiracial to succeed. The union bureaucracy has figured this out, and most unions now have black and Latino officers at all but the highest levels. Far left organizations, lacking the resources to hire a multiracial staff, tend to divide along the racial lines of US society.
This problem too will be solved only when a working-class upsurge brings much larger numbers of black, brown and white workers into struggle together, creates multiracial organs of struggle, and helps the racially divided revolutionary left transform itself into the multiracial leadership the working class needs.
For now revolutionary Marxists should do what we can to bridge the racial gap, primarily by fighting for the predominantly white organizations to overcome the effects of societal racism on their external activity and internal lives. That is, by fighting to get them to take up issues of racial and national oppression, to build alliances across racial lines, to recruit blacks and Latinos, to encourage the leadership of people of color, and to transform themselves into acceptable regroupment partners for predominantly African-American and Latino organizations.
A third key problem in building a revolutionary workers' organization in the US today is internationalism. The US working class is very powerful, but it is still far too much under the sway of the US ruling class to revolt. Many workers and youth advocate international solidarity, but they understand this mainly as US organizations and activists aiding others. Most don't see that the US working class needs the struggles of workers in other countries to overcome its own limitations in consciousness and organization.
The Iraqi working-class and popular resistance needs the US antiwar and labor movements to do everything they can to restrain the US military. At the same time the US antiwar and labor movements need the Iraqi resistance to expose the lie that the US is fighting a just, humane, and relatively painless war. More generally, the US working class needs to see its struggle for emancipation as part of a world struggle against capitalism, led by US imperialism, in order to free itself from the blinders and harness of national chauvinism.
For now revolutionary Marxists should do what we can to build the union, antiwar and other struggles and patiently explain that US imperialism is the chief evil and enemy in Iraq and around the world, as it is in the US.
In 1992 the US supporters of the International Trotskyist Opposition (ITO), now in the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI), were a small group of Trotskyists in a very big country with no consistently Trotskyist organizations of any significant size. We faced a difficult question: Should we build a small, politically homogeneous organization on our program and perspectives, or should we join a larger, more heterogeneous organization in which we could put forward our program and perspectives?
In 1992 we formed the Trotskyist League (TL) as an interim measure. We knew that we were below the critical mass necessary to build an independent organization, since we could not at the same time intervene effectively in the class struggle, maintain our international links, produce a popular publication, a theoretical magazine and pamphlets on key issues, have a full internal life, and recruit and retain cadres. We sought to join a larger organization.
After two failed regroupment attempts and a protracted and sometimes rocky courtship, the TL joined Solidarity in 2002. We chose Solidarity because it defines itself as a revolutionary socialist organization, it is from the Trotskyist tradition, we agree with its "Basis of Political Agreement", it is relatively large by US standards, it has more presence in the US labor movement than any other far-left group, it has many strong cadres, it promotes women's leadership, it attracts students and other youth, it is democratic, and it permits organized tendencies.
We had more formal agreement with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), another revolutionary group from the Trotskyist tradition. The Ih3 is considerably larger than Solidarity, but it has less presence in the labor movement and undemocratically prohibits political tendencies between conventions, other than the leadership's de facto tendency. We judged that we couldn't survive there.
The ISO seems to be changing now, becoming less sectarian externally and more democratic internally. A unification of the ISO and Solidarity might now be possible and could help overcome the weaknesses of both organizations. We urge testing the possibility through joint work and political discussions involving the ranks as well as the leaders.
Tactical questions in the US are complicated by the backwardness of the political situation here. I'll discuss one example, the 2004 presidential election, which presents a question that would seem bizarre in most countries: With no workers' parties running, should socialists in the US support the Kerry-Bush slate as the "lesser evil", support the Nader-Camejo slate as a "protest vote" against the war and neoliberalism, support socialist candidates who will get almost no votes, or abstain?
Most social-democrats and post-Stalinists and many self-styled anarchists support the Democratic Party slate of Kerry and Edwards, joining the liberals in pleading "anybody but Bush". Many Greens support the independent slate of Nader and Camejo. Others support the official Green Party slate of David Cobb and Pat LaMarche, whose policy is to campaign only in "safe states" in which either Bush-Cheney or Kerry-Edwards are sure to win. LaMarche has said publicly that if she lived in a contested state she'd vote for Kerry, not herself.
Several small socialist groups are running candidates who will get a few thousand votes each. These include (in alphabetical order) the Peace and Freedom Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Workers World Party. Some anarchists and revolutionary socialists advocate abstention.
Solidarity, the ISO, and most other revolutionary socialists -- correctly, in my view -- critically support the independent slate of Nader and Camejo for the reason indicated above. Although the Nader-Camejo slate itself isn't a working-class alternative, it is the only sizable electoral protest against war and neoliberalism. Since most liberal "personalities" support Kerry-Edwards, the Nader-Camejo vote will be mainly workers, Latinos, African Americans, Arab Americans, and youth.
The election is very close and could go either way. As I write, Bush-Cheney lead in polls among likely voters, but Kerry-Edwards have begun to gain. Kerry has finally acknowledged that the war on Iraq was a mistake, although he still says that the US must win, not withdraw. This partial differentiation from Bush has revived his campaign, but it may be too little, too late.
Revolutionary Marxists are under enormous pressure to support Kerry-Edwards or to remain silent. Those who resist the pressure have a unique opportunity to discuss the need for independent working-class political action with workers and youth.
One to three percent of voters will support Nader-Camejo, frustrated to be casting just "protest votes". About half will vote for Kerry-Edwards, most of them opposing their candidates' core policies. About half will vote for Bush-Cheney, many of them against their class and other interests. Half of the 18-and-older population won't vote, seeing none of the candidates as worth a trip to the polls.
Revolutionary Marxists have something to say to all four groups, even the more open-minded of those who vote for Bush-Cheney against their interests: Only with independent working-class political action could we move beyond the ineffective choices of "lesser-evil" votes for the capitalist parties or "protest votes" for candidates with no chance to win. Only with independent working-class political action could we struggle effectively for the world we want, not just in elections but also on picket lines and in the streets.