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Workers Vanguard No. 1011
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26 October 2012
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Elections 2012:Wall Street Democrat vs. Wall Street Republican
For a Workers Party That Fights for a Workers Government!
Part One
The following is a presentation, edited for publication, by
Spartacist League spokesman Paul Cone at an October 13 forum in Los
Angeles.
As revolutionary Marxists, our approach to the elections is the
same as our approach to all our work and especially our interventions into class
and social struggle. We seek to break the workers from illusions that the
Democrats, Republicans or any capitalist party can be relied on to
promote their interests, or that any lasting improvement of their lot can be
achieved under capitalism. At bottom, the belief that any fundamental change for
workers and the oppressed can be achieved through the ballot represents a
utopian belief in the reformability of the bourgeois state.
We seek to instill in the working class, as well as radicalized
youth, the recognition of the unique social power the proletariat possesses as
the collective producers of most of the wealth of this society. Such social
power needs to be realized through a party of their own, a workers party. What
we mean by that is not an electoral vehicle but a party that leads the working
class and oppressed in a fight for workers rule: the expropriation of the
capitalist class through workers revolution and the formation of a workers
government. In a society under workers rule, the productive capacity and
resources are owned in common and production is based on human need—not the mad
chase after profits.
I want to also point out that we communists would run for elective
office and serve in the Congress and other legislative bodies as revolutionary
tribunes of the working class—i.e., as oppositionists to the
capitalist order. But we would not run for executive offices such as president,
governor, mayor. Holding executive office means taking responsibility for the
administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. Running for such
offices can only reinforce illusions that the capitalist state, under the right
leadership, can be made to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed.
Although the working class here has historically waged some of the
fiercest battles against the bosses and their state, the U.S. stands out as the
only advanced capitalist country where the working class has not attained even a
minimal level of political class consciousness. In its mass, the American
working class has never supported a party whose declared ultimate goal is the
replacement of the capitalist system with a socialist society, or which even
claims to stand simply for workers’ interests in their day-to-day struggles
against the employers. The two primary, and interrelated, obstacles have been
illusions in the Democrats and the racial and ethnic divisions promoted by the
capitalists, both of which are purveyed by the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy.
Capitalist Crisis: Workers Pay
This year’s elections come in the context of four years of the most
severe economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We’ve seen the
continued hemorrhaging of jobs, home foreclosures and massive indebtedness along
with a massive bolstering of the forces of state repression under the pretext of
the wars against terrorism and drugs.
To the tune of trillions of dollars, first Bush and then, even more
so, Obama bailed out the con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were
central to this collapse. The working class, black people, Latinos, the poor,
the sick and the aged have been made to foot the bill. Alongside large-scale and
long-term unemployment, corporate profits have, on the average, risen at an
annual rate of 4.8 percent over the past three years. Over the past year, the
net worth of the 400 richest Americans grew by $200 billion—an average of $50
million each. In that same period, median household income fell by 4 percent. In
New York City, the center of American finance capital, nearly 1.7 million people
are officially classified as poor, the highest figure in more than a decade.
Officially, the homeless population of the city is 46,000.
The national jobs report issued on September 7 disclosed that only
69.8 percent of men over the age of 16 were either working or looking for
work—an all-time low. With one-quarter of jobs paying below the poverty line for
a family of four, 58 percent of all job growth since what they like to call the
“recovery” is in low-wage occupations, earning less than $14 an hour. Six
million people have no income other than food stamps. Some 2.8 million children
live in households with incomes of less than $2 per person a day—a benchmark
generally associated with the impoverished Third World.
In racist America, it’s all the worse for black people and Latinos,
who were among the main victims of the banks’ subprime mortgage scams. One-third
of black and Latino households have no net worth, with many underwater in debt.
Over 25 percent of blacks and Latinos are officially recorded as living in
poverty.
Periodic economic crises, such as the one we are in now, are
inherent in the capitalist system of production for profit. In the 1930s, the
one country that not only wasn’t ravaged by the Great Depression but experienced
great economic development was the Soviet Union, where the working class in 1917
had taken state power, which was maintained despite the subsequent bureaucratic
degeneration under Stalin. Today in the Chinese deformed workers state, where
capitalism was overthrown by the peasant army led by Mao in 1949, state control
of the economy has greatly offset the effects of the worldwide economic crisis.
Short of the working class taking power, there is no crisis that
cannot be surmounted by the bourgeoisie. In “The Death Agony of Capitalism and
the Tasks of the Fourth International,” better known as the Transitional
Program, which was written in 1938 during the Great Depression, revolutionary
leader Leon Trotsky put forward a series of demands that are applicable today.
These demands address the economic catastrophe facing the working class,
“unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the
proletariat.”
In the face of mass unemployment, Trotsky called for a shorter
workweek at no loss in pay to spread the available work, for a massive program
of public works and for wages to rise with prices to guard against the ravages
of inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the capitalist
owners and the swindles of the banks, he argued that the workers should demand
that the capitalists open their books. He also raised the call for the
expropriation of branches of industry vital for national existence and of the
most parasitic of the capitalist owners. He underlined that such a demand must
be linked to the fight for the seizure of power by the working class, as against
the Stalinist and social-democratic misleaders for whom the call for
nationalization was merely a prescription for bailing out capitalist
enterprises.
Trotsky bluntly put it: “If capitalism is incapable of satisfying
the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let
it perish.” In opposition to the capitalists and their reformist agents, Trotsky
argued that “‘realizability’ or ‘unrealizability’” would be “decided only by the
struggle,” by means of which, “no matter what its immediate practical successes
may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating
capitalist slavery.”
Obama at Helm of U.S. Imperialism
Our opposition to Obama and the Democrats, no less than our
opposition to the Republicans, is a class opposition. It’s not a
protest against the Democrats’ failure to live up to expectations—they did
exactly what we expected. It is not a search for some alternative within the
capitalist electoral framework—a formation like the Greens or the Peace and
Freedom Party that would supposedly break the two-party monopoly with a
bourgeois third party. Nor is it an exercise of political coquetry: “Oh, if you
know we always vote for you Democrats, what would compel you to carry out our
political wishes?” All of these are how the radical liberals and reformist
socialists approach the question of the Democratic Party. No less than open
support to the Democrats, these do nothing to advance class consciousness but
rather keep the working class enthralled to the capitalist order. They are all
obstacles to building the revolutionary workers party necessary to end this
nightmare of capitalism once and for all.
As we wrote four years ago (“Obama: Commander-in-Chief of Racist
U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 925, 21 November 2008):
“The election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the
United States has aroused great expectations among working people and the
oppressed around the world. Black people and others celebrated on streets
throughout the country the election of the next Commander-in-Chief of bloody
U.S. imperialism.... Amid fears of a new Great Depression...hopes for ‘change’
center on the incoming Democratic Obama administration. These hopes will be
brutally dashed.”
We also pointed out: “As America’s next top cop, Obama will
preside over the racist capitalist system, which is based on the exploitation
of working people at home and abroad.”
That prognosis was verified—and then some. But we didn’t need a
crystal ball. V.I. Lenin, who founded the Bolshevik Party and together with
Trotsky led the October 1917 Russian Revolution—the only successful workers
revolution in history—aptly described the choice in elections under capitalism
as a process “to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is
to repress and crush the people.”
This time around, the reality show to become America’s next top war
criminal pits the two rich white guys, Romney and Ryan—who look like a walking
ad for khakis, hair gel and Pearl Drops tooth polish and who promise to
eliminate just about all of the remaining government social services that are a
lifeline to a large bulk of the population, while promising greater riches to
the capitalists—against the hoops-playing, change-promising Obama, who stuffed
his administration with a Wall Street all-star team, such as Timothy Geithner,
Lawrence Summers and Jacob Lew. The Obama administration has handed out lucre to
just about every industrialist and banker that came, hat in hand, knocking on
the White House door—and not even spare change for the rest.
A lot has happened in the last four years. Mass unemployment has
provided a more fertile climate for the decades-long attacks on the basic
organizations of defense of the working class—unions. The current attacks were
kicked off by the 2009 auto contracts forced upon workers at General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler by the United Auto Workers’ Ron Gettelfinger and the newly
elected Obama—part of the bailout of the auto bosses. This opened the floodgates
for extending two-tier agreements to other union contracts throughout the
country, and threw thousands of auto workers on the scrap heap.
We’ve seen the emergence of the Tea Party crazies, launched and
funded by some of the fattest of fat cats in the conservative Republican
establishment. They seem to have consolidated a great deal of control of
the Republican Party, peddling religious obscurantism, anti-women bigotry,
nativist hatred of anyone who wasn’t born in the U.S.—that is, born with white
skin and speaking English. Their not so thinly veiled racism is expressed, among
other ways, in the hallucinogenic belief that Obama is forcing socialism on the
U.S., the only basis for which is his black skin. To defend the purity of
elections, they have been on a drive to purge blacks and Latinos from voting,
imbibing so much of the “voter fraud” Kool-Aid they have begun to visualize
magic buses full of “illegal” voters pouring into polling places across the
country.
After decades of massive redistribution of wealth to the richest
sliver of the population under both Democratic and Republican administrations,
even the bourgeois press has noted the gaping inequality between the haves and
have-nots. The populist Occupy phenomenon burst across the scene with an impact
reminiscent of the 1973 comet Kouhoutek.
Earlier this year Charles Murray, author of the racist screed
The Bell Curve (1994), turned his attention to poor white people in a new
book, Coming Apart. According to Murray, poor people are poor
because they make poor choices—usually citing what he considers “moral” ones,
like smoking, drinking, a little pot, having sex at a young age. As if the
well-heeled don’t do exactly the same—and probably to a greater extent since
they have the money to burn. (This is the same drivel that Bill Cosby, Obama and
others have been handing down to poor black people to blame them for their
oppression.) Obviously the poor “choices” begin with choosing to be born into a
poor family. Although the book overwhelmingly represents the view of the
capitalist class, it didn’t get that much play thanks to its inopportune
timing—both political parties are fighting over precisely that demographic in
the key swing states.
The right to abortion has been further eroded. Obama promised to
ease the Republicans’ war on immigrants only to have his administration shatter
prior records for deportations by such a wide margin it is a wonder they weren’t
called before a Congressional committee investigating steroid use. Obama also
promised to reverse much of the decimation of civil liberties under the “war on
terror” only to expand government spying to a level that would make George
Orwell’s Big Brother envious. Meanwhile we have seen authorized assassinations
of U.S. citizens, indefinite detention and persecution of leftist opponents of
government policies.
Two-Party Electoral Circus
In his September 25 lecture to the United Nations, Obama told this
gathering of imperialist thieves and their victims that Americans “have fought
and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their
view.” No. Since its emergence as an imperialist power with the Spanish-American
War of 1898, the U.S., like its imperialist rivals, has sent its young men, and
now some women, to fight and kill in its quest for world domination, to secure
markets and resources and geopolitical military advantage. For over a century,
Washington has placed in power and/or propped up just about every military
dictatorship around the world.
This Nobel Peace Prize recipient initiated a surge of troops for
the occupation of Afghanistan and supplied the firepower for NATO’s devastation
of Libya. He has bolstered U.S. military forces in Asia directed against the
Chinese deformed workers state, declaring the Pacific to be the Pentagon’s
number one priority, and the U.S. also maintains the embargo against the Cuban
deformed workers state. Obama has also implemented starvation sanctions against
Iran as punishment for their purported program of developing nuclear arms. U.S.
drones regularly rain death and destruction from Pakistan to Somalia. DEA narcs
help terrorize Latin American farmers and workers in the name of the “war on
drugs,” and when the U.S.’s puppet rulers meekly suggest decriminalizing some
controlled substances they get slapped down from Washington. U.S. imperialism,
hands off the world!
Obama promised nothing to black people. He kept that promise. In
the supposedly “post-racial” utopia ushered in by his election, we have the
continued mass incarceration of black people and the escalating terrorization by
cops of black and Latino youth in ghettos and barrios, which in turn fuels
vigilante terror like the racist killing of Trayvon Martin.
Yes, Obama has done just about everything the capitalist masters
asked and so much more. Yet from the day he took office, a core component of the
Republican Party took to the streets demanding “Take our country back!” Back
from whom? No secret there. Even as the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism,
Obama is marked by his black skin and African heritage. Newt Gingrich called him
the “Food Stamp President.” Romney, not unexpectedly, has even charged, falsely,
that Obama is undoing Clinton’s signature law eviscerating welfare by removing
the work requirements, resurrecting Reagan’s “welfare queen” chimera that
impoverished black women are sucking up the government dollars of hard-working,
tax-paying white people.
Add to these the likes of abortion opponent Todd Akin, the
Republican candidate for Senator from Missouri, who said that a woman who gets
pregnant following a rape wasn’t really raped; the spectacle at the Republican
Convention, where a black woman working for CNN was pelted with peanuts while
one of the Republican faithful screamed at her, “This is how we feed the
animals”; the efforts across the country to destroy unions; draconian
immigration laws enacted in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and elsewhere. You get a
sense of why workers, blacks, immigrants, women, gays, who have nothing to show
for their past support, are going to again vote Democrat as a lesser evil.
How to account for a significant portion of the American
bourgeoisie being so mentally unhinged? Did a Klingon warship pass over the U.S.
30 years ago firing some form of brain-destroying phaser? Maybe the answer is
buried in the UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico. But I don’t think so. After the
counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, it appeared
that the U.S. imperialists had finally become masters of the world. But even as
the U.S. achieved unrivalled military supremacy, its industrial base continued
to decline. To some in the ruling class, this decline of the country’s economic
might defies explanation—besides being contrary to “God’s will.” In consequence,
a wing of the bourgeoisie has seemingly gone totally insane.
The massive redistribution of wealth to the top, the increasing
segregation of black people, shredding of the social “safety net,” embrace of
“Christian family values,” rollback of democratic rights, imperialist wars and
occupations: all have been bipartisan policies. The Republicans may explicitly
announce that it is open season on workers and oppressed minorities; the
Democrats instead offer a pat on the back, maybe a little consolation that we
“share your pain,” while enforcing capitalist misery and social reaction, often
more effectively.
Yet at the same time that the differences between these two
capitalist parties have increasingly narrowed, the vitriol between them has
grown. This is not a unique development. Writing about the 1912 presidential
election won by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in an article titled “The Results
and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections,” Lenin observed:
“Since the Civil War over slavery in 1860-65—two
bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and
strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic
Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has
developed into the Republican Party.
“Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between
the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has
been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not
had any serious importance for the mass of the
people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by
means of spectacular and meaningless duels between the two
bourgeois parties.”
Centrality of Black Oppression
Shortly after the Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory,
Richard Viguerie, a key conservative fund-raiser and organizer, said, “It was
the social issues that got us this far, and that’s what will take us into the
future. We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing,
abortion, school prayer and gun control.” Reagan aide Lee Atwater made clear
what that meant. For obvious reasons I’m going to paraphrase here: “You start
out in 1954 by saying the ‘N’ word. By 1968 you can’t say the ‘N’ word—that
hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.
You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them
is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
In fanning the flames of racist reaction, the Republicans are
implementing the “Southern Strategy” that has served them well for the past 40
years. The shape of bourgeois politics in America was fundamentally altered by
the civil rights movement. The New Deal alliance between labor, Northern
liberals and Southern segregationists cemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in
the 1930s was blown apart. The 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry
Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, was the one who authored the
“Southern Strategy,” persuading racist Southern Democrats—the Dixiecrats—to
defect.
The bourgeoisie, which was willing to permit the gradual abolition
of legal segregation and provide avenues for the upward social
mobility of a small layer of black people, at the same time unleashed a campaign
of white backlash which eventually took the form of opposition to “big
government”—identified as forcing white children to go to school with blacks,
giving tax money to black welfare mothers and poverty bureaucrats, and giving
jobs to blacks and women under affirmative action. While most black people were
no better off, the government created a layer of black middle-class
professionals. Racist politicians began deliberately stoking white resentment.
All this underscores that the oppression of black people, a
race-color caste overwhelmingly segregated at the bottom of society, remains at
the core of American capitalism. The forcible segregation, stigmatization and
vilification of those whose ancestors were dragged here in chains as slaves
serves to maximize profits, regulate labor and divide the working class. As
historic American Trotskyist Richard Fraser noted of segregation some 60 years
ago:
“Prejudice is the product of this complex social relation. But
although it is directed immediately against the Negro, its object is the working
class as a whole. Through discrimination and segregation, Negro labor is
degraded and its wage falls to the bare subsistence level. But this sets the
pattern and controls the conditions of labor as a whole.”
— “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953),
reprinted in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of
His Work,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990
Fraser added: “Without racial separation in the United States,
there would be no possibility of maintaining the discriminatory social and
economic practices which are fundamental to the economic and social well-being
of American capitalism, and its role in the world today.”
The fight for black equality remains the strategic question of the
American revolution. We fight for black freedom on the program of revolutionary
integrationism. In fighting for the working class to oppose all instances of
racist discrimination, we have supported scatter-site public housing in
opposition to residential segregation; defended school busing as part of our
fight for free, quality integrated education; initiated mobilizations centered
on the multiracial labor movement against KKK and Nazi terror. At the same time,
we stress that genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come
about through the smashing of capitalism, preparing the road to an egalitarian
socialist order. This perspective is counterposed to liberal integration, which
is premised on the utopian notion that equality for black people can be attained
within this capitalist society founded on black oppression. Our perspective is
counterposed as well to go-it-alone black nationalism—a petty-bourgeois ideology
of despair which at bottom accepts the racist status quo.
There will be no effective resistance to the immiseration of
American working people without the unity in struggle between the trade unions
and the black and Latino poor. Despite the destruction of industrial jobs and
erosion of union strength, black workers, who have a significantly higher rate
of trade-union membership than white workers, continue to be integrated into
strategic sectors of the proletariat, which alone has the power to shatter this
racist capitalist system. Won to a revolutionary program, black workers will be
the living link fusing the anger of the dispossessed ghetto masses with the
social power of the multiracial proletariat under the leadership of a Leninist
vanguard party.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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