https://socialistaction.org/2020/04/14/should-progressives-work-in-the-democratic-party/
Should Progressives Work in the Democratic Party?
Socialist Action / 13 hours ago
By GEORGE BREITMAN
Here we reprint part of a 1959 debate between a revolutionary socialist
and a social democrat. George Breitman, a member of the Socialist
Workers Party and longtime editor of The Militant newspaper, argued the
No side.
I shall begin by defining what I have in mind by the terms
“progressive,” “work in” and “Democratic Party. ”
By “progressive” I mean two things: First, the great social forces that
have the power to decide the future – the working class and its allies,
the working farmers, the Negro people and the youth. Second, I have in
mind the smaller, radical groups and individuals who are repelled by the
capitalist system, its anarchy, militarism, depressions, regimentation,
inequality and debasement of human and cultural values, and who favor
the replacement of this system by one based on cooperation, planning,
brotherhood and promotion of the interests of the majority. In short, I
use the term “progressive” for those who are pro-labor or
anti-capitalist, who are anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-Jim Crow,
pro-socialist,
By “work in” I mean belong to, become a member of, vote for, support or
endorse.
Now, about the nature of the Democratic Party.
Socialists say that political parties represent, express, reflect class
interests. This doesn’t mean that parties necessarily say they represent
class interests; nor that all their members think they do; nor even that
all their members come from the same class. (The truth of this
proposition doesn’t depend on what socialists say, or what
anti-socialists say. It can be tested by facts, the evidence of history,
objective analysis.)
When socialists say the Democratic Party is a capitalist party, they
don’t mean that most of its members are capitalists. Obviously not. If
the capitalists had to depend on their own numbers, they couldn’t elect
a justice of the peace, for they are a tiny part of the population.
Actually, most supporters of the Democratic Party are workers, farmers
and members of the middle classes, But they aren’t the ones who decide
the real aims of the party.
Nationally, the Democratic Party is a coalition – of capitalists and
union leaders, of Southern white supremacists and Northern Negroes, of
corrupt machines in the cities and unorganized or loosely organized
farmers on the land, of conservatives and liberals, etc.
This coalition explains why the Democratic Party says the things it
says, why it writes the platforms it writes – for it appeals to
conflicting interests and tries to hold them together. It also explains
why the Democratic Party sometimes says different things than the other
capitalist party, the Republican Party, for the Republican Party has a
somewhat different composition and following, making its major appeal
for support to the middle classes and non-unionized sections of the
working class.
But it doesn’t determine which interest controls, dominates, runs and
uses the Democratic Party. We say it is dominated, as the Republican
Party is dominated, by a minority of its members – by a small group of
monopoly capitalists who also control the economy, the government, the
means of communication and the educational system.
It doesn’t matter what the Democratic platform says – the chief function
of this party, as of the Republican Party, is to protect the interests
of the monopoly capitalists at home and abroad. It doesn’t matter what
the candidates of this party say during election campaigns (they usually
say what they think will win votes, not what they think) – what counts
is what its office holders do about the important issues of the day.
Only a few examples are possible now:
The overwhelming majority of the people of this country, and of the
members of both capitalist parties, want peace, the relaxation of
international tensions, a ban on nuclear explosions, and so on. But what
do they get? Wars, war crises, preparation for war, militarization, the
draft, a permanent arms economy and crushing taxes to maintain it, the
continuation of the Cold War and Cold War propaganda. And the Democratic
Party’s chief complaint against the Republicans is that they don’t
appropriate and spend enough for these purposes! On this issue the
Democratic Party surely serves the interests of the ruling class
faithfully and consistently.
The Democrats differ from the Republicans occasionally on what to do
about unemployment, because the Democrats usually have greater support
among the unemployed and want to retain that support. But their
differences are minor, sometimes insignificant. They agree on the basic
things: That the present economic system must not be reorganized to
abolish unemployment. That when workers are laid off through no fault of
their own, they should suffer cuts in their living standards, rather
than the employers. That jobless compensation should not be paid for the
duration of unemployment. That the work week should not be shortened.
These are things the capitalist class thinks too.
The Jim Crow system in the U.S. is the scandal of the world.
Nevertheless, the American ruling class shows no intention of abolishing
it within the time of anyone now living. In the South, the Democratic
Party is a one-party dictatorship dedicated to maintaining white
supremacy. In Congress, it provides the bulk of the votes against
meaningful civil rights legislation. Northern Democrats have to make
some gestures to keep the Negro vote, but their liberalism is rarely
more than skin deep on this question. If you elect liberals like Hart
and McNamara, who swear undying devotion to the civil rights cause, the
first thing they do when they get to Washington is vote to elect the
Southern Democratic enemies of the Negro people to the key Congressional
posts, which are used to block civil rights and all other progressive
legislation, Liberals like Governor Williams will make impassioned
speeches about injustice to Negroes in the South, but no one has ever
heard him utter a single word about the most Jim Crow city in the North
right on his own doorstep, Dearborn, whose mayor boasts that no Negro
can live there. So it would be putting it mildly to say that the
Democratic Party’s policy on civil rights is in accord with that of the
ruling class, which always benefits from hatred and discord among the
workers.
My final example is civil liberties. We are still suffering from the
effects of the witch hunt launched to silence all opposition to the Cold
War. The record shows that the Democratic Party served the capitalist
class just as zealously in this witch hunt as the Republicans. The
Democrats passed and enforced the Smith Act to gag political dissent.
Democratic presidents transformed the FBI into a political police force.
The Democrats started the misnamed government “loyalty program. A
Democratic president initiated the “subversive” blacklist. Democrats
spearheaded the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950. Liberal
Democrats took the lead in passing the Humphrey-Butler “Communist
Control” Act of 1954. We tend to think of this as the era of
McCarthyism, but the Democrats, liberal as well as conservative, were in
there doing their fair share of gnawing away at the Bill of Rights, And
not only in Washington, but in Lansing too. The Trucks Law of 1952 was
the worst and most repressive law ever passed in Michigan. All the
Democrats in the legislature voted for it. Williams, begged by the civil
libertarians to veto this bill to turn Michigan into a police state,
said he could see no reason not to sign it, and sign it he did. For the
next four years he ignored all appeals that he call for its repeal. It
would still be on the books if it had been left up to him, rather than
the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally struck it down.
Having given an analysis of the Democratic Party, for better or worse, I
want to indicate now why it is wrong from just about every conceivable
angle for progressives to work in it. I’ll take up the labor movement
first, the radical groups second.
Unions are created in the first place because there is a fundamental
clash of interest between workers and capitalists. A necessary condition
for the effective functioning of unions is that they be independent of
the capitalists; as we all know, a company union, an organization
dominated by the employers, does not and cannot defend the workers’
interests. I believe it can be stated as a law – the more independent a
union is of capitalists, of individual capitalists and of the capitalist
class as a whole, the better able it is to defend the workers’
interests. Or if you don’t care for the word “law,” let me put it this
way: Independence of the labor movement is a first principle, recognized
and expounded by the best union leaders like Debs and Haywood.
This has always been true, but it is especially true today, when the
monopoly stage of capitalism expands the role of the state and gives all
struggles, including labor struggles, an openly political character.
What labor in our country needs above everything else is a party of its
own, which can fight for the needs and aspirations of the workers on the
political field as unions can on the economic field…
But instead of having a party of its own, the labor movement is
dependent, in the political sphere, on a party controlled by the
capitalists and promoting the interests of the capitalists. It is a tail
to the Democratic kite, as one union leader put it.
This must be designated as a violation of the principle of independence
on the basis of which the union movement was created.
It is not only wrong in principle, however. It is also harmful in
practice, and the cause of most of the ills besetting the labor movement
today.
It was reported not long ago that the unions spent more money on the
last congressional election than the Democratic campaign committees did.
What have they gotten in return? UAW secretary-treasurer Emil Mazey said
about a month ago: “We won an election last November but until now we
have not received a single thing from this victory.” This is true after
every election.
The present Congress, controlled by the Democrats the unions helped to
elect, has refused to end the filibuster. It has refused to extend
jobless compensation for a year. It has refused to enact a federal
standard for jobless compensation. It is on the verge of passing the
Kennedy-Erwin bill to further restrict the independence of the unions by
subjecting them to government control, a bill which becomes worse and
worse every time Congress takes it up. And at the recent conference on
unemployment in Washington, all the AFL-CIO could get from the leaders
of the Democratic Party was a promise to study the question…
[Teamsters Union president Jimmy] Hoffa is not our idea of a model labor
leader, any more than Reuther is. But sometimes they tell the truth too.
I think Hoffa did that in a recent interview with the Detroit Free
Press. Asked to comment on the alliance between the UAW and the Michigan
Democratic Party, he said: “The UAW has less power that way. If I got
you, I don’t have to worry about you. The Democrats control the UAW in
Michigan. Reuther has got himself into a trap and doesn’t know how to
get out.” Reuther knows how to get out all right, but except for that, I
think Hoffa’s statement comes close to the truth, which I would put this
way: That, thanks to this alliance, the Democrats have much more
influence in the labor movement than the labor movement has in the
Democratic Party.
The Democrats can take the unions for granted, because they feel they
have them in their pocket; because the unions, having sworn not to
create their own party, have nowhere else to go. Who can deny this?
Dixiecrats get more concessions from the Democrats than the union
leaders do because they threaten to bolt and form their own party. The
union leaders not only have become dependent on the Democratic Party,
they have become its captives. And this is one of the reasons why the
Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the right year after year.
So labor’s support of the Democrats is wrong in all respects – from the
standpoint of principle, from the pragmatic standpoint of results.
What the labor movement and its allies need is to make a clean break
with both capitalist parties, and form an independent labor party
dedicated to winning control of the government and putting into effect a
program that will meet the needs of the majority of the people,
For radicals and socialists, the situation is even more clear-cut. Our
goal – the creation of a new society through working class political
action – requires that we help the labor movement to break away from
capitalist parties and capitalist politics; and to expand the influence
and organization of radical and revolutionary groups and parties fit to
provide leadership to the workers in a fight for a better society.
Neither of these objectives can be served by working in the Democratic
Party. Again, it is wrong in principle and wrong in every other way that
can be measured. The highways are littered with the political corpses of
radicals and socialists who entered the Democratic Party with the idea
of making it radical, and who ended up by becoming mere liberals or even
conservatives themselves.
The main function of the radical movement today is educational and
propagandistic, pending the time – not as distant as some radicals think
– when it once again can lead the people in great actions and struggles.
To educate means first of all to say what is, to tell the people the
truth. What good is a radical, what right has he to any hearing, if he
doesn’t meet this minimum condition?
But you can’t be in the Democratic Party and tell the truth to the
people. The first thing demanded of you in the Democratic Party is that
you support its candidates, that is, help spread the propaganda that the
election of Democrats is in the interests of the people. If you do this,
you have to lie, you have to cover up the fact that the Democratic Party
stands for the Cold War, more armaments, little or no help to the
unemployed, racial oppression, restrictions on the Bill of Rights,
retention of the Taft-Hartley Act, maintenance of the status quo generally.
In short, the condition for working in the Democratic Party is that you
must abdicate the primary function of the radical. If everyone did it,
it would mean the death of all organized radical opposition to capitalism.
The final test of a policy is in its results. The policy we are debating
tonight is not a new one, and it has been tested for a long time. The
labor movement has been working in and supporting the Democratic Party
for the last 25 years: Isn’t it true, Brother Haessler, that the
Democratic Party today stands to the right of where it stood 25 years
ago, and not to the left? The main sections of the radical movement have
been supporting the Democratic Party, directly or indirectly, with only
a few lapses for over 20 years: Can you claim, Brother Haessler, that
radical influence in the Democratic Party is greater than it was 20
years ago? Can you claim that radical influence in the country is
generally greater today than it was in the days when the radical
parties, considered it their duty to oppose the Democratic Party at the
polls?
Supporting the Democratic Party is at best an exercise in futility for
radicals, and one of the causes contributing to their decline. At worst,
it is a betrayal of anti-capitalist principles that are at the heart of
radicalism, and without which it must decay and die.
It is also a repudiation of the whole past of American radicalism. If
it’s right to support the Democrats today, if it’s wrong to oppose them
at the polls and to work in every other way to expose their reactionary
character, then everything the old socialist movement did in its best
days was also wrong and should be renounced rather than pointed to as an
inspiration for the future. If it’s right to support the Democrats
today, then [Eugene] Debs was wrong in helping to organize the Socialist
Party, in running those magnificent election campaigns, in teaching that
it is unprincipled for socialists to support capitalist candidates; then
Debs was just a hopeless sectarian, whose example has little to offer us
today. (Which, incidentally, is what William Z. Foster and the Communist
Party now are saying.)
Speaking of Debs reminds me of the question that people sometimes ask:
What happened to the old idealism of the socialist movement, the
self-sacrificing spirit of solidarity and militancy that the American
radical movement used to know? What happened to it was that the leaders
of the movement, lacking or losing confidence in the capacity of the
workers to change society and govern themselves, began to find all kinds
of pretexts and rationalizations for deserting the policies of class
struggle and embracing the policies of class collaboration. One of the
manifestations of this change was the change from the old principle,
that it’s the duty of socialists to oppose capitalist party candidates,
run independent candidates and use election campaigns to expose the
nature of capitalism and present the truth about socialism – a change
from this tradition to arguments that independent campaigns achieve
nothing, that you must not let yourself get “isolated,” that you must
adjust yourself to the politics of the labor bureaucrats rather than
fight them.
You can’t create idealism, you can’t maintain militancy and devotion to
the great goals of the socialist future through such maneuvers. Take the
workers into the Democratic swamp of opportunism, horse trades and dirty
machine politics, where any piece of filthy work is justified if it
helps win the next election, and you can’t expect anything but that it
will sap the workers’ militancy, devotion to principle and
class-consciousness – if they remain there and don’t drop out of
politics altogether demoralized.
The future lies with the youth – the young people just beginning to
recover from a decade of Cold War conformism. They’ve heard enough lies
to last them for a lifetime. What they need is the truth, simple and
direct. Only if they get it will they respond with those reserves of
militancy and bravery that are especially characteristic of the young,
that seem to be the prerequisite of every genuine revolution, and that
can revitalize American radicalism as an effective fighting force.
You’ll get nowhere telling the youth white lies or half truths about the
Democratic Party. You’ll be shirking your duty to them and to the future
if you tell them to go work in the Democratic Party.
Therefore, the policy dictated to progressives is to oppose the
Democratic Party, not to work in it or get others to support it. Those
of us who are workers should strive in our unions to bring about a break
with capitalist politics and the formation of an independent labor
party. Those of us who are radicals and socialists should do everything
we can to fight the two-party system, utilize election campaigns to
spread socialist ideas and influence, and run socialist slates for
office, if possible along the general lines of the Independent Socialist
ticket in New York in 1958.
That ticket, bringing together independent radicals, former Progressive
Party members and Socialist Workers Party members in a united socialist
campaign against both capitalist parties, was an encouraging progressive
alternative to the compromising, demoralizing, self-defeating policy of
working in the Democratic Party. The Socialist Workers Party advocated
similar united left-wing tickets here in Michigan in the 1957 and 1958
election campaigns. The other radical groups in the state rejected its
proposals in those years. We hope they will respond differently to
proposals for a united ticket of radicals, socialists and progressives
in the 1960 campaign, nationally and locally. If they don’t, we promise
we will still try to act as socialists should, by placing a socialist
ticket on the ballot in Michigan and running a campaign that will help
promote independent working class political action by openly telling the
truth about capitalism and socialism.
Share:
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on
Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in
new window)
April 14, 2020 in Democratic Party.
Related posts
The Demise of Bernie Sanders
Capitalism vs. Socialism
The Demise of Bernie Sanders
Post navigation← Socialist Action 2020 presidential candidate Jeff
Mackler on Bernie Sanders dropping out of the primary – VIDEO
Search for articles
Search
Search …
Get Involved!
Donate to help support our work
Get email updates
Join Socialist Action
Social Media
View socialistactionusa’s profile on FacebookView SocialistActUS’s
profile on Twitter
Subscribe to Our Newspaper
Newspaper Archives
Newspaper Archives
Upcoming Events
No upcoming events
--
___
Thomas Paine
“One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
