https://socialistaction.org/2016/10/16/u-s-leftists-leap-into-democratic-party-swamp/
U.S. leftists leap into Democratic Party swamp
/ 16 hours ago
bernie-hillary-july12-628x356By JEFF MACKLER
Out of the starting gate real quick came Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed
champion of a U.S. “political revolution” and “democratic socialism.”
Sanders’ initial dark horse image was quickly abandoned as the corporate
media quickly granted him equal time, as soon as he affirmed that he was
running as a Democrat in Wall Street’s preferred party and would support
the rigged convention’s choice. Indeed, Sanders was the perfect
candidate at a time when the appeal to traditional corporate politics
and politicians had reached a modern-era low.
Sanders was a long-time member of the Democratic Party congressional
caucus with a 98 percent Democratic Party voting record—war budgets and
racist legislation included—and a professed Vermont “independent” who
was without exception the priority-funded and endorsed choice of the
Democratic Party hierarchy, including President Obama’s twice official
endorsement.
This was exactly what his party’s spin doctors needed; 57 percent of
registered Democrats, according to a New York Times poll preferred
socialism over capitalism. With an ever deepening eight-year worldwide
capitalist crisis in progress, Sanders was capitalism’s recipe to
refurbish the Democratic Party’s deeply-tarnished image and once again
channel the unwary back into the ruling class’s priority instrument, its
firewall to contain social explosions.
But if there was a political tragedy in this years’ electoral scenario,
it was qualitatively less capitalism’s endless and repeated variations
of “lesser evil” politics and qualitatively more the socialist left’s
virtual total capitulation to the two party, or three party—Greens
included—capitalist shell game.
The Green Party, a largely middle-class or multi-class, and
pro-capitalist reformist group, as well as a number of traditional
“socialist” organizations—like the Democratic Socialists of America, the
Communist Party, and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism—have been known on the left for their decades-long and near
exclusive electoral focus on the Democratic Party.
The Communist Party, for example, which supported Clinton in the
Democratic primaries, calls for “building a multi-class alliance that
includes the Democratic Party establishment” in a campaign to “defeat
the extreme right and GOP [and] its oligarchic backers.” In 2016,
unfortunately, other left groups have readily joined these reformists in
the Democratic Party swamp.
Socialist Alternative champions Sanders
With this year’s election cycle the once-promising Socialist Alternative
party has all but broken with any semblance of working-class
independence by championing the Bernie Sanders campaign and initiating
the “Movement 4 Bernie,” including taking for good coin Sanders’
pseudo-radical “democratic socialist” rhetoric and empty proclamation to
be leading a “political revolution” inside the Democratic Party!
Socialist Alternative’s support for the Democrat Sanders, while urging
him to break with the Democrats to be the Green Party’s presidential
candidate, serves to foster illusions in capitalist politics—most
importantly, the notion that the leading party of the multi-millionaire
and billionaire ruling rich can be magically transformed from the
inside, as opposed to being defeated by a working-class-controlled
party, combined with massive social struggles aimed at capitalism’s
abolition.
Socialist Alternative and its twice-elected socialist Seattle city
council member, Kshama Sawant, have taken grave steps toward undermining
the very essence of Sawant’s well-deserved socialist election
victories—efforts that Socialist Action actively supported and helped to
finance.
But we were not totally uncritical of several of Socialist Alternative’s
flawed campaign tactics. We strongly disagreed with Sawant’s listing of
several local Democrats on her campaign literature, her acceptance of
significant campaign contributions from Democratic Party officials, and
her attendance at local Democratic Party fundraisers.
In our view, these were important errors that tended to undermine the
central thrust of the Sawant campaigns, which aimed at counterposing a
principled socialist and working-class platform to the boss class’s
Democratic Party.
But Socialist Alternative went on to deepen its break with working-class
political independence. In a July 31, 2016, Real News Network interview
with Rania Khalek, Sawant stated: “He [Sanders] decided to run as a
Democrat. We don’t agree with that, but we supported him anyway, because
we feel that tens of millions of people were connecting with his call
for a political revolution” (emphasis added).
In commenting on Socialist Alternative’s “Movement 4 Bernie” petition,
Sawant stated, “Over 120,000 people signed that petition because they
wanted Bernie to continue his political revolution outside the
Democratic Party if the Democrats didn’t let him continue as their
nominee. And in that petition we said that if people aren’t convinced of
the idea of running in every state then let’s run in the safe states. So
I think that the safe states idea can be used as a tactic, but I think
fundamentally what people need to grapple with is, you know, the fact
that we need to build an independent party.”
And so, Sawant lends legitimacy to voting for Sanders only in “safe
states,” while impliedly urging or accepting the legitimacy of a vote
for Clinton in all the rest.
Further, during an Amy Goodman “Democracy Now!” commentary immediately
following the September Clinton-Trump nationally televised debate,
Sawant stated that Trump needs to be “trounced” in the November
elections while she bemoaned the fact that Clinton was the least capable
of doing the trouncing, again implying that Sanders would have done a
better job of it. While Sawant repeated her support for the Jill Stein
Green Party candidacy later in the same commentary she nevertheless
informed her supporters that Trump’s defeat at the hands of Clinton was
high on her priority list and that there were “fundamental” differences
between the two.
For Sawant, the prime example of an “independent party” is the
middle-class pro-capitalist Green Party, or some such class-undefined
political variant. Prior to her first run in Seattle, Socialist
Alternate sought out a joint city council election effort with the Green
Party, but the Greens rejected the proposal, leaving Socialist
Alternative with no alternative but to run an open and credible
socialist campaign.
ISO urges Sanders to run as Green
In a similar vein, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) also
urged Democrat Sanders to run as the Green Party candidate, as if a
capitalist party politician can be converted to a working-class champion
of “political revolution” with the stroke of a pen. The ISO is no
newcomer to middle-class politics, having supported Ralph Nader’s
campaigns in the past.
Nowadays, Nader is urging a “billionaire” to run for president. In 2000,
he negotiated a deal with Pat Buchanan’s right-wing Reform Party for
ballot status in some seven states in return for a damning interview in
Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, where Nader, tit for tat,
felt compelled to agree with much of Buchanan’s reactionary
anti-abortion and anti-immigrant views.
Also committed to “third party” politics is the socialist group,
Solidarity, whose members are often active builders and sometimes
candidates of the Green Party. Taking yet another leap off the cliff of
working-class politics, Bay Area Solidarity members also backed the
Richmond Progressive Alliance, a Democratic Party/Green Party electoral
formation that last year supported an open Democrat, Tom Butt, for mayor
in order to “defeat the Chevron candidate.” Butt won.
The above socialist groups that bent to the ruling class’s move to
legitimize Sanders and posture him as a socialist who was acceptable in
ruling-class circles were by far not the exception. Both the Workers
World Party and its offshoot, the Party for Socialism and Liberation
(PSL), not infrequently supporting “progressive” Black and Latino
Democrats in the past like Jesse Jackson, called for a Sanders vote in
various Democratic Party primaries even though both presented their own
candidates for the presidency. Jill Stein too urged a Sanders vote in
the California primaries.
One happy and welcome exception to the broad capitulation of the
socialist left today is the small but important Socialist Party
presidential campaign, which rejects support to capitalist and
pro-capitalist parties in all their variations.
But more generally, it has virtually become the norm for often
well-meaning socialists to support so-called independent parties like
the Greens or the Rainbow Coalition, or even open Democrats like
Sanders, as opposed to working toward the construction of parties based
on, controlled by, and beholden to working-class organizations, namely
trade unions.
The fact that the U.S. is perhaps the only major capitalist nation on
earth with no tradition of working-class-based political independence
manifested by a Labor Party or mass Socialist Party has proved to be a
major disorienting factor. It has also contributed to socialist
organizations’ often inventing nearly irrational reasons—“political
revolution”—to support one or another “progressive” Democrat with a view
to breaking the stranglehold of this party’s capitalist predators over
its ranks.
In truth, the party ranks have absolutely zero control or influence in
this exclusively controlled ruling-class instrument. Or more accurately,
there are no “ranks” in the Democratic Party, only a diverse association
of individuals who are rounded up every four years or so to pay homage
to the ruling class’s proffered candidate.
Organizing the power of the working class
Simply stated, there will be no political or any other revolution in the
U.S. or anywhere else in the world that is not driven forward by
consciously organized working-class power.
A democratically-organized fighting labor movement, in alliance with and
in full solidarity with every struggle of the oppressed, is a
prerequisite for any significant challenge to capitalist prerogatives.
However diminished in size and influence, highly undemocratic, terribly
bureaucratized, and often corrupt the trade unions might be, the fight
to transform them into fighting instruments at the service of workers is
necessary to achieve future social progress.
The patient but critical struggle to build a class-struggle left wing in
today’s trade unions, and in those that will be founded to defend
workers’ interests in the future, is inseparable from the exercise of
workers’ power for the common good.
For revolutionary socialists from the time of Karl Marx to the present,
the most critical questions, indeed, the only relevant question
regarding achieving social progress, is which class shall rule? The vast
majority who creates all wealth, or the tiny minority who effectively
steals it to perpetrate its brutal rule?
It is in this context that revolutionary parties sharply oppose any and
all efforts to reform any capitalist or pro-capitalist party. All of
them are the finely tuned instruments of minority rule. The capitalist
class, through its chosen parties and representatives, holds a monopoly
of power at all levels of government and in society more generally.
History has assigned capitalism’s abolition and the construction of a
truly socialist society to the one force capable of the task, the vast
working-class majority.
Socialist Action’s presidential election campaign is aimed at building a
mass revolutionary socialist party deeply integrated into every struggle
in which humanity strives for liberation. Join us!
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October 16, 2016 in Elections, Vote Socialist Action.
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