Re: Final thoughts on the Nader campaign

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis,

    The case you make is cogent and persuasive. Yet I still have my
doubts ...

    You postulate that the much broader layer of people represented,
so to speak, by the Seattle protesters will be attracted by the Nader
campaign. Some undoubtedly will be -- but does this represent anything
like the main contingent?

    The *VALID* point about Nader's speeches that I think is relevant
is that he fails to give sufficient expression to the sentiments of
those who identified with Seattle as to be attractive to them. All my
"webbie" buddies who tended to identify with Seattle frankly don't see
anything in Nader. These guys -- the equivalent of the grease monkeys
of the "new economy" -- have had a shattering of their illusions over
the past few months as the dot-com carnage has escalated. A year ago
they were all full of quasi-libertarian bluster about using the
credentials from their current job to get a stock-options job at a
brand new startup and make a killing with the IPO. That's all gone
now, and they are thankful to be in a staid traditional media octopus
where their jobs --they hope-- are secure.

    AOL/Turner/Time-Warner have just announced a master plan for
building a 20-odd story tower next to CNN center for CNN interactive
and other "new economy" ventures, with a tripling or more of the work
force. So for now no one is terribly nervous. If AOL's growth rate
tops out -- or rather, WHEN  it tops out -- we may see a change in
plans, and in attitudes.

    I'm pretty sure we've not seen the real shakeout in the e-economy
yet. Many of these companies are on artificial respiration from the
huge amounts of money they made selling stock. That well has now run
pretty dry for brand-new startups, and the venture capitalists are
baring their fangs and are rapidly becoming vulture capitalists.

    As for the union leadership, there is a different interpretation
than the one you give, which is that a layer of the officialdom is
reflecting motion in the ranks. And that is, simply, that a layer of
the officials are trying to pressure the Democratic politicians by
playing hard-to-get, and that it has little to do with any real motion
in the ranks towards Nader or any other electoral expression,
independent or otherwise.

    Your (brief) economic argument that the average real wages of
non-supervisory personnel have fallen 6% over 25 years as accounting
for the alleged motion in the working class is singularly
unconvincing. First, people have to realize that a change of a quarter
percent a year is probably well beyond the precision of these
statistics. Second, a lot of these figures have become outdated in the
last few months, as revised estimates for labor productivity and
inflation going back to 1959 have been introduced. If the income
figures once revised were to say that the average non-manufacturing
wages rose by 6% over the past quarter century, would that make any
difference?

    Much more telling is the growing INEQUALITY in income
DISTRIBUTION. The share of the national income going to working people
has been constantly declining since the mid-70s, after having been
stable from the mid-30s.

    The argument that real wages have been falling will not ring true
to many working class families for a couple of reasons, the main one
being that even if it is true statistically for the class as a whole,
it isn't true of most individuals. Wages are stratified by age. A
young unskilled worker that made, say, $8/hour (in constant dollars)
25 years ago today may be making $15, because s/he is several steps
above the entry level. It could well be true that the young worker
TODAY that holds the equivalent entry-level position is only making
$7, and that the one who held the equivalent better position a quarter
century ago made $17. But by and large, the individual worker has
moved up. Another reason is that the rate of labor force participation
(especially for women) has climbed and the number of dependents per
family declined.

    If there is renewed motion among labor rank and file, declining
real wages isn't driving it, I don't believe.

    There is, clearly, some motion, especially among the poorer,
immigrant layers of workers. I'm not sure this represents a big change
in the attitude of this layer, but rather that the AFL-CIO's shift
towards more organizing has given it an organized expression. But I'm
not aware of any special attraction to Nader by this layer, are you?

    As for the broadest masses of people, the recent Pew Center survey
shows them more disengaged than ever before. "Good times" have a
certain amount to do with this, the "inside baseball" way the media
covers the election campaign has to do with this, the basically
indistinguishable, hair-splitting differences between the two main
bourgeois candidates have to do with this, there are all sorts of
factors.

    But what it all boils down to is that, politically, U.S. elections
for half or more of the population is basically a content-free zone.
People aren't looking to the elections to express or reflect their
social, economic or political concerns. In fact, they aren't looking
to the elections at all, not even for entertainment.

    *    *    *

    There is another whole line of argument to be made, which is
essentially that what may well be correct tactics for an organized
grouping might not be useful for dispersed activists acting as
individuals. I tend to think we will do better as individuals sticking
with whatever protest movements there are than dropping that to go
with Nader. Of course, if we see all the other activists going into
the Nader campaign for the duration, that might indicate a different
course is better.

    A related but in some ways separate question is what to say to
people about what you recommend or intend to do on election day. I
think on this, more important than the specific recommendation --vote
Nader, socialist, write in Mickey Mouse or go fishing with Fidel-- is
what one says about the vote. And that is that voting in these rigged
elections is unimportant, at most you can cast a protest vote, and
what IS important is supporting and taking part in the actual
struggles that are going on OUTSIDE the elections.

José


----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;
<jhurd_newparty@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 14, 2000 8:11 PM
Subject: Final thoughts on the Nader campaign


Characterized by catastrophism from its birth, American ultraleftism
has
been ill-equipped to understand and relate to leftwing third party
initiatives. If capitalism is on its last legs, wouldn't an electoral
effort amount to a diversion at best, or betrayal at worst? In
reality,
American capitalism has enormous resilience--based as it is on a
vulturistic hold over the Third World. It has the capacity to work its
way
through one crisis after another. Given this reality, Marxist politics
must
involve detours and flanking tactics. This is something that any
self-respecting ultraleft finds impossible, their main slogan being
"March,
march--full speed ahead!" Of course, it never bothers them if no army
is
following them. In some cases, some of the extreme purists feel
compromised
if they do have a following, even of just a couple dozen. What were
they
doing wrong?

Furthermore much of this kind of ultraleftism is idealist in nature.
Each
sect has a magic formula that will wake up the masses from its
slumber. All
that is needed is the right wording on a leaflet to be passed out on
the
right occasion and BINGO. Not surprisingly, their attitude toward
third
party candidates is also idealist in nature. Instead of paying
attention to
union interest in the Nader campaign as a sign of motion in the ranks,
they
dwell on Nader's speeches as if speeches change history. In reality
revolutions only partially involve conscious action; more significant
are
the powerful mass mobilizations operating on the basis of newly
awakened,
nearly subliminal thoughts and feelings. This is what the bourgeoisie
calls
the mob and it is what revolutionaries call free humanity.

The purpose of this concluding article on the Nader campaign is to
call
attention to the underlying class struggle dynamics of some third
party
campaigns, including Nader's itself. With a two party system in the
United
States that conspires to bottle up challenges to particularly hated
capitalist policies, it is almost inevitable that electoral responses
will
develop to confront these policies. In every instance the bourgeoisie
goes
on the offensive against such campaigns, even when the candidate
himself
has a history in the two-party system. They are not afraid of the
candidate, but the example of an electoral formation operating out of
their
control.

The first such initiative in the 20th century, which I reported on in
my
last post, was the Farmer-Labor Party and LaFollette campaigns of the
1919-1924, that overlapped to a considerable degree. It expressed the
resistance of American workers to attacks on their political and
economic
rights, which had taken the form of the Palmer Raids and other
extra-governmental rightist attacks. It also expressed the
determination of
the black community to beat back racist pogroms and the growth and
influence of the KKK. LaFollette sought out the support of the
organized
left, the trade unions and the NAACP. Unfortunately the Communist wing
of
the left was hostile to LaFollette's campaign and probably shared some
responsibility for its failure to remain viable after 1924. Its defeat
undoubtedly played a role in the political retreat of the late 1920s,
a
period not unlike our own. With the absence of a political alternative
to
the Democrats and Republicans, nothing in the political arena stood in
the
way of a ruling class economic transformation that in its way was as
sweeping as the "downsizing" of the 1970s and 80s. Mike Davis writes
in
"Prisoner of the American Dream":

"It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of American labor's
defeat in the 1919-1924 period. For almost a decade, the corporations
were
virtually free from the challenge of militant unionism. In the
interlude of
the 'American Plan' employers accelerated the attack on worker control
within the labor process, the new mass-production technologies
advancing
side by side with new forms of corporate management and work
supervision.
The totality of this transformation of the labor process -- first
'Taylorism', then 'Fordism' -- conferred vastly expanded powers of
domination through its systematic decomposition of skills and
serialization
of the workforce."

During the 1930s there were opportunities for a third party based on
the
trade union movement, but because of the hegemony of the Communist
Party,
they were squandered. FDR's New Deal attracted the blind support of
the CP,
even as the party ran its own ineffective propaganda campaigns for
president.

Ironically it was the turn of the US ruling class against the New Deal
consensus that precipitated a third party initiative in 1948, the
Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. In many ways Wallace
symbolized the most progressive aspects of the New Deal. As Secretary
of
Agriculture, he and colleague Harold Ickes played the role of liberal
conscience in the FDR cabinet. He took the principles of the New Deal
at
face value and decided to launch the Progressive Party in the face of
what
he considered their betrayal at the hands of Harry Truman.

The Wallace campaign has served as a whipping boy for dogmatic Marxist
electoral theorizing, much of which I took seriously when I was in the
Trotskyist movement. It was supposed to prove what a dead end middle
class
electoral politics was, in contrast to the insurmountable power and
logic
of a Labor Party. Unfortunately, the Labor Party existed only in the
realm
of propaganda while the Wallace campaign, with all its flaws, existed
in
the realm of reality.

While most people are aware of Wallace's resistance to the Cold War
and to
some of the more egregious anti-union policies of the Democrats and
Republicans, it is important to stress the degree to which his
campaign
embraced the nascent civil rights movement.

Early in the campaign Wallace went on a tour of the south. True to his
party's principles, he announced in advance that he would neither
address
segregated audiences nor stay in segregated hotels. This was virtually
an
unprecedented measure to be taken at the time by a major politician.
Wallace paid for it dearly. In a generally hostile study of Henry
Wallace,
the authors begrudgingly pay their respects to the courage and
militancy of
the candidate:

"The southern tour had begun peacefully enough in Virginia, despite
the
existence in that state of a law banning racially mixed public
assemblies.
In Norfolk, Suffolk, and Richmond, Wallace spoke to unsegregated and
largely receptive audiences. But when the party went on into
supposedly
more liberal North Carolina, where there was no law against
unsegregated
meetings, the violence started. A near riot pre- ceded his first
address,
and a supporter, James D. Harris of Charlotte, was stabbed twice in
the arm
and six times in the back. The next day there was no bloodshed, but
Wallace
was subjected to a barrage of eggs and fruit, and the crowd of about
five
hundred got so completely out of control that he had to abandon his
speech.
At Hickory, North Carolina, the barrage of eggs and tomatoes and the
shouting were so furious that Wallace was prevented from speaking, but
he
tried to deliver a parting thrust over the public address system: 'As
Jesus
Christ told his disciples, when you enter a town that will not hear
you
willingly, then shake the dust of that town from your feet and go
elsewhere.' If they closed their minds against his message, he would,
like
Jesus Christ, abandon them to their iniquity."  (Henry A. Wallace: His
Search for a New World Order, Graham White and John Maze)

Wallace was trounced badly. Briefly, the campaign was undermined by
Truman's demagogic appeal to some bread-and-butter issues supported by
the
trade union bureaucracy, which was also working overtime to purge
CP'ers
out of the trade unions. Furthermore, since the CP had done nothing to
defend trade union prerogatives during WWII, even to the extent of
supporting speedup, many rank and filers considered them to be enemies
of
the labor movement. On top of this, the 1948 CP coup in Czechoslovakia
against the social democratic government of Edward Benes alienated
many
liberals and even some leftists. Despite efforts by Wallace to keep
Stalin
at arm's length, the rightwing in the United States was able to
exploit
resentment over the situation in Czechoslovakia and paint Wallace as a
"Communist dupe".

When the votes were counted, Wallace only received 2.37 percent of the
total. This disaster set the tone for a general offensive against the
left
in the US, focusing particularly on the CP. In no time at all, the
witch-hunt was unleashed, mobs attacked the Paul Robeson concert in
Peekskill, and the Korean War broke out. There is very little doubt
that
the Wallace campaign and the forces gathered around it were the sole
force
capable at that time of putting a roadblock in the way of this
quasi-fascist movement. If the labor movement had not been put on the
defensive, if the civil rights movement had been able to move ahead
under
the general framework of Progressive Party campaigns, perhaps the
dismal
1950s would have not been inevitable. This is not socialist
revolution, but
it is the real class struggle nonetheless. Seeing the relationship
between
the two processes requires some dialectical insight.

Twenty years later another radical third party emerged and for some of
the
same reasons as Wallace's. The Peace and Freedom Party [PFP] was
launched
by radicals in the Draperite International Socialism current in 1968
because the two parties seemed united in supporting the war in Vietnam
and
racist attacks on the black community in the name of "law and order."
Unlike 1948, the trade unions were not in motion and therefore very
few
workers joined the PFP. This meant that it lacked even a modicum of
social
stability. The choice for Presidential candidate, Eldridge Cleaver,
was
symptomatic of the sort of feverish mood that existed in the
predominantly
young and middle-class party. On top of this, the party became a
battleground for competing "vanguard" organizations each of which was
fighting for hegemony. Meetings often turned into the kind of
screaming
matches that marked SDS meetings during the same period.

Meanwhile the CPUSA decided to launch its own third party bid, with
the
highly original name of Freedom and Peace Party--Dick Gregory was the
candidate. We Trotskyists, who ran our own candidate, sneered at the
shenanigans of the "petty bourgeois" third parties, but our rallies
were
dwarfed by the PFP's. The world of real politics is often very messy
and
chaotic, something that the control freaks of the Trotskyist movement
could
not relate to. This messiness was characteristic of the 1960s in
general.
If any good was to come out of it, there had to be a Marxist movement
that
accepted the youthful energy and spontaneity on its own terms and
tried to
steer it in a class struggle direction. I would suggest that the
Seattle
protests give a good indication that all genuine mass movements have a
dynamic of their own and it is best to engage with them rather than
create
some mini-movement run from above on a tight leash.

In going through my library, I discovered an interesting piece of
trivia
about the PFP that I had completely forgotten. Cleaver disappeared
from the
United States during the campaign in order to avoid arrest, but
Douglas
Dowd, his vice-presidential candidate, remained in the country. There
could
be no more of an odd couple than these two. Dowd is one of the great
left
scholars in the United States. A veteran of WWII around the same age
and
outlook as Howard Zinn, he has taught economics at Cornell University
for
decades. In his marvelous memoir "Blues for America," Dowd recounts a
campaign rally for him and Cleaver:

"Cleaver had many passions; the one ranking highest when I knew him
was his
determination never again to let 'them' get him back in prison. Before
the
November election, he skipped the country, believing-probably
correctly-
that he was going to be tried and convicted on some charge or another.
But
before his departure we had shared a platform or two-a memorable
experience.

"There was an evening at Syracuse University, for example, when the
large
university crowd was encircled by at least twenty of Cleaver's
men-standing
in the outer aisles, all noticeably armed.

"As the least important speaker of the evening, I gave my speech first
to
the fitful and uneasy audience-not caring much about my speech, and
certainly not expecting what they were soon to hear from Eldridge. On
the
brink of leaving secretly for Algiers, he was both angry and tense. My
years in the army had accustomed me to the F-word; but I had never
heard so
many of them in a rat-a-tat-tat such as Cleaver's that evening.
Because I
sat on the stage, I could observe the faces of the audience: whether
faculty or students, they seemed to be in a state of semi-shock. To
paraphrase Saddam Hussein, it was the motherfucker of all political
speeches.

"Cleaver went underground and overseas; shortly thereafter,
bureaucratic
wheels moving as slowly-and as absurdly-as they are wont to do, I
received
a note from the N.Y. Secretary of State informing me that my
presidential
running mate was disqualified because he was too young (!).

"Cleaver returned to the country after many years in Algeria. It is
widely
believed (also by me) that Cleaver came back to the States in a deal
with
feds: he would stay out of prison if he would also stay out of
politics,
electoral,  street, or otherwise. In any case he became a professed
fundamentalist Christianity and a dispenser of capitalist ideology for
a
few years, even for while selling men's leather pants with an
outstanding
codpiece as a selling point."

Turning now to the Nader campaign, we have to start off by addressing
the
question of what kind of contradictions would explain the emergence of
a
third party challenge to the Democrats and Republicans. Since we are
at
peace, and since the economy is reportedly booming, why Nader and why
now?

Turning to the newly published "America's Forgotten Majority", Ruy
Teixeira
and Joel Rogers write that "from 1973 to 1998, in an economy that
almost
doubled in real terms, the wage of the typical worker in production
and
nonsupervisory jobs (80 percent of the workforce) actually declined by
6
percent, from $13.61 to $12.77 an hour."

This has been the reality for blue-collar workers and it has been
going on
for decades now. It is truly remarkable that no electoral response on
the
left has appeared prior to the Nader campaign.

Despite the chauvinist character of labor union opposition to China's
entry
into the WTO, there is another process taking place that has much more
importance for Marxists. When powerful American trade unions flirt
with the
candidacy of a man who has never had a kind word for American
corporations,
we are dealing with something new.

The problem for Marxists, however, is that Nader stops short of naming
the
system that is causing the problems working people face on so many
different levels. We would much prefer it if instead of talking about
"globalization" and "greedy corporations" that he would state
unambiguously
that it is the capitalist system that we are dealing with. But then we
would not be dealing with a candidate who had mass appeal. What
troubles
many Marxists, if you stop and think about it, is not so much the
weakness
of his message but the backwardness of the American political
landscape. If
we were in Brazil, then we would have somebody like Lula talking about
the
rottenness of the capitalist system nonstop. That being said, both
Nader
and Lula respectively represent candidacies of a movement that stops
short
of the revolutionary transformation that is necessary once and for
all.

While it is by no means in the cards, it is not to be ruled out that a
Nader campaign will attract significant working class support. In such
an
event, it is vitally important for Marxists to be represented in all
of the
various campaign bodies around the country that organize rallies and
other
events. Since American Marxism is so generally hostile to the Nader
campaign, it is to be expected that members of the Green Party's left
wing,
like Marxism list subscriber Howie Hawkins, will play that role. In
his
postings to the list and in his various articles that have appeared in
Z
Magazine and New Politics, I have grown to respect his principles and
strategic insight. We and the Greens need more like him.

So how will I vote? I personally plan to vote for David McReynolds,
who is
the Socialist Party candidate. I am for Nader and I am for McReynolds.
But
there is only one David McReynolds. He carries on the great Debsian
tradition that American Marxism unfortunately divorced itself from in
the
sectarian detours of the early 1920s. It is our ultimate goal to
reunite
these traditions and meld them with other social movements, like the
environmental, gay and women's movement. In combination with a newly
energized trade union movement, we will then confront as a united mass
movement our enemies in the Democratic and Republican Parties, who
threaten
the planet and everybody who lives on it.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/