Final thoughts on the Nader campaign

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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/