20.10.2004

Avoiding cooperation

Phil Hamilton continues his round-up of the American left with a look at the website of the Socialist Equality Party

Already a number of reports have claimed that early voting in key ‘swing states’ have been plagued by a series of problems. In Florida, the scene of the previous electoral farce, the machinery brought in to avoid the controversy over dimpled and pregnant chads has been prone to breakdowns and ‘network failures’. Even worse are claims that Florida has yet to process voter registration forms for up to 11,000 black residents. The crisis of US bourgeois democracy is poised to end in yet another results night fiasco.

The US Socialist Equality Party, a splinter from the break-up of Gerry Healy’s former ‘international’ and the organisers of the well known World Socialist Web Site, has unfortunately decided to go down the well trodden economistic road travelled by the Socialist Workers Party (US) and Workers World Party. Instead of tackling the democratic deficit head on, the comrades demand “a socialist programme for jobs, education, healthcare!” and the obligatory “Stop the war in Iraq!” While these are necessary component parts of any socialist political strategy, the failure to put democratic demands on an equal footing tends to undermine their silly claim that “SEP candidates are the only candidates in the 2004 election providing a revolutionary socialist alternative …”

The website’s centre piece is a SEP 2004 Committee statement calling for WSWS readers and SEP supporters to volunteer time and resources for the campaign. Unfortunately for the comrades their campaign appears to be much smaller than those of other socialists, having only secured ballot access for the presidency in seven states, as well as candidatures for Congress in Maine and for state representative in Illinois. The need for small biographies of SEP nominees has not been overlooked either. The SEP presidential candidate is Bill Van Auken, a member of the group for 33 years and currently employed as a full-time writer for WSWS. The vice-presidential nominee is comrade Jim Lawrence, a retired auto worker with a militant record stretching back 30 or so years. An ungenerous reading of this suggests the hack has won out over the trade unionist. From the campaign’s perspective perhaps it would have been better to swap the nominations over.

The committee statement moves on to attack the ‘alternative’ of the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Despite more Healyite posturing creeping in (“only our campaign opposes the war in Iraq and calls for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops”), they are right when arguing that the Democrats are conducting a campaign on the same rightwing terrain as Bush-Cheney. SEP also condemns the Democrats’ shameful anti-democratic activities around the election, highlighting their miserable attempts to keep Nader, the Greens and other anti-establishment parties off the ballot. The comrades also talk about the University of Illinois’ harassment of Tom Mackaman, SEP’s state legislature candidate. This coincidentally comes after an unsuccessful challenge to his candidacy by the Democrats. The account of ballot-spiking continues with a description of how the Ohio secretary of state arbitrarily rejected two thirds of the signatures SEP obtained to get on the ballot, before finally finishing with the customary rhetorical flourish.

In addition the site features bite-sized reports of varying quality on how the campaign is going on a state-by-state basis. This could have been a worthwhile feature, but the variance in detail (‘Illinois’ has more information on the undemocratic shenanigans SEP faces, while ‘Colorado’ merely invites support for the campaign) and infrequency of updates makes this a missed opportunity.

The SEP platform will not win prizes for prime positioning, but it does expand greatly on its committee statement. Of the socialist groups running for president, the SEP’s document is closest to a manifesto. Prior to setting out its list of demands, the comrades in a rare moment of modesty, recognise that their campaign will be limited and poll few votes, but this does not matter. Its purpose “is to raise the level of political debate … to break out of the straitjacket of rightwing bourgeois politics … and lay down the programmatic foundations for the building of a mass movement for a revolutionary transformation”.

While SEP is correct in setting this objective for its electoral work, as ever the comrades cannot conceive that this would be best achieved in cooperation with other socialists working toward the same goal. There were no surprises when entering Socialist Party USA, SWP and WWP into the site search engine turned up nothing but four-year-old polemics. This failure of socialists to even attempt electoral cooperation will ensure the continued marginalisation of working class politics in this election.