09.11.2000
London Socialist Alliance and Nader
For the first time in decades, a candidate from the left of the two main parties has made an impact on the race for the White House. In key states - particularly Oregon and Florida - Nader may have polled enough to swing the vote for president between George W Bush and Al Gore. The unprecedented deadlock was in no small measure brought about by the presence of a third candidate.
Whether or not it was correct to support Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for the US presidential elections, has become a contentious issue among revolutionaries and socialists in Britain. A partially issued press release from the London Socialist Alliance from last weekend said: "Go, Ralph, go: British left cheers Nader." A full release was halted after protest from the LSA chair, Marcus Larsen (CPGB), and secretary, Greg Tucker (International Socialist Group).
For the first time in decades, a candidate from the left of the two main parties has made an impact on the race for the White House. In key states - particularly Oregon and Florida - Nader may have polled enough to swing the vote for president between George W Bush and Al Gore. The unprecedented deadlock was in no small measure brought about by the presence of a third candidate.
The pull of Nader's campaign has been such that some socialists, particularly the Socialist Workers Party and its sister organisation in the US, the International Socialist Organization, opted for calling for a vote for the Green Party candidate. So should socialists have supported Nader?
It is ABC for Marxists that in the United States supporting either of the two main bourgeois parties is to cross the class line; it is to support the candidate of an enemy class. Nader is somewhat different, standing on a petty bourgeois platform opposing big business, while championing the small farmer, the small shopkeeper, local business and local labour. His campaign has been more akin to the Populist politics of 19th century America.
Even the SWP/ISO admit that while Nader is anti-corporate, he is not anti-capitalist. Nader has championed the rights of consumers and the rights of workers in their workplace for decades. Yet he also supports trade barriers - particularly against China.
The SWP/ISO claims that he represents the "spirit of Seattle". Even if this were so, this nascent anti-capitalist 'movement' is many-layered. Nader, if anything, represents its right-leaning, reformist wing, its protectionist elements. He does not represent the politics of the working class, even in a refracted sense, as social-democracy did in its reformist heyday.
For socialists to actively call for electoral support for a candidate with the politics of another class is dangerous, to say the least. Ken Livingstone, while no doubt a chameleon character holding and advocating all manner of petty bourgeois ideas, represented a rebellion in the Labour Party which, despite Blair's best efforts, remains a bourgeois workers' party. He represented, admittedly in a distorted way, the possibility of the working class pole attempting to reassert itself against the increasingly dominant bourgeois element.
Nader, however, is a different matter. He is more akin to an Anita Roddick than a Ken Livingstone. While some sections of the post-cold war union bureaucracy have warmed to Nader, his candidacy is not a potential step towards independent working class organisation. The main strategic issue for the working class is the formation of a working class party. It should not be sidelined into the dead end of Green Party radicalism and petty-bourgeois anti-corporatism.
Yet the left needs to take a sympathetic view to those who supported and campaigned for Nader. Socialists needed to have been with the Nader campaign, but not for it. We want workers to break from the bourgeois parties, but in which direction? Communists cannot back a campaign that has no intention and no potential to break from the confines of bourgeois politics.
Given that it is known that a number of organisations which comprise the LSA opposed a call for a Nader vote (CPGB, ISG, Workers Power), it is therefore irresponsible for the LSA press committee to have issued a pro-Nader statement. While this committee has a brief to issue statements on current LSA policy or on relatively non-contentious issues, it cannot and should not develop policy on the hoof.
The minutes of the LSA press meeting of last week read: "Despite dire warnings that 'a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush', Ralph Nader has succeeded in pushing Gore to the left in the US presidential election campaign. John [Rees] will speak to Nader seeking backing. Mike [Marqusee] will draft something." What that "something" turned out to be was unacceptable. There is nothing wrong with the LSA commenting on the Nader campaign per se, but to recklessly support Nader without a full debate and discussion was foolish. As Greg Tucker, LSA secretary, said in his statement backing up Marcus Larsen, "It would be contentious for us to support a Green candidate in Britain without discussion."
The LSA media release in part read: "Don't think it can't happen here. He [Nader] is raising healthcare, wages, affordable housing, military spending, public investment, human rights and the environment. Like the LSA in May's London Assembly elections and in subsequent by-elections, Ralph Nader is showing that it is possible to build a meaningful alternative to the pro-big business consensus to which all the major parties now subscribe." The equating of our Socialist Alliance, while currently campaigning around a left reformist platform, with the middle class populism of Nader is just too much.
All this raises a number of points. Politics is not discussed enough in the Socialist Alliance. Meetings are overly technical. There is also a culture from dominant sections (not just the SWP) of an assumed 'common sense' agreement with certain positions: on global warming, Blair's 'betrayal', Nader, anti-capitalism, the 'united front' nature of the SAs, the 'racist' nature of immigration controls, the need to present a Labourite economistic election programme. These issues are contentious and need discussing in a full and frank manner. Only in this way will minorities be prepared to accept majority positions as a basis on which to conduct joint activity.
To equate Nader's campaign with the LSA's is profoundly worrying about the direction in which the SWP wishes to take the alliance project. Programmeless, the SWP itself almost automatically tails the latest populist movement. But for consistent revolutionaries, a communist programme is our essential tool in providing class-based clarity to guide our actions.
Marcus Larsen