04.11.2004

Abolish the elected monarch

Kerry deserved to lose - Bush did not deserve to win

George Bush has secured his second term in office. Moreover, the Republican Party now has a clear majority in the upper and lower houses of congress. To increase the Democratic Party’s misery, Bush - in contrast to the 2000 presidential elections - comfortably won the popular vote by some four million.
Yes, as widely predicted, all the states, except for the relatively minor players of New Hampshire and New Mexico, essentially staged a re-run of the 2000 election and remain as before in terms of party allegiance. Puzzling for some, however, was the fact that, although there were much higher levels of registration and turnout compared to 2000 (with up to 10 million extra voters), the main beneficiary of this was George Bush rather than John Kerry. The born-again Bush was certainly able to mobilise the christian vote over ‘hot button’ issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, etc. In this way the commonly shared values of bigotry and prejudice joined fundamentalist protestants and the Roman catholic hierarchy behind Bush.

No one should go into mourning because Kerry lost. He is a reactionary multi-millionaire who is not deserving of any electoral support from socialists and partisans of the working class. Even with him in the White House the Iraqi people were still going to suffer under brutal imperialist rule. We cannot agree with the fawning method, sentiments or conclusions of Sunder Katwala, secretary of the Fabian Society, who wanted Kerry to win simply because he was “not George Bush”. No, the mere fact that someone is not George Bush is not enough. That is to reduce elections to choosing the lesser evil.
Obviously, though, the election offers a snapshot of the current balance of forces within America, and hence poses the tasks confronting communists, socialists and genuine democrats in that great country.

Bush is seeking to amend the US constitution to specify that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman, a clearly retrograde proposal which needs to be vigorously contested. As well as voting for the presidency, the electorate in 11 US states had the opportunity to voice their opinion on this matter in a series of referendums taking place in Oklahoma, Georgia, North Dakota, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oregon. Regrettably, though, these states - by quite wide margins - voted in favour of Bush’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. Progressive America now needs to go on the offensive against reactionary America.

There were positive glimmers in urban, secular-inclined California, which also held a referendum on stem-cell research and now looks set to become the first US state to provide the funding for it - the ballot’s approval was needed to get around restrictions imposed by the Bush administration. Once again, the divide is clearly visible between the America which is god-fearing, anti-abortion, the defender of ‘family values’ and authoritarian; and the America which is rational, scientific, pro-women’s rights, secular and socially tolerant. The 2004 presidential elections can only exacerbate this cultural, social and political divide, and communists in the United States must be at the vanguard of this humane, progressive America, precisely in order to inject a socialist pulse and direction.

Self-evidently, the US working class movement is still the tail of the Democratic Party. Instead the working class needs to assert its independence and become a class for itself. That can only be done if it becomes the tribune of the people and champions a radical extension of democratic rights.
To do so in part requires that the working class goes back and rediscovers the old American values of secularism, militant democracy and revolutionary republicanism upheld by Daniel Shays, Fredrick Douglass, Eugene Debs and John Reed. In part, this requires informing those values with a renewed contemporary Marxism and taking up the fight to transform the creaking, quasi-democratic 1787 constitution - with its endless ‘checks and balances’ it is transparently designed to frustrate and subvert popular initiatives and any moves to take power out of the hands of the plutocracy. Only through such a programme of extreme democracy does ending capitalism and socialism become possible.

Of course, the origins of today’s rotten system lie in the multi-layered compromise hammered out after the 1775-83 American revolution by the exploitative representatives of wage-labour and slave labour, as codified by the 1787 Philadelphia constitution.

As we know, the southern delegates at the constitutional convention were keen to prevent any infringements or restrictions on slavery and succeeded in forcing through significant amendments - most notably, an iniquitous clause whereby each slave counted as three-fifths of a white person. In another concession, this time to the states, it was agreed that the president would be elected indirectly through a winner-takes-all electoral college system. Technically the electoral college could also reject the popular choice.

Furthermore, small states like Connecticut or Delaware, backed by the south, gained further electoral college strength when the convention also agreed to apportion only two senators in the upper house for each state, irrespective of its size.

Therefore, for instance, Wyoming, with a population of under one million today, has the same number of senators - and therefore adds two to its electoral college basic vote total of one - as a huge state like California, with a population of 32 million. Thus California’s two senators are added to its overall electoral vote of 52, which may sound impressive, but it is still the fact that its voting power is artificially restricted in comparison to states with much smaller population densities, like Wyoming, Hawaii or Alaska. Small is most definitely not beautiful.

Obviously, after the civil war the three-fifths clause was abolished, but the electoral college with its apportioning of votes in current-day America continues the undemocratic imbalances first introduced in 1787. Periodically, there have been attempts at reform, particularly in 1969, when under popular pressure the House of Representatives voted by a clear majority to abolish the electoral college and substitute a popular vote (Richard Nixon himself backed the proposal). However, when the proposals went to the senate in 1970, racist segregationist senators, led by the late and thoroughly unlamented Strom Thur-mond, launched a series of filibusters, and the reform fell.

Interestingly, as part of the presidential elections, the state of Colorado mounted a challenge to the electoral college system, arguing that that it should split its nine electoral college votes proportionately between the two candidates. But, for this or that reason, amendment 36 was rejected outright by the Colorado voters.

All this highlights the urgent need to launch a new democratic offensive. Specifically, we would recommend the following programmatic outline:

1. The president proposes the budget and other legislation put to congress, appoints all government officials and members of the supreme court and acts as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He is a monarch who has to stand for election ever four years. But we are against the monarchical principle and the concentration of so much power in the hands of one person. Abolish the monarchical presidency.

2. The supreme court consists of nine judges who serve for life (ie, as long as they wish). This institution commands enormous negative power. It can veto and interpret legislation. Under extreme circumstances - eg, a revolutionary situation - it could even rule. Before the 1861-65 US civil war, America’s second revolution, the supreme court loyally protected the property rights of the slavocracy in the south. Before 1850, slave-owners had provided 18 out of 31 supreme court justices - yes, a reactionary stranglehold. Abolish the supreme court. All judges should be elected by popular vote and all judges should be instantly recallable.

3. US armed forces have hundreds of overseas bases. Its huge arsenal of WMDs could destroy a billion people in an instant. Though in relative decline economically, US imperialism is unmatched as a military power. Increasingly the threat of coercion is used to impose US interests over other countries. Bush cynically exploited the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to unleash his ‘war on terror’, curb civil rights at home and boost the annual military budget - which now stands at around $350 billion. The US invaded and now occupies Iraq. It threatens to mete out similar treatment to Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba. Clearly, the US armed forces are oppressive externally, but also potentially internally, and a huge waste of material wealth and human resources to boot. This excessively overgrown machine should be scrapped and replaced with a simple system of popular militias.

4. The US is an indivisible federal republic. It has two houses of congress, but strong state rights. This whole edifice needs a radical overhaul. The principle of federalism needs to give way to the principle of democratic centralism. There ought to be one house of congress in which representatives are elected on the basis of equal numbers of voters. There should be wide measures of local and state autonomy. However, congress ought to wield executive power and be the final arbiter.