27.08.2008

Capitalism with a human face

US communist Jim Creegan gives critical support to independent Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader

During a recent North American television appearance, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian intellectual superstar, remarked that most contemporary leftists would probably profess strong disagreement with Francis Fukuyama’s book, The end of history and the last man. In this famous 1992 work, Fukuyama argues that free-market capitalism represents the end point in human historical development. Yet, Zizek continued, most who denounce Fukuyama implicitly accept his conclusions.

This is evident, he might have pointed out, from the fact that, amid all the talk one hears these days about the crimes of corporations and the US government, there is one word conspicuous by its virtual absence: ‘capitalism’. Its use is not avoided because people are unaware that the means of production and exchange are privately owned, but rather because to give this state of affairs a definite name is already to imply that there can be something beyond it. For most people in the present post-cold war environment, including many who would call themselves leftwing, the regime of private property is not a historically defined social system, but simply the way things are. Therefore the highest goal they can aim for, as Zizek put it, is “capitalism with a human face”.

The human face most reformists pine for is something resembling the welfare state of the ‘golden age’ following World War II. From the Soviet experience they have concluded that revolution has proved to be a chimera turned nightmare. Their ambitions, at least on the home front, are limited to restoring the ‘social contract’ that supposedly prevailed in the halcyon days before Reagan and Thatcher, when they or their parents were growing up. Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’ is nostalgically invoked.

This line of thinking, however, contains an inherent paradox. The reforms that came to be known as the welfare state were the response of the ruling classes to two simultaneous dangers, both of them life-threatening: the most devastating economic crisis in capitalism’s history; and the existence in one-sixth of the earth of a non-capitalist society, born in revolution. In the absence of these challenges, the ruling classes long ago concluded that a “human face” was something they neither needed nor could afford. This is the lesson that Thatcher and Reagan taught, and which all bourgeois political factions were quick to absorb.

The learning curve of the liberal left, however, is a little slower. During each presidential election they flock to the Democratic Party, hoping to find another Roosevelt, but discovering only centrist politicians like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton - essentially dedicated to the same rightwing agenda as the Republicans, only somewhat more temporising and cautious about putting it into practice.

Thus a debate ensues within the vaguely defined, largely white, middle class milieu that styles itself the American ‘progressive community’. A minority argue that they have been played for fools - used by the Democratic leadership to whip up enthusiasm at election time, only to be shunted aside and ignored once the votes are counted. They begin to make noises about independent political action.

The majority answer that the Democrats may be bad, but the Republicans are worse. The latter will pursue a more bellicose foreign policy; they will privatise everything that exists; they will fill vacancies on the Supreme Court with lifetime-tenured, rightwing judges who will destroy the separation of church and state and abolish the right to abortion. The apologists say that, unlike the Republicans, the Democrats are at least susceptible to pressure from the left. If we do our job between elections and hold their feet to the fire, the way to progress could open up.

These arguments are repeated with only minor variations during each election cycle. For anyone old enough to have lived through at least several of these quadrennial exercises in mass deception, the tedium can be deadly.

Democratic Party loyalists have a point. The Democrats are not, in fact, as ‘bad’ as the Republicans. Their voting base is comprised to a greater degree by the victims of neoliberal ‘reforms’, and this imposes upon them a certain restraint when following, as they inevitably do, in the same direction as their more uninhibited rivals. But few human spirits, and especially few youthful ones, can be inspired by a lesser degree of ‘badness’. When all is said and done, the Democrats worship at the same imperial altar and feed at the same corporate trough as the Republicans. For anyone with eyes to see, they are clearly not the vehicle for attaining the desiderata of their reformist base.

This recalcitrant fact confronts ‘progressives’ with a choice: they can either embellish the Democrats’ reformist credentials, talking themselves and others into believing that this party of the centre is much further to the left than it is; or they can opt for independent electoral action. From the late 90s on, ‘progressive’ opinion has hovered between these poles, with many in between and others switching back and forth. The Democratic loyalists now have the clear upper hand, due to the outcome of the last major attempt to tack left.

The irrepressible Ralph

In 2000, Ralph Nader secured the presidential nomination of the Green Party and ran for the presidency against both George W Bush and his Democratic opponent, vice-president Al Gore. Nader got a few trade union endorsements, as well as the support of a number of media personalities and Hollywood stars.

He was the logical choice because he was (and is) the only nationally known figure to the left of the Democrats who is neither a journalist nor a professor. Nader is a politician of sorts. An anti-corporate crusader and consumer advocate since the 60s, he has founded and run more than a dozen non-profit organisations dedicated to exposing corporate lies and espousing various public-interest causes, like safe cars and clean air.

Nader’s politics are neither socialist nor class-based. He despises corporations not because they are the dominant incarnation of capital, which exploits labour, no matter what its form; but because they are too greedy and impersonal, and wield a disproportionate political influence. His alternative to the ‘corporate state’ seems to be taken from a 1930s Frank Capra movie: a grassroots democracy comprised of small to medium-sized family businesses and their well paid, unionised employees, all working happily together and animated by an unflagging public spirit.

Yet despite his neo-populist illusions, Ralph Nader is an uncompromising man. When, under the Carter administration in the 1970s, official Washington turned sharply to the right and began slamming its doors in his face, Nader, in contrast to the majority of liberals, declined to confine his agenda within the limits prescribed by the powerful. Instead, he turned to the rest of the country, pursuing his various causes at the local level. He is the only candidate to call for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. He repeatedly violates the strongest taboo of American politics by focussing attention on Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. He is also the only candidate in decades to call for the abolition of the Taft-Hartley Act, which has crippled trade unions since 1947.

His denunciation of the two major parties as corporate minions is a protest, however inadequate, against the ruling class political monopoly. And, perhaps most significantly, Nader in 2000 refused to heed the advice of those who, like the left-liberal standard bearer, The Nation magazine, tried to have the best of both worlds by urging him to stand for president only in those states with assured Democratic majorities. Nader got his name on the ballot wherever he could, regardless of the consequences for Al Gore and the rest of the Democratic ticket.

The response of the Democratic establishment was little short of hysterical. Since the rise of Bill Clinton in the early 90s, the party has been dominated by an internal clique called the Democratic Leadership Council. This group was the vehicle of Clinton and others for steering the party sharply to the right by freeing it of any ‘anti-business’ taint left over from ‘new deal’ days. Its strategy was based on the assumption that the party no longer faced any organised challenges from the left - either from trade unions or political parties. The numerous but diffuse milieus that disliked the Democrats’ rightward turn could nevertheless be counted on to support the party against the greater Republican evil, when it came time to vote. This strategy provided the model for Tony Blair’s New Labour.

Ralph Nader’s candidacy posed an unexpected challenge to this strategy. But it was not big enough for the Democrats to feel they had to accommodate Nader and the Greens, even verbally. They sought instead to nip the defection in the bud.

The party’s lawyers manoeuvred across the country to keep Nader’s name off the ballot. A small local incident bespeaks the Democrats’ rancour. Here in New York City, Amy Goodman - a pioneering radio and television journalist - was purged, along with several colleagues from the alternative radio station, WBAI. The Clintonite board that controlled the network in Washington was enraged by Goodman’s support for Nader, as well as her aggressive questioning of Bill Clinton when he unexpectedly phoned the station to drum up support for Hillary’s senatorial bid in 2000. Goodman said she stopped coming to work because she feared for her physical safety. A similar purge, with violent episodes, took place earlier at the network’s sister station in San Francisco. (Both purges were later reversed as a result of organised listener boycotts; Goodman’s Democracy now! is today a nationally syndicated radio and television programme.)

The hysteria reached fever pitch when Al Gore lost the 2000 election to Bush by 537 votes (according to a hotly disputed official tally) in Florida. The Democrats blamed their defeat on Nader, branding him a “spoiler” for taking away the votes that could have put Gore over the top. As George W Bush pursued blatantly anti-popular home policies and invaded Iraq, confounding expectations that he would govern in the right-centrist fashion of his father, Nader became the devil incarnate in left-liberal circles. ‘See what you get when you step too far out of line?’ scolded Democratic apologists. Most of Nader’s erstwhile supporters fell back into line.

In 2004, the Green Party refused to renominate Nader for president. Instead, it picked a little known lawyer named David Cobb, who pursued a ‘safe state’ strategy, campaigning only in those constituencies where a Democratic victory was certain. A couple of years later, the organisers of a major anti-war rally in Washington pointedly refused to invite Nader to speak, while several Democratic elected officials adorned the platform. During the 2004 campaign, television viewers were treated to the spectacle of Michael Moore, the documentarist, and a comedian and talk-show host named Bill Maher - both Nader supporters in 2000 - going down on bended knee before Ralph Nader on Maher’s weekly show, begging him not to run against John Kerry. To his credit, Nader spurned their entreaties. He ran again for president in 2004, with an ex-leader of the formerly Trotskyist US Socialist Workers Party, Peter Camejo, as his vice-presidential running mate.

Nader is running again this year. Matt Gonzalez, who narrowly lost to the Democrats in a 2003 Green Party bid for mayor of San Francisco, joins Nader on the ballot. For its part, the national Green Party has once again declined to nominate Nader, choosing instead the black former Democrat, Cynthia McKinney, who recently lost her congressional seat in Georgia as a result of, among other things, her refusal to toe the Zionist line regarding the Middle East. The Greens say they will contend for the presidency in all possible states. Without the apparatus that the Greens can supply, or the support of prominent figures, Nader has not been able to replicate the impact of his 2000 campaign. Yet he refuses to go away.

Audible grumbles

Although most left reformists are still chastened by their 2000 experience, the current mood is not quite as abject as in 2004, when the main slogan was ‘Anybody but Bush!’ - ie, John Kerry, the pro-war Democrat.

Obama, it is true, continues to exert an enormous appeal based solely on who he is, as opposed to anything he has done or promised. In a country where black people were enslaved for 250 years, and - within the memory of a baby-boom generation only now getting old - lynched, forbidden to vote, attend the same schools or use the same toilets as whites in the south, the possibility of a black man becoming president has profound emotional significance. The spirits of blacks and other people of colour, as well as of anti-racist whites, are understandably buoyed by the prospect. Obama has also gained sympathy because he is the object of race-baiting. Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign was laced with subtle racial innuendo, as are indeed the television adverts of John McCain.

On the other hand, Obama has had to distance himself publicly from ‘the black agenda’ as the price for acceptance by the political establishment. He had to disown the pastor of his former Chicago church, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, after a videotape surfaced in which Wright argued that 9/11 was a case of American imperialist “chickens coming home to roost”. Obama’s Father’s Day speech, exhorting black fathers to take greater responsibility for their families and children, echoed the rightwing refrain which seeks to assign blame for the plight of the black family not to poverty and unemployment, but rather to the feckless behaviour of black men. The speech provoked the ire of Jesse Jackson, who was unknowingly caught on camera saying that he would “like to cut his [Obama’s] nuts off”.

As black radicals Glen Ford and Adolph Reed have pointed out, an Obama victory could easily give credence to the convenient conclusion that America has now “put the race problem behind it” and become a “colour-blind society” at a time when blacks are further behind whites by just about every index of well-being. Obama, who rattles on incessantly about how “only America” could give someone like him a chance at the presidency, seems only too willing to feed this white-comforting myth. (He, of course, forgets to add that it was also “only America” that prevented people of his pigmentation from holding major elected office - with a brief hiatus during the post-civil war reconstruction period - for the first 200 or so years of its existence!)

As Obama moved to the right after securing the nomination (see ‘Barack Obama - a class act’ Weekly Worker July 17), grumbling among his white liberal supporters also became distinctly audible. During the primaries, a group called Progressives for Obama - spearheaded by the social democrat, Barbara Ehrenreich, and the former 60s new leftist, Tom Hayden - had been positively rapturous. They hailed the Obama campaign as the birth of a “new social movement” akin to the industrial unionism of the 1930s or the civil rights movement of the early 60s (The Nation March 24). But after Obama voted to allow Bush to continue his programme of warrantless wiretapping, this same group, while still supporting the Democratic contender, issued an open letter to him in which they spoke of “troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance” (ibid July 30).

Other supporters were even more vocal. Some even organised a networking site on Obama’s own web page, calling on him to reverse his stand on domestic spying. A prominent writer for Salon.com, a major liberal Democratic online journal, gave vent to his anger: “For him to suddenly turn around and endorse this proposal is really a betrayal of what so many of his supporters believed he believed in” (The New York Times July 2).

The indignation of these liberals will not result in big defections to the Nader camp in 2008. But one can only imagine what their reactions might be to Obama in the White House - where not only centrist compromises, but real crimes, will be required.

A strategic task

The Democratic Party constitutes a major obstacle to the American left, just as the Labour Party does in Britain. The Republicans are the party of unalloyed reaction, and thus have little influence among social groups - workers, blacks, immigrants and reform-minded petty bourgeois - that could pose a threat to the existing order in times of crisis. Such a function devolves upon the Democrats, who in this respect play a role analogous to that of social democracy in Europe.

The difference is that the Democrats do not now profess, and have never professed, socialism or an allegiance to the working class; they have no formal links with the trade unions and openly accept buckets of corporate cash. Nevertheless, their historical association with the ‘new deal’ and civil rights allows them to continue to pose as the more ‘progressive’ of the two parties. The weakening of that pose in recent decades is due to the absence of organised pressure from below.

Breaking the Democratic stranglehold is thus a strategic task for American socialists. It simply will not do to argue, as many do, that presidential elections are not all that important, so we might as well hold the line against the Republicans by voting Democrat, and then go about the more important business of organising around non-electoral issues in the meantime.

The Democrats do not exert their influence only during elections. Together with the union bureaucrats, minority-group leaders and assorted popular figures they cultivate, Democratic politicians at all times counsel the path of least resistance. They say the most important thing people can do to improve their lot is vote them into office. Therefore, when a demonstration adopts a tone that is too militant, or a strike employs tactics outside the bosses’ laws, these things are said to damage the Democrats’ electoral chances. Such tactics, they say, must hence be avoided at all costs. The Democrats, in short, act as a break on independent political action at all times.

No more convincing is the chorus - joined by the self-styled anarchist, Noam Chomsky, in 2004 - of those who contend that Democratic victories, while changing nothing fundamental, make “concrete differences to real people”, and that to ignore this fact amounts to sacrificing human beings in the name of doctrinal purity.

Chomsky and those who argue in a similar vein should also know that politics always involves a calculation of short-term losses against long-term gains and vice versa. To think exclusively in the short term is called opportunism. It is true that the Republicans are more rabidly rightwing than the Democrats, and that their ascendancy often means the defeat of a beneficial piece of legislation, adverse legal rulings, faster environmental degradation, bolder attacks on the few remaining rights workers possess, etc. Many claim to know, without convincing evidence, that a Democratic administration would never have invaded Iraq.

To oppose voting for the Democrats, one does not have to argue that they are identical to the Republicans. If they were, no-one would have any reason to vote for them. It is sufficient to point out that the short-term benefits of electing Democrats pale in comparison beside the disadvantage of giving them the legitimacy they require to defuse any impulse for radical change. Indeed, both the ‘greater evil’ and the ‘lesser evil’ play indispensable roles in the perpetuation of the evil called capitalist rule.

Critical support

Finally, what attitude should socialists take toward left reformists who have, in fact, broken with the Democrats? Ralph Nader is the best known and most consistent of these apostates.

Lenin and Trotsky considered the tactic of critical electoral support to be permissible only in relation to workers’ parties, even if, as in the case of social democrats, such support was intended to expose their treachery. Ralph Nader has no connection with working class institutions, supports small-time capitalism, and is therefore certainly not the head of anything that can be called a workers’ party.

But, then again, what exactly is a workers’ party in today’s class-ambiguous political context? We know that the Republicans and Democrats in the US, the Tories in Britain, the CSU/CDU in Germany and the UMP in France are bourgeois parties. But what of British Labour, the German SPD or the French Socialist Party? All had working class and socialist origins, and some still maintain links to the trade unions, although these are growing steadily weaker. On the other hand, all these parties now openly support capitalism, and have had a major hand in privatising public functions and imposing austerity on the working class. Is there, moreover, a qualitative difference between the middle class party militants who inhabit the left fringes of these parties and those who work for the Greens? If anything, the former are further to the right. The question of what is and what is not a workers’ party, or if these categories are still meaningful at all, is one that needs greater clarification.

In the interim and for practical purposes, we suggest a criterion based upon how political parties function. No support, first of all, should ever be extended to a political formation that engages in left posturing in order to foreclose upon more radical possibilities. Such a group were the Greens of 2004, whose ‘safe state’ strategy was designed to satisfy the urge for independent political action, while not challenging the Democrats in real terms. The Greens in this instance merited no political support whatsoever.

Ralph Nader, on the other hand, is not standing for office to head off, defuse or coopt anyone. His candidacy - in 2000, 2004 and today - is based upon nothing but his principled opposition to the corporate stranglehold on official Washington. He is a pariah in Democratic circles. It would be simply untenable to tell people to break with the Democrats as a strategic necessity, and then refuse to have anything to do with those who actually do so because they do not constitute a bona fide ‘workers’ party’.

Socialists have many important things to say to such people, and it would be foolish to let labels of doubtful contemporary application stand in the way. Nader, in short, is worthy of critical support.

That support should, however, be offered without illusions. The mainly young people around Nader are committed reformists, with all the confused notions and vacillations of the middle class. They are not destined to become a major force in American politics as things now stand. But if the present economic crisis deepens, along with the disillusioned mood now setting in, things could change. Social layers below the middle class could start to look around for an alternative to the Democrats. Many of Nader’s current supporters may shudder at the prospect of a more serious class politics. But others may feel empowered as a result, and could perhaps start thinking that more is possible than ‘capitalism with a human face’.