30.10.2008
No vote for Obama
Nick Rogers looks at the strategic choices before the US working class
The November 4 elections in the United States are being hailed by commentators as likely to mark a historic once-in-a-generation shift that could see the first black president elected and the Republicans ejected not only from the presidency but from any meaningful role in Congress. The comparison is made with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election that signalled the US ruling class’s full-throttled commitment to the strategy of neoliberalism. Heightening the electoral drama are daily headlines reporting the biggest shock to the US and global economy since the financial crash of 1929.
In fact ever since the year-long credit crunch resulted in mid-September in a meltdown of the US financial sector, the polls have swung decisively in favour of Barack Obama - reversing the lead John McCain had built up after the surprise selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate briefly turned popular sentiment in favour of the Republicans’ self-proclaimed ‘mavericks’. A week before election day Obama continues to hold strong leads of between 5% and 10% in national polling, is even further ahead in many of the key swing states and is pushing his campaign audaciously into so-called Republican ‘red’ states - such as Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia - that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in a generation.
In congress the Democrats may end up with more than 60 Senate seats, the margin necessary to override Republican filibustering of legislation. The Democrats are likely to strengthen their majority in the House of Representative. All the usual caveats apply, but a Democratic landslide beckons.
Missing from the close to saturation coverage in the mainstream media is not only any hint of an independent political role for the US working class, but any analysis of what strategic direction a new Democratic governing elite might pursue. US communist Jim Creegan has authored an excellent series of articles for the Weekly Worker in which he has demonstrated how narrow is the political turf over which this supposedly transformational set of elections is being fought - McCain’s accusations of ‘socialism’ against Obama notwithstanding.
Take foreign affairs. Obama won the Democratic nomination in good part because he was able to point to his opposition to the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton’s Senate support in 2003 for the war caused her immense damage amongst grassroots Democrats in the primary contests.
Yet Obama in no way represents an anti-imperialist trend in US politics. He would not be receiving endorsements from major establishment figures - most recently of Colin Powell, secretary of state at the time of the invasion of Iraq - if he was perceived to represent any kind of threat to the imperialist (or capitalist) status quo. Obama proposes a 16-month withdrawal from Iraq and would leave behind a substantial number of troops with a wide mandate to protect US interests. Beyond Iraq, he is looking to a redeployment of forces rather than any drawing back from overseas entanglements. Obama wants to increase the US commitment in Afghanistan (as part of an increased US budget) and has said he would be prepared to extend the conflict to the Pakistani border region even in the face of opposition from the Pakistan government. The Afghan scenario he paints bears all the hallmarks of the Vietnam war and its extension into Cambodia and Laos.
In the course of the election campaign Obama has offered strong support for Israel and insisted that he would keep available every option in his determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities.
Obama’s vision is of a reconfiguration of US imperialist strategy - rather than its reconstruction or abandonment. The replacement of George W Bush will not see any lessening of the dangers facing the world. Despite that Obama has been endorsed not only by ‘official communists’ in the US, but their equivalents in Britain: from Respect’s George Galloway to Labour’s leading leftwinger John McDonnell.
Jim Creegan quite rightly argues that communists ought not to support Obama. However, despite that, his otherwise sound political perspectives contain a significant flaw. He advocates support for the presidential candidacy of independent Ralph Nader. Nader has an exemplary record as a defender of the consumer and an anti-corporate campaigner, and has stood for the presidency in each election since 1996. Incidentally he can boast the genuine Arab ancestry that some Americans ascribe to Obama - Nader’s family was Lebanese Christian. Whether Nader meets McCain’s standard of being “a decent family man” I do not propose to consider.
Ralph Nader and working class independence
But Nader is not a working class militant. Comrade Creegan himself admits this: “Ralph Nader has no connection with working class institutions, supports small-time capitalism, and is certainly not the head of anything that can be called a workers’ party” (all Creegan quotes from ‘Capitalism with a human face’ Weekly Worker August 28). Comrade Creegan provides an incisive description of the philosophy that motivates Nader: “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 disproportionate political influence.”
What then can be the basis of our support for Nader? The key criterion, according to comrade Creegan, is whether Nader’s candidacy contributes to weakening the hold of the Democratic Party on organised labour: “The Democratic Party constitutes a major obstacle to the American left, just as the Labour Party does in Britain … the Democrats … play a role analogous to that of social democracy in Europe ... Breaking the Democratic stranglehold is thus a strategic task for American socialists.”
It is certainly the case that the measure of all working class tactics and strategy should be what best promotes working class independence. Comrade Creegan makes a valid point about the respective roles of the Democratic Party in the US and the Labour and social democratic parties in Europe. On neither side of the Atlantic do these parties represent the historic interests of the working class.
Much is sometimes made of absence in the US of a mass workers’ party - the ‘American exception’. In Europe parties explicitly aiming to represent the working class came to carry increasing political and electoral weight in the course of the late 19th century and early 20th century. Most were members of the Second International, which Marx and Engels played important roles in forming and nurturing. All were committed to one degree or another to their own version of socialism.
In the US during the early 20th century the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs did grow in influence. Debs took 900,000 votes and six percent of the vote in the presidential election of 1912. Two Socialist Party candidates were elected to Congress and the party had 70 mayors and other representatives in state legislatures and city councils. It was reasonable to envisage that the labour movement in the US was on a similar (if delayed) trajectory to that of its European counterparts.
The real divergence in working class fortunes in Europe and the US occurred in the aftermath of World War I. The imprisonment of the Eugene Debs under the Sedition Act for an anti-war speech, and repressive actions against the Socialist Party and the rest of the left in the post-war red scare - prefiguring McCarthyism - left the organisation a shadow of its pre-war self. In Europe the response to war and the Russian Revolution split the Second International creating mass parties of either (or both) the Communist or Socialist Internationals.
In the US, despite the formation of a Communist Party, the process of building a self-proclaimed workers’ party that could win mass support was effectively aborted. State repression is only part of the explanation - European capitalist states hardly refrained from responding to the threat of revolution. European fascism emerged as a militant anti-working class force almost as the armistice was being signed.
Divisions within the US working class between white and black and between different immigrant groups frustrated attempts to organise the working class as a coherent national class. The sheer size of the United States and the need to organise at state level as well as nationally adds to the scale of the task facing any new political initiative.
There were objective economic factors. Throughout the 19th century the US was a colonising power within its own borders. The frontier to the west and the option of escaping wage labour to work the land as a small proprietor is the basis of the narrative of the ‘American dream’ that has proven such a useful tool in the ideological armoury of the US ruling class. It also kept wages relatively high (by creating labour shortages) and forced industrial capitalists to resort to advanced labour-saving technology (focusing on the production of relative, as opposed to absolute, surplus value). Thus US workers counted themselves privileged compared to the workers of other countries - a belief that aided reformism and strengthened US nationalism.
So it was that in the US the battle for representation of the working class was won by the Democratic Party. It was Franklin D Roosevelt and his ‘new deal’ that consolidated this relationship in the 1930s, incorporating the organised working class into an alliance with an openly bourgeois party. The US Communist Party under Earl Browder - which grew from 7,000 members in 1929 to 80,000 by 1938 - gave its imprimatur to the arrangement at a time of unprecedented working class militancy - yet another of the betrayals of popular frontism.
But none of the European social democratic or Labour parties proved themselves up to the task of challenging the rule of capital (or resisting its offensive in the era of neoliberalism) and none opposed the imperialist logic of their own national state either during World War I or at any time after. Lenin was correct when he described these parties as “bourgeois workers’ parties”. Although formally tied to the institutions of the working class - at least in their origins - the leaders of these parties have always been committed to the core ideas of the bourgeoisie.
The alliance of US unions with the Democratic Party has always represented a kind of ‘Lib-Lab’ popular frontism - an alliance between the working class and a faction of the bourgeoisie. In practice, Europe’s social democratic and Labour parties - whatever their socialist rhetoric - have represented a politics that occupies much the same segment of the political spectrum.
Jim Creegan is therefore correct to emphasise the importance of breaking the US working class from Democratic Party - in the same way that the European working class must be broken from social democracy and Labourism.
The goal of all those on the revolutionary left must be to build the independence - political and economic - of the working class. We are talking here of working class organisation. That is, the focus of the left should be on building strong, combative unions that represent as broad a swathe of the working class as possible, and on building a party that unambiguously represents the strategic interests of the working class. Not a US Labour Party. Not a party based on anti-corporate and non-socialist radicals. Not any kind of halfway (or quarter-way) house in fact. The CPGB does not hesitate to call the party that the working class needs by its correct name: a Communist Party. That is my answer to comrade Creegan’s cry, “But, then again, what exactly is a workers’ party in today’s class-ambiguous political context?”
Ralph Nader, as comrade Creegan admits, does not seek to organise the working class. Nor does he advocate the kind of politics that are required to strengthen the position of the working class in society with the objective of it taking power. Nader, therefore, whatever his personal qualities, is part of the problem; not the solution.
There is another reason why communists in the US should refrain from giving their support to would-be populist leaders. Presidential constitutions are inimical to the interests of the working class. In the US the president appoints the government (and the judges in the Supreme Court), can both propose and veto legislation, controls foreign affairs and serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
We should not base our political strategy on reinforcing illusions in such an anti-democratic form. If the working class is to raise itself to the leading social force in society, it must take the lead in all aspects of politics. That means, above all, opposing a constitution deliberately designed back in the 18th century to act as barrier to popular democracy.
Abolition of the quasi-monarchical presidential system (rather than proposing this or that radical new candidate for the post) should be a priority demand. Further demands should include: “A single chamber of congress, elected annually, which has full legislative and executive powers … Congress delegates, or representative, should get their democratic mandate from an equal constituency basis … A system of popular militias must be initiated” (J Conrad, ‘Finish the American revolution’ Weekly Worker October 14 2004).
Prospects
What then are the prospects for the kind of communist politics I have briefly outlined? The Weekly Worker’s European-centric writers tend to assign an important, even ‘honourable’, place to the workers of the US in the worldwide communist revolution, but one that will follow the revolution in Europe and almost everywhere else. Mike Macnair recently expressed sentiments along these lines: “… the US, which as the biggest global exploiter of all is unlikely to lead the way in overthrowing capitalism” (‘Responding to the crisis’ Weekly Worker October 16).
The task facing the workers’ movement in building democratic, pluralist communist parties with principled programmes (and fighting unions) poses sufficient challenges across all continents to give us pause before predicting the course of future revolution.
If the position of states in the global hierarchy were inversely related to their revolutionary potential, then neither would the European working class hold any prospect of being in the vanguard of revolution. If, on the other hand, the objective strength of the working class (in terms of social weight, national cohesiveness and organisational potential) has any bearing on its ability to intervene socially and politically, then the US working class is destined to play a hugely significant role in the revolutionary events of this century.
The US working class has suffered as severely as any under the neoliberal assault of the last 30 years. Legal restrictions and economic restructuring have seen a sharp decline in union membership to currently some 12% of the workforce (and even lower in the private sector). US workers have paid the price in wages and conditions. The median hourly wage has stagnated since the mid-1970s, falling back over the last eight years after a rise in the 1990s. Workers have maintained living standards only by working more hours (already much longer in the US than those in Europe), taking second jobs, and going into debt.
US nationalism remains a powerful and reactionary political force, but US workers gain precious little from the global hegemony of US imperialism. Now, with the events of the last couple of months, the US ruling class cannot even claim to deliver economic stability.
In the last few years there have been some signs of renewed combativeness by some sections of the US working class. The Change to Win federation of unions that broke from the AFL-CIO in 2005 is dedicated to recruiting among new sections of the working class and organising industry-wide unions.
Even this year’s presidential campaign rhetoric reveals a more open discussion of immediate working class demands (if concealed under the deliberately obfuscating rubric of the ‘middle class’) than is usual in British politics these days. The primary campaigns of both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton made the kind of direct appeals to unionised blue-collar workers that the leaders of New Labour shy away from. Hypocrisy, of course, but indicative of the continuing importance of the working class in US political life.
If Obama is elected president, it will at least indicate that some of the barriers that have divided black and white in the US - white racism to be frank - are coming down. Of course, black Americans will continue to face huge social and economic disadvantages - including appalling statistics for the number of young black men who are victims of the US prison system.
Above all, the collapse of the finance sector of US capitalism will change the political landscape in ways we cannot yet envisage. Both threats and opportunities will inevitably emerge. We can say for sure that the ideological basis of the bourgeoisie’s rule over the last 30 years has been shaken, probably beyond retrieval. The disorganised retreat of neoliberalism does not signal a return to the welfare state (except for billionaires). However, the working class does have a chance to regain its intellectual self-confidence and once again engage in the battle for society’s leading ideas.
US global hegemony may come under sharper challenge. Can the US dollar preserve its position as the world’s reserve currency, given the current financial turmoil? Can military intervention in multiple conflicts be sustained in the face of the huge debts the bail-out of the banks will bequeath the US treasury? The wounded hegemon may lash out in unpredictable and destructive ways.
The working class movement in the US has an opportunity and a duty to challenge a ruling class that is as bereft of ideas as it is of a viable financial system.
