12-26-06, 8:40 am

In the December online issue of Political Affairs, Andrew Bard Schmookler ('Reason and Emotion in the Anti-Bushite Movement, Or, Hey Democrat-hating Lefties, Get Real') makes the argument that the left has no choice but to work with the Democratic Party in the effort to combat the ultra-right Bush administration. While for the most part I agree with his tactical conclusion, I think the argument leading up to it needs to be fleshed out and given a more solid theoretical foundation.  It is not just a matter of all institutions being fallible and nobody being perfect, but specifics of the political situation in this country.

First of all, we need to understand why there is not a mass socialist party or coalition in this country that can elect significant numbers of people to national political office. This is not because socialists and communists are stupid, nor because we are disunited and cancel out each other’s efforts. It has to do with the United States as a specific social and political formation, at this point in history. 

Some of the key points are:

First, while other countries developed very large Second International socialist parties, the United States only developed a smallish one. The Second International Socialist Party peaked around the First World War when their presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, got nearly a million votes, but they went steadily downhill after that, in spite of with some frequency electing their candidates to mostly minor local offices. The Communist Party, once it overcame the sectarianism of the “Third Period”, developed a lot of influence via the unions and other mass organizations with which it worked, but this did not translate into large scale election of Communists to national office, though some have been elected to local office (including the New York City Council) from time to time. The other left parties have either had similar experiences or have been completely shut out of electoral office.

Today, there is one independent socialist in the US Senate (Bernie Sanders of Vermont) and no socialists of any kind in the House of Represents or in state governors’ mansions, though there are still some in local elected offices.

Second, the US state apparatus is backed by the largest concentration of wealth and power in the history of the world. The resources available both to the state directly, and to other institutions in our society (the media, the universities, the conservative churches, etc) which fight to suppress the socialist movement, are of unprecedented scale. Such a state apparatus has a positively demonic power to destroy its enemies, but also to shape popular consciousness in a system preserving way.  This is capitalist hegemony on steroids.

Third, the bourgeois democratic constitution and legal system of the United States is crafted to booby trap progressive third party efforts. The electoral college/electoral votes systems creates the danger that even if a progressive third party effort gets decent support and picks up a number of electoral votes, it is likely to end up giving the presidency to the most reactionary big party candidate and not to the least reactionary one. The lack of runoff elections and proportional representation work the same magic for senators, federal representatives, state governors and many other positions. Vote for the socialist candidate in any numbers, and you may clinch the election of the Republican, who is usually to the right of the Democrat, on the issues you care about most. This is very different from countries like South Africa, Mexico or many in Europe, in which there are greater possibilities for dissident political parties to grow in parliamentary legislation without tipping the balance to the ultra-right.  It is in the interest of neither major capitalist party to change the constitution to remedy this, and there is not enough understanding of these things at a mass level to create effective pressure from below to change them.

Fourth, the legal regime allows wealthy capitalist sectors to buy candidates at all levels, from village councils to the presidency. The McCain-Feingold limits on campaign spending are minor inconvenience for the corporation that is shopping for candidates to elect, but the laws create big obstacles for trying to build a labor-based third party. The FCC fairness doctrine which is supposed to open access to mass media for all political tendencies is history, and at any rate never gave an opening for socialist, communist or Marxist groups to get a word in edgewise.  Again, there is not enough motivation for either of the major capitalist parties to change this, nor is there enough mass consciousness to pressure for changes from below.

Fifth, most states have requirements for petition signatures for nomination to public office that range from the annoying to the impossible. The system is rigged by these requirements in favor of the two big capitalist parties, neither of which have a vested interest in changing it.

Sixth, much of the self-styled socialist left in this country, based as it is in the intelligentsia without organic roots in working class mass struggle, has followed sectarian practices which ensure that it is ineffective even within this daunting context. This is a sad history that repeats itself.During the epoch of the Vietnam War protests and the peak of the Civil Rights movement, in the 1960s, left wing views had enough popular support that a mass political party if not explicitly for socialism, at least against capitalism and imperialism, perhaps could have been created. But many of the most active people ended up wasting their energies in a spiral of sectarian narrowness that proliferated tiny splitoff sects as the movement receded like a deflated balloon. The tiny sects, mostly followers of Mao, Trotsky, Enver Hoxha or their avatars, spent a huge amount of time attacking each others’ positions in unreadable screaming screeds, and only influenced the masses in a negative way, i.e., turning them against anything that smacked of Marxism.  Worst of all, they tended to manifest an utter contempt for the working class. Starting with the protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999, and segueing into the protests against the incipient Iraq war in 2003, (and from a somewhat different social base, the immigrants’ rights protests of 2006) we have seen new, large scale mass movements that are very gratifying in their scale and the clarity of the ideas coming out of them. However, the sectarian ultra-leftist tendencies have also arisen within all of these movements, and the attitudes to which Schmookler is reacting are manifesting themselves again in the same or similar ways. One of these is the desire to eschew any tactical support in elections for Democratic Party candidates, on the grounds that they are not far enough to the left. A variant is to support only the most left-wing of the Democrats, such as McKinney or Kucinich, which in practical terms has meant sitting out electoral activity in the vast majority of Congressional Districts. Yet another is to support third party candidacies that can not win, in spite of the large probability that they will end up throwing the election to the Republicans. Finally, there are some people who think that all electoral activity is a snare and a delusion, and advocate electoral boycotts.

So the politics of real, material struggle get set aside for a politics of protest and self-expression. This also reflects the fact that the left (and I do not include the liberal Democrats in the category) is so unused to winning any real victories that sections of it have got accustomed to making do with protesting for the sake of protesting.

I think Schmookler is right to identity an element of subjectivism or emotionalism in these sectarian attitudes. But we all get emotional, and we don’t all run off the strategic and tactical rails when we do so. I think the problem is not anger or rage alone, but this emotionalism combined with a wrongheaded theoretical concept, which comes in turn from the lack of organic rootedness in working class and mass struggles. In the recent senatorial election in Virginia, I was in a state of surging adrenalin when I went and voted to oust George “Macaca” Allen. But I knew that the way to get rid of Allen was only to vote for Democratic candidate Jim Webb, even though Webb is not even a McKinney/Kucinich left wing Democrat, but in fact a former Republican Reagan administration member. My vote for Webb was based on three things:  a. Examining the two candidates and concluding that Webb was better that Allen on key issues, especially on the supremely important issue of the Iraq war.  b. understanding that it was important to take the Senate out of the hands of the Republicans if we want to create obstacles to the Bush administration’s reactionary policies and appointments, and c. Understanding that in Virginia in the year 2006, on November 7, there was nobody else you could vote for with any hope of ousting Allen. 

That the choice was between a racist lunatic and a former Reagan official was certainly maddening, but like it or not, that was the situation and a realistic attitude required a vote for Webb.

There is rhetoric about being tired of having to support the “lesser evil” all the time, but would the “greater evil,” by default, be better? There is where the subjectivity comes in, and also a mis-reading of the historical moment. For a characteristic of the “ultra” section of the US left is to think that when you see thousands of people protesting on the street, the revolution is at hand. This year’s huge immigrants’ marches were a great step forward for the left and the working class, but it would be a mistake to think that all those millions of people were marching for socialism.  

Another attitude that crops up on the left now and then is the idea that if the ultra-right wins, its brutal policies will so enrage the mass of the population that they will be ready for a socialist revolution. This did not work out too well in Germany, where the ultra-right was elected in 1933 and it took World War II and tens of millions of deaths to remove the Nazi regime. It also did not work out in Spain, where the ultra right took power in 1939 and even bourgeois democracy was not restored until Franco died in the 1970s, more than 30 years later. Nor did it work in Mussolini’s Italy where impending defeat in World War II was needed to oust the fascist regime. It did not work in Salazar’s “Estado Novo” Portugal or Pinochet’s Chile or apartheid South Africa either. The “vote for Hitler and bring on the revolution” notion has to be pushed down whenever it pokes its head above the parapet. The fact is that the left can make better advances in a liberal democratic context where it can organize, speak and publish its views openly rather than spending all its time hiding from the police.

And what, after all, is wrong with the Democratic Party? I don’t think its merely that it and its leaders are messed up like all institutions get messed up. I think that it is because it is a party that belongs more to the ruling capitalist class than to the working class. However, the strategic tack of the Democratic Party is usually to the left of the Republican Party because it depends on sectors of the working class for support more than the Republican Party does. The degree to which there is real space between the Democrats and Republicans varies from issue to issue: The Democrats are often strongly differentiated from the Republicans on basic economic issues, but hard to distinguish on some other issues, such as the Israel/Palestine situation. Taking into consideration the weakness of the actual left, the Democratic-Republican split in the ruling class has to be utilized tactically to the hilt. To sit out elections because the Democrats are the only force able to stop the Republican ultra-right is self-defeating to the point of being suicidal. But we can not give the Democrats a free pass when they come out on the wrong side of an issue either. Support the left gives must be effective but also critical.

So the best short-term tactic often is, indeed, to support the Democrats. However, and very fortunately, electoral politics are not the only kind of politics. Marches, demonstrations, grassroots organizing in the workplace and the community, artistic and cultural work and educational and journalistic activities are also important fronts of struggle which will eventually create the mass consciousness that can open up other options at the electoral level also. The eventual emergence of a viable socialist or at least anti-capitalist electoral vehicle will arise out of the mass mobilizations, and not out of self-isolating sectarian grouplets.

--Emile Schepers is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs. Send your comments to