Socialist Action /August 2000
The Nader Campaign and 'Lesser Evil'
Politics
By JEFF MACKLER
More predictable than Halley's comet and Yellowstone's
Old Faithful geyser is the fact that a White Knight will appear every four
years during U.S. presidential election time to claim the sword of social
reformer and the cloak of anti-establishment criticism, promising to make
things better in the framework of capitalism.
Longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader-currently
averaging seven percent in the national polls and nearly 10 percent in California,
Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington-is the current White Knight. He is
the Green Party presidential candidate and has already achieved ballot status
in 31 states and counting.
Nader is the darling of those middle-class reformers,
liberals, and social democrats whose political vision ranges from the capitalist
Democratic Party to pro-capitalist formations that periodically emerge to
pressure the Democrats to change their stripes at least a little bit.
Ralph Nader has managed to spend most of his adult
life marginal to or uninvolved in the mass social movements that have shaken
American society-including the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s,
the mass struggles against the Vietnam War, the battle to keep U.S. troops
out of Central America and the Gulf, the historic struggles for women's
equality, and the current worldwide effort to stop the execution and win
the freedom of the innocent death row political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Nader and his myriad offshoot citizen-action groups,
nicknamed over the years "Nader's Raiders," did spend a generation
or more lobbying Democrats and Republicans in Congress, filing law suits,
and authoring exposés on behalf of auto safety and positive environmental
reforms.
Within the framework and norms of establishment
politics, and within the parameters of capitalist flexibility when the margins
were broader in past decades, Nader has been the champion of compromise
and moderate change.
By his own admission, however, his efforts have
largely come to naught, as the same corporate powers and the bipartisan
capitalist government that represents them not only eliminated most of the
few reforms Nader and his followers had helped to engineer but largely destroyed
the vast social legislation won by previous generations in the course of
mass social struggles.
In today's world of intensified imperialist competition
and the associated globalization of capital, ever narrowing profit margins
have rendered yesterday's reformers, like Nader, obsolete.
In virtually every nation on earth, the ruling
classes have crippled or destroyed much of the social legislation, wage
gains, labor rights, and environmental laws won by workers and their allies
in decades past.
In the underdeveloped world, in the course of stealing
natural resources, installing capitalist-friendly dictators, repressing
all opposition and chaining poor nations to the imperialist debt machine,
capitalism has brought billions to unknown poverty and ruin.
In a world of shrinking markets and shrinking average
profit rates, world capitalism is compelled ever more to increase the rate
of labor exploitation and cripple or eliminate health care, social security,
welfare rights, education, and pollute the very air we breath and water
we drink to insure the sole reason for its existence-profit.
Ralph Nader accepts the fundamental premises of
capitalism, the private ownership of productive facilities and the expropriation
of worker's labor power for corporate profit. He seeks a few modifications
in the distribution end of the equation and a few regulatory measures and
reforms so that some capitalists are compelled to take better care of their
wage slaves.
Making Democrats a bit better?
The July 17 issue of the Democratic Party-oriented
Nation magazine quotes Nader's intention quite clearly:
"When I saw that the Democrats couldn't even
defend this country against the baying pack of right-wing extremists in
the Republican Party anymore, that's when I said it's time for a new progressive
movement. Can you imagine what Harry Truman or FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]
would have done with the likes of Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay? They would
have landslided them."
Better Democrats are Nader's ultimate goal, He
has been quoted far and wide from The Nation, to CNN, to the Green Party
National Convention and his own campaign literature stating that his candidacy
will result in getting disillusioned voters to the polls, who will both
cast a vote for him and a vote for local Democratic Party congressional
candidates.
The June 23 San Francisco Chronicle noted: "While
Nader acknowledged that he could cost Gore some votes, most people who vote
for him for president will cast a ballot for a Democrat for Congress, boosting
the chances of the Democrats to regain control of the House, he said."
The same issue of the Chronicle observes: "A
graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Nader is not so
caught up in his quest as to believe he has a chance to win. His purpose
is to establish the Greens as a 'significant third party' that will qualify
for [$12 million in] federal matching funds, and serve as a 'lever to pull
the Democratic Party to the left, or make it shrink year by year.'"
A month later, the July 23 New York Times reported
a similar theme: "Mr. Nader said a central purpose of his candidacy
was to move the Democratic Party left on labor and other issues."
A Nader interview published in the July 6 LA Weekly
is perhaps the most explicit in regard to his pro-Democratic Party intentions.
The bracketed remarks below were provided by the LA Weekly interviewer.
Nader states:
They [the liberals with hesitations about voting
for Nader] are not thinking tactically. There are very few Green Party
candidates: There is Medea Benjamin [running] for the Senate [in California].
There are only 16 Green Party candidates for the House of Representatives.
So where are these millions of votes [brought
to the polls to vote for Nader] going to go in the House races? To the
Democrats.
That's why is was clear from my meeting with Gephardt
a few weeks ago that he is not displeased with this candidacy. [He's looking
at] a few close Congressional District races. A few thousand votes here
and there, and he's the speaker. That's pretty important, and they [the
hesitant liberals] are not thinking that way.
Also, it all depends on what state they're in.
If they're in Texas, they don't have to make the kind of calculation that
they would in Michigan, where the Bush-Gore contest is close. They can
say: look we want this Green Party to cross the 5 percent threshold [of
eligibility for federal campaign funds in the next election], because then
it's going to be a real hammer on the Democrats.
It's going to pull them in the right direction,
where now the corporate lobbies and the DLCs [Democratic Leadership Council]
are pulling them in the other direction. In Texas, they can say, I'm going
to vote for Nader because Gore is out of it in Texas, he doesn't have a
chance. [Emphasis added].
Nader, a lifelong Democrat, is not shy about stating
his real intentions. He wants to pressure the Democrats to be kinder capitalists
and less receptive to the so-called right wing of the Democratic Party,
the DLC, who Nader considers to be more pro-corporation than the rest of
the party.
He "tactically" instructs his supporters
that in close races between Gore and Bush it's really not intelligent to
cast a vote for Nader. The latter option is fine only when there's no doubt
about the outcome, as in Texas.
Was FDR a social reformer?
Like many pro-capitalist politicians who harken
back to the myth of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman as social reformers,
Ralph Nader is at best painfully ignorant of the truth of the politics of
these clever capitalist politicians.
Roosevelt, contrary to popular myth, was a capitalist
leader of the first order. In the face of the most massive labor upsurge
in American history-characterized by massive strikes and labor actions that
successfully took on the capitalist courts, politicians, police, and National
Guard to unionize the major centers of capitalist industrial power-Roosevelt
acceded to labor's might rather than risk a social revolution that in the
era of the 1930s had the potential to end capitalist rule once and for all.
But Roosevelt retaliated as best he could, using
federal troops to try to break strikes, including the historic miner's strike
of 1943, and imprison labor's best fighters-as he did in 1941 when the central
leadership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) was imprisoned under Roosevelt's
anti-democratic and anti-communist Smith Act.
It was the SWP's role in leading one of the nation's
most powerful strikes, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, that brought
Roosevelt into an alliance with the rightist Teamster national president,
Daniel Tobin. Their aim was to eliminate the socialist threat to capital
represented by the historic fight of the Minneapolis Teamsters, who brought
militant and honest trade unionism to the Twin Cities and the Midwest and
Western states.
Contrary to the popular myth served up by Nader
to make clear his overall Democratic Party orientation, Franklin Roosevelt
was known for his wartime wage and job freeze in the face of a rising cost
of living; for the fraud of his "equality of sacrifice" program
wherein the war profiteers and corporations grew rich while workers starved;
and for his anti-strike laws and anti-labor repression. It was Roosevelt
himself who declared his so-called New Deal dead.
Nader's platform statement contains a provision
for the elimination of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. But he neglects
to mention that his mentor, Harry Truman, presided over the government that
approved the Taft-Hartley Act. It was Truman who gave the go-ahead to the
McCarthy witch hunt that Nader decries, and it was Truman who reneged on
his famous 1948 campaign promise to repeal Taft-Hartley.
The FDR/Truman myth aside, Nader's support for
a Democratic Party congressional majority today takes one's breath away.
Over the past eight years, the Democrats, led by Clinton and Gore, have
engineered the most massive cuts in social expenditures ever recorded.
Clinton's "new" Democrats put Nixon,
Reagan, and Bush to shame when it came to gutting the social gains of past
decades that had been won in struggle by the masses in the streets and factories
of the nation. The Clinton forces were able to do this more easily especially
because they had the false mantle of "liberalism" associated with
them and the attendant support of the liberal pro-capitalist establishment,
the labor bureaucracy, and the innocent and not-so-innocent believers in
the myth of Democratic Party progressivism.
Nader, like those pro-capitalist reformers who
preceded him inside and outside the Democratic Party (Jesse Jackson, Ron
Daniels, Barry Commoner, Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy,
etc.) seeks a kinder, gentler capitalism-an oxymoron if there ever was one.
Nader proposes to cut $100 billion from the military
budget, leaving the bipartisan Congress a paltry $200-$250 billion or so
to spend on death and destruction, the approximate amount budgeted by Clinton's
first administration. In the interview in the July 6 LA Weekly, Nader advocates
that the United Nations be used for military interventions in the world
as opposed to U.S. or NATO troops.
Nader's co-thinker Greens in France and Germany,
whose parliamentary representatives daily broker deals for the corporate
rich in the coalition governments they help run (Germany and France), voted
approval for using European military budgets to support the worldwide imperialist
assault on Yugoslavia.
Like Milosevic, the imperialists rejected Kosovar
self-determination, as they did during Milosevic's genocidal war against
Bosnia. Their aim, as with the Greens, was the restoration of the capitalist
market in Yugoslavia and eventually throughout Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR.
While the European Greens in the main called for war and blood against Yugoslavia,
they remained outside and opposed to the large antiwar mobilizations that
simultaneously opposed the imperialist war and supported Kosovar self-determination.
The Mexican delegate to the U.S. Green Party's
national convention, Arnold de Ajager, supported his party's "lesser
evil" decision to back the rightist National Action Party (PAN) candidate,
now president of Mexico, Vincente Fox.
Protectionist trade policies
The central focus of Nader's campaign-his seemingly
vigorous attack on global corporations gone wild, on the WTO, the IMF, and
World Bank-is, contrary to popular opinion, his most backward and conservative
quality!
Nader has latched on to protectionist trade politics
as his stock in trade. This is in accord with the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats
who seek to use Nader's campaign to more effectively pressure the Democrats
for reactionary ends such as keeping foreign products and Mexican workers
out of the U.S. and stopping trade with China and many other poor nations.
Like most labor bureaucrats today, Nader employs
left-sounding phrases that score U.S. corporations for moving their plants
abroad. He appears to defend the interests of working people in the United
States and internationally. But sadly, nothing could be further from the
truth, Nader's best intentions notwithstanding.
In order to defend "American" jobs as
opposed to jobs everywhere in the world, the labor bureaucracy (appropriately
named by Daniel DeLeon at the turn of the century, "labor lieutenants
of capitalism") has employed a myriad of chauvinist tactics. These
range from "Buy American" and "Union Label" campaigns
to supporting well-meaning but misdirected "anti-sweatshop" efforts,
to pressuring Democratic Party "friends" to pass legislation that
"protects" American workers and products from foreign competition.
In each case, regardless of the rhetoric, the logic
is the same. The interests of American workers are counterposed to those
of foreign workers.
Because this doesn't sound very progressive to
most working people, and especially to the new generation of radicalizing
youth who have taken to the streets to protest capitalist injustice everywhere,
the bureaucracy utilizes left-sounding arguments to deceive honest people
who really want to help the oppressed in the United States and worldwide.
Thus, we are told by the bureaucrats, and by Nader,
that foreign workers are paid less than American workers. We are informed
that they are in fact often paid wages of just a few cents an hour, that
in some instances they work virtually as slaves (with no pay), that their
working conditions are barbaric, that child labor is employed, and that
environmental protection and labor laws barely, if at all, exist.
But from these terrible truths we are supposed
to conclude that the U.S. government must not trade with countries tolerating
such conditions, that the United States must ban products from these countries,
that the United States must insist that they comply with so-called international
labor standards, and finally and most important to the labor bureaucrats,
that no U.S. factories should be permitted to operate in these countries.
In truth, however, neither the U.S. government
nor the corporations it represents, nor the labor bureaucracy has any intention
of challenging any of the horrendous conditions that capitalists the world
over subject working people to in the interest of maximizing profits. In
many instances, it is the U.S. corporations or their subsidiaries who are
the direct beneficiaries of these policies.
And from the vantage point of the labor fakers,
who live on the dues and authoritarian control they largely exercise over
the membership, no U.S. job should ever be shipped abroad, no matter what
the wages and working conditions.
If we accept the argument that foreign products
produced by oppressed and exploited workers are not to be allowed in this
country or in any other, "foreign" workers would soon be fired
and/or their plants closed, leaving them in even worse conditions than when
they did have jobs.
Closing Mexico's maquiladoras, or banning the products
produced by their workers, for example, would not benefit Mexican workers
one iota; nor would banning Mexican truck drivers or any other Mexicans
from entering the United States to work.
The U.S. labor bureaucracy's protectionist policies
in reality target capitalism's victims rather than capitalist corporations.
Taking on these corporations is the last thought to enter a bureaucrat's
mind. That would mean a fight with American bosses entailing the mobilization
of labor's broad ranks, a return to cross-union and international solidarity,
a real campaign to organize the unorganized 86 percent of the U.S. workforce,
a fight for the unemployed with a program for massive public works to rebuild
schools and the deteriorating urban infrastructure, and a coordinated battle
to reduce the work week with no cut in pay.
But these actions risk the bureaucracy's security
and cozy relations with the employers, relations that guarantee them a standard
of living that rivals some of their capitalist benefactors. The mobilization
of labor's ranks for a real struggle against the bosses is a bureaucrat's
worst nightmare. They fully understand that such a fight would open the
door to the ranks to regain control of their unions by breaking the bureaucratic
stranglehold.
The bureaucracy, desperate to protect its own narrow
interests, sees the corporations, the capitalist state, and its twin parties
as its most critical allies in the reactionary fight against foreign products
and workers.
In recent years we have witnessed the spectacle
of the U.S. Steel Corporation joining with the United Steelworkers Union
of America (USWA) in one protectionist campaign after another designed to
pressure Democrats as well as Republicans to keep foreign steel out of this
country. And since China is today, for the first time in history, the world's
largest steel producer, China-bashing has become the central preoccupation
of both the steel bosses and labor bureaucrats.
In Seattle, Steelworkers president George Becker
led tens of thousands of AFL-CIO members in a mock dumping of products made
with foreign steel into a Seattle river. A USWA truck-mounted billboard
read, "The WTO: Destroying Millions of American Jobs."
In Washington, D.C., the same protectionist bureaucrats
mobilized for a rally that featured the proto-fascist Pat Buchanan, the
bureaucracy's demagogic champion when it comes to placing a "pro-worker"
caste on deadly racist and anti-labor ideas.
Buchanan, like Hitler before him, is preparing
to counter the real battles that a mass independent and fighting labor movement
will generate. However, with a revolutionary-minded leadership, there is
no force on earth capable of defeating a united working class in the U.S.
and worldwide.
Ralph Nader, introduced to the Green Party Convention
by author/activist Ronnie Dugger as "a one-man social movement,"
sees no potential for such a renewed fightback. He aims to substitute the
intellectual few allied with "enlightened" Democrats of the FDR
type for the organized millions who themselves are the only force capable
of winning real social change that requires a challenge to the capitalist
order itself.
Not too many years ago, United Automobile Workers
leaders encouraged workers to take sledge hammers to foreign cars imported
to the United States to symbolically demonstrate their protectionist as
opposed to internationalist ideology. The destroyed vehicles were denounced
as "Jap cars," a reference to the racist term employed by American
chauvinists during World War II.
Today the bureaucrats and bosses present their
racist attitudes with more pleasing leftist rhetoric designed to hide their
chauvinist policies and to attract genuinely anti-capitalist students and
other angry youth to their anti-worker, protectionist cause. The flaunted
"Teamster-turtle alliance," is a happy-sounding term connoting
a labor-environmentalist alliance, but it has yet to produce a single deed
on the part of the corrupt Jimmy Hoffa Jr.-led Teamster officials.
Labor's misleaders don't restrict their efforts
to protecting faltering U.S. industries. Where it suits their needs they
favor free trade as well, as when AFL-CIO President John Sweeney endorsed
a letter published in the Oct. 29 Washington Post along with 34 heads of
trade groups and corporation officials that approved the bargaining objectives
laid out by the United States in preparation for the Seattle meeting of
the WTO. Said Sweeney and his capitalist cohorts, "We support the emphasis
by the U.S. in increasing market access."
Neither protectionism nor free trade offer any
solutions to the problems facing U.S. or foreign workers. Both trade measures
are utilized by capitalists, depending on which is more advantageous at
the moment. When a U.S. corporation reaches a technological level surpassing
its international competitors, it presses for free trade, demanding that
all obstacles to the importation of U.S. products abroad be eliminated.
But when a U.S. industry lags behind the technology
achieved by foreign capitalists, the affected U.S. corporation and its associated
lieutenants in labor become protectionist. Since they can't profitably export,
they demand that the government they own and control protect its products
against competition from superior products abroad. In both cases it is the
workers who lose.
When a free-trading boss introduces new machines,
U.S. workers lose their jobs. When a protectionist boss can't compete, he
either closes his plant and workers lose, or he keeps the plant open and
demands lower wages, longer hours, and less safety and environmental enforcement.
At the same time, the less competitive capitalists press the government
to ban foreign products and foreign workers. Again, the workers lose.
Of course, following the long-term laws of capitalist
production, in order to remain competitive, the protected corporation must
either eventually close down and invest its capital more profitably elsewhere
or introduce new technology and fire workers. Yesterday's protected factories
are today either out of business or modernized at the expense of workers'
jobs.
In the long and short run, the workers of the world
lose in the face of ever increasing capitalist competition. As history records,
any labor strategy based on tying workers and their unions to the success
of U.S. corporations is doomed to failure.
The world's capitalists are aware of their own
inherent contradictions. They eventually saturate the world's limited markets
and turn on each other in trade wars orchestrated by competing governments
on behalf of their own corporations.
In the meantime, they try to mitigate their contradictions
by inventing one world arbitrator-type organization after another from the
WTO to GATT to the IMF and World Bank. These institutions are designed to
temporarily resolve what cannot in the long term (and now in the short term
as well) be resolved: the inherent "survival of the fittest" competition
that both drives the system forward and also ends in its destruction, or
better, the destruction of everything, everyone, and any nation that stands
in the way of unimpeded profit.
As he never-ending trade wars-which history has
demonstrated hold the potential of closing down all trade-continue, a grave
threat to the entire worldwide capitalist system is posed. In these circumstances
the gentlemanly rules of combat embodied in the WTO and similar institutions
will prove incapable of protecting profits. Real wars will become the order
of the day, as with the past two world wars that devastated whole continents
and killed tens of millions on the altar of profit, not in the name of a
mythical democracy.
The unending wars of intervention on the part of
the United States and its international competitors today in the Middle
East, (Iraq); Europe (Yugoslavia); and in the semi-colonial world more generally
are a harbinger of the larger wars to come, unless the working people of
the world construct a new leadership independent of and in opposition to
capitalism, its political parties and offshoots, and its agents in the workers'
movement.
Capitalism must be replaced
While there is no solution to labor's plight in
the framework of capitalist politics, there are real and practical solutions-national
and international labor solidarity and class-struggle politics (as opposed
to Nader's class collaboration) that can win day-to-day victories.
In the long run however, only the replacement of
capitalism itself by a socialist society, organized on a worldwide basis,
can eliminate the horrors brought on by capitalism's deadly pursuit of profits.
The abolition of capitalism and its apocalyptic
traits of war, racism, chauvinism, poverty, and disease will pave the way
for the immediate construction of a new society based on the fulfillment
of human needs the world over. The rule of the capitalist few will be replaced
by the rule of the vast majority through their own institutions.
Working-class rule in alliance with all the oppressed
will place on the order of the day the creation of a pristine environment
for the enjoyment and health of all. It will immediately move to organize
productive wholesome and good-paying jobs at remarkably reduced hours for
everyone.
Environmentally safe technological innovation will
serve all humanity and will mean better lives and more free time as opposed
to ruined lives and/or never-ending overtime. Free quality education, housing,
and health care; a flowering of culture; an end to war and military spending;
and the allocation of untold billions to eliminate disease and poverty will
be the norm of a society democratically governed by the vast majority.
Such a world is far from the vision and consciousness
of the labor bureaucracy and its temporarily adopted spokespersons, Ralph
Nader on the "left" and Pat Buchanan on the right. While lambasting
the conditions of labor abroad, offering no solutions, both are essentially
silent in regard to the conditions of labor at home, at best aiming their
fire at an abstract "corporate" power while taking the capitalist
system itself for granted as the only social system worth defending.
Slave labor exists in the expanding and ever-privatized
U.S. prison industrial complex, where capitalists force prisoners to work
for some of the nation's largest corporations at 25 cents an hour or less.
While prison labor is denounced by labor tops in respect to China, it is
more than tolerated in the United States, in which more than two million
Americans, the highest proportion in the world, are incarcerated.
The AFL-CIO is represented on the Board of Federal
Prison Industries, which operates more than 100 prison factories-manufacturing
everything from computer circuit boards to sewing "made in the U.S.A."
labels in clothing.
Similarly, U.S. corporations have run rampant over
environmental protection laws, labor rights, health care, drug costs, and
virtually every other aspect of life where profit rates are in competition
with human needs.
"Reforming" the Democrats?
Ralph Nader offers little or nothing to fight this
American reality other than to pressure capitalists and their parties, especially
the Democrats, to reform their image and grant a few concessions. In Nader's
last less ambitious Green run for the presidency, he actually made a list
of those Democrats he favored in state and local elections. Today, he serves
the same function in a more sophisticated manner.
Recognizing that the Democratic Party's presidential
candidate, Albert Gore, has a record indistinguishable from that of President
Clinton, Nader knows that a repeat of the 1996 election's historic low voter
turnout (less than 50 percent of eligible voters) could result in an even
greater disaster for the Democrats.
Like Jesse Jackson, he hopes to register and otherwise
bring to the polls those who are most likely to vote for him AND his "lesser-evil"
friends in the Democratic Party, thus ensuring the Democrats yet another
"important" (according to Nader) congressional majority. And as
we have demonstrated with Nader's own words, he has judged that his campaign
poses no real threat to a Gore victory.
Albert Gore's personal record, of course, differs
little from any other capitalist politician, however "left" his
speech writers and managers may find it necessary to pose him. According
to social critic Alexander Cockburn:
- Gore took full credit for the 1996 Welfare Reform
Act, which threw 2.6 million people into immediate poverty, including 1.1
million children. An additional 14 million were given three years to find
a job or starve.
- His "Reinventing Government" initiatives
of 1993 aimed at gutting what was left of federal affirmative action.
- He campaigns in Texas by attacking Republican
George Bush as soft on crime, while maintaining a position on the death
penalty indistinguishable from Bush's.
- Over the past four years, Gore has solicited
and accepted campaign cash from arms companies, the nuclear industry, bond
traders, runaway firms to Mexico like Mattel, and exploiters of child labor
like Disney. Occidental Petroleum, in which the Gore family has a stake
worth over half a million, is trying to drill in the Colombian rain forest
on land belonging to the Uwa Indians, who are being murdered by Colombian
soldiers-who are now about to receive another billion, courtesy of the
Clinton-Gore administration.
Alexander Cockburn, who compiled the above list
in the Anderson Valley Advertiser (shortened by this author considerably
due to lack of space), is a current Nader advocate. However, Cockburn used
similar arguments to support Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign against
George Bush Sr., though he now claims that a vote for Clinton was a wasted
effort since the president went on to forget what Cockburn terms the "bold
promise and bright expectations" of his campaign.
Cockburn and Nader have spent a lifetime in lesser-evil
politics. They cannot bring themselves to reveal that today's Bill Clinton,
whom they formerly supported, is yesterday's George Bush Sr.
In truth, there was no evolution in Clinton's politics.
His coming to power was the product of a decision of the U.S. ruling class
in general, who today and yesterday tout the Clinton administration as the
best friend corporate America has ever had in the White House.
Nader and Cockburn today serve up yet another "lesser
evil" White Knight version of politics wherein an enlightened hero
will force reluctant Democrats to "return to their roots."
Nader and his campaign managers foster the discredited
idea that life can or will be changed by casting a ballot on election day.
If Nader receives the necessary five percent to qualify for $12 million
in federal matching funds for the next electoral adventure, so the argument
goes, everything will be different!
Sadly, Nader's supporters include various currents
who profess socialist politics-including groups like Solidarity, Socialist
Alternative, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and too many
others who see capitalist electoralism as a viable political arena.
The ISO's July 21 Socialist Worker newspaper endorsement
ends with an amazing judgment:
"Nader's campaign provides a focus for labor
and anti-globalization activists to break with the Democrats. This could
open the way to the development of an independent working-class political
party. For that reason socialists should welcome Nader's campaign-and get
involved with it."
The ISO, whose international organization in the
past endorsed similar anti-socialist candidates in other countries, is sorely
mistaken in this matter. Nader has never given the slightest indication
in word or deed that these are his intentions. To the contrary, he follows
in the footsteps of a long line of professional critics and Democratic Party
reformers.
This White Knight would-be savior is no substitute
for taking on the capitalist bosses and their system with the full force
of all those who suffer under its domination. The work of human liberation
has been assigned by history to the masses, not to White Knight champions
who urge our oppressors to treat us more kindly.
Socialist Action /August 2000 |