Is The Democratic Party A `Lesser Evil'?Selections from The Militant newspaper

Is The Democratic Party A `Lesser Evil'? Pathfinder Press has just brought back into print The Lesser Evil? Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics. This book consists of debates between members of the Socialist Workers Party and various radicals who argued that the Democratic Party offers a worthwhile arena where advocates of labor, democratic rights, racial justice, women's rights, and general social progress can present their program.

The excerpt below is from the opening remarks by Jack Barnes in a 1965 debate with Stanley Aronowitz, at the time a leader of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1965 Barnes was the national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance; today he is the national secretary of the SWP. The entire text of this debate and two others appears in The Lesser Evil? The book is copyright 1977 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

When you talk about the Democratic Party, or read someone discussing the Democratic Party, as a labor-Negro- liberal coalition - and when you include the great mass of the American workers in it - you are not really talking about a party membership, you are talking about a voting bloc, an electoral weight. That is, the average worker, the average Negro, who once every four years or once every two years pulls the Democratic lever, is a voter, not a party member. He plays no role, he takes no daily part in, and he knows damned little about the Democratic Party.

This is very important, because it brings more sharply into focus the basic idea that a political party's policy is determined not by who pulls the lever for it every four years. The party is defined and determined by the program it puts forth and by what set of policies and strategies in the world and at home it puts forth, and what class or group within a class these policies serve.

The class the party votes for in its program and policies, not the party that the class votes for, is what determines the kind of party it is. By this criterion the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s was, and remains today, a bourgeois party, a party whose basic program is in the interests of the American ruling class. The electoral coalition forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by the CIO heads, and by the Communist Party, merely guaranteed a solid constituency, to use a term in common usage, at least for a brief period of time.

What we are really talking about when we use the phrase American labor-Negro-liberal coalition is a coalition between the owners of American industry and finance and, on the one hand, the professional ward-heelers and politicians who keep the party machinery oiled, and, on the other hand, the various trade union bureaucrats and leaders of protest movements in American society, whose job it is to bring out the ranks of the coalition at voting time to guarantee the continuance of the rule of this party as opposed to the Republican Party. They are the safety factor, they are the insurance policy, because when the general propaganda fails, when someone starts to step out of line, when the candidates of the party get to be a little too much to stomach, it's those boys who whip things into shape, who go to the workers, to the Negroes, to the socialists, and say, "Look, it's in your class interests, it's in your interests as socialists, to come out and vote for this group, as a tactic" - in order, of course, to defeat the "greater evil."

Now that we've separated the electoral votes, the coalition, and the party, which are quite different entities, we can answer the most basic question: Who really needs this coalition? If you stop to think about it for a moment, it is crystal clear that the small minority who manage to maintain their rule through this coalition - the American capitalist class - are the ones who need the coalition.

When [pacifist] David McReynolds debated [SWP member] Peter Camejo a few week ago at the

forum I referred to earlier, McReynolds kept emphasizing how badly the Negroes need allies, how badly the workers need allies, how badly the antiwar activists need allies how they are all small minorities. He kept forgetting to mention the smallest minority of them all - the tiny clique that rules this country through the Democratic Party. They are the ones who are desperate for allies, because they are the ones who, if it depended on their own numbers, could never put anyone in power. In fact, they wouldn't get nearly as many votes as [New York City SWP mayoral candidate] Clifton DeBerry is going to get next week on election day. If they lost the voting bloc every election day, they would have to find a new way of ruling, a new way of fooling people, or step from the scene. The final argument of coalitionism - the alleged weakness of the American workers and their alleged need for this coalition - stands everything ultimately completely on its head, because they are the last ones who need the coalition; the coalition is what keeps the American ruling class in power.

Just as the major task, the central question, of the 1930s was whether the working class would build a political arm, so the major concern, the major task, of the politicians who serve this minority capitalist class today is to prevent the majority class from organizing itself as an independent political force and destroying this coalition.

Of course, as far as revolutionary socialists are concerned, the key becomes the break-up and destruction of this coalition and the winning over of the mass of the Negroes, the workers, the radicalized students, and the dissatisfied middle class to a new platform, a new program, and opening their eyes to the character of the leadership that has tied them to this capitalist party...

Without the rejection of participation and work within the Democratic Party, no steps forward can be taken. But rejection is only the first step.

The term independent political action, unfortunately, almost like the term peace, is very abstract and very algebraic. You know, just think of the word peace for a moment. [U.S. president] Lyndon Johnson is for peace; everyone is for peace. In fact, the more they slug it out the more they are for peace. In some ways, the term independent political action is almost the same.

Walk up to almost anyone on the street and ask, "Do you want to be independent politically or dependent politically?" They'll say, "Independent." To put any meaning, any concrete meaning in the formula independent political action, we have to go back to the basic question I discussed earlier, the class character of the party.

The Democratic Party carries out the policies and the needs of the American capitalist class; this defines its basic character. If we are going to talk about independent political action, we have to begin to define it as independent of this party and the class it serves. In other words, stop talking about independent political action and start talking about independent working class political action, or independent socialist political action.

This is important because the entire question cannot be separated from the electoral arena, as I’ve shown. The major fallacy is that there is a way to outsmart and outwit the Democratic Party. These people say they are not really coalitionists but it’s a tactical question whether they are in or out. But it always ends up the same way. At the same time, the question is certainly not isolated to the electoral arena.

This is another common fallacy: When revolutionary Marxists put forth the concept of independent political action, they are merely talking about their own election campaigns every couple of years. That’s totally false. For revolutionists, education, propaganda, and agitation for working-class political action, for a labor party, for a socialist party, for a break with capitalist

politics is part and parcel of the struggle against the Meanys and Reuthers, the Rustins and Kings, the Thomases, the Harringtons, the anonymous editorial writers of the Worker.

The mere algebraic call for some form of independent political action still leaves the door open back to coalitionism. There are many examples of this. The easiest way to put it is: The call and the demand and the insistence on independent labor political action, and independent socialist political action, are part and parcel of the struggle against the leaders and privileged layers of the working class, the trade union movement, the civil rights organizations, whose very existence is tied up with the maintenance of this coalition and the maintenance of dependence. And they will go an awful long way to salvage this when they have to.

One of the best examples of this was the American Labor Party in New York. I don’t have time to go into it in detail. But when the Social Democratic fakers in New York were faced with the problem that a lot of their workers still hadn’t become "sophisticated" enough to understand they were supposed to vote for capitalist politicians in 1936, they formed a labor party, the American Labor Party. That’s independent political action, isn’t it? It had one small twist--it voted for Roosevelt. In other words, there’s more than one way to prevent the establishment of real independent politics. There have been many other examples in the so-called reform movements. The Progressive Party in 1948 is a very educational example of this. But that’s a topic for later on.

Thus these forms of so-called independent politics--the American Labor Party forms, the forms of uniting with the existing leaderships of these movements for a "socialist" program--are steps right back to coalitionism through the back door. And what this does is to bring us back to where we started. That is, to the antiwar activists, to these new radicals whose actions have thrown this question once again to the fore in the last few months.

I don’t call them the New Left or a New Left. Because they are not this. This is one of the misused and abused terms. What they actually are and what we actually see in front of us is a new layer of radicals. A small but significant and growing radicalization in American society. A layer whose political physiognomy is not yet determined in any significant way. What is important about their current activity--other than the fact that it is a protest which is almost unique in American society: against a war while that war is still going on--is the fact that their demand to bring the troops home is a confrontation with Johnson and with this entire layer of coalitionists, and that threatens the coalition. Their mere existence and their mere refusal to compromise threatens this coalition. This explains not only the attacks they receive from the press and from the government, but the vicious and now unanimous attacks that the leaders of American labor have come out with against antiwar demonstrators.

Their problem is not a rejection or an acceptance of an Old Left--again an imaginary, false, homogeneous concept--but understanding how to reject the reform-pressure-coalition perspective that the Communist and Socialist parties developed to a fine art from the thirties on, in place of a program of revolutionary opposition to the Democratic Party and its allies. That is, the program that the revolutionary socialists fought for in the 1930s, in the 1940s, in the 1950s, and that we still fight for today.

What they don’t need is an American Labor Party, Progressive Party, Community Party, Peace Party back-door path back to coalitionism. But education and organization for socialism to understand the need for class independence and for no compromises with the defenders of coalition. In other words, we need to win, recruit, and train out of this layer not more Reuthers but more revolutionists.

It is very important that this layer of young radicals understand that first and foremost what determines the character of any organization’s politics, what’s most basic of all, is the program. There is no shortcut, there is no easy way around establishing a set of principles and a set of demands and an approach, and there is no way around the fact that these will be in the interests of one layer of society--one class--or another. They must recognize what they must be after, that is, the abolition of capitalism, for it doesn’t make much difference how big a party or how big a constituency they form, it’ll have the same results. I’m always struck by this fallacy, the big number fallacy. The idea that, in essence, first you draw together the people and then later you tell them what the program really is, or later they discover what the program really is. I think we have had our best example of the horrendous effect that such an approach can have in Indonesia the last couple of months.

Here was an organization, the Indonesian Communist Party, that claimed three million members; three million members in its youth group; and a following of over twenty million in the mass organizations of the workers, peasants, women, students, and government employees that it led. And it is currently undergoing an utter annihilation at the hands of an army of about 350,000. The problem of the Indonesian Communist Party is not its constituency. It’s hard to imagine a much bigger constituency for any radical party, as a percentage of the toiling population. The problem is, you can’t turn a sponge into a sword overnight, no matter how large the sponge is.

‘All-people’s front’ versus working-class political road(Reply to a Reader column)

BY MARTÍN KOPPEL

March 29, 2004

In a letter to the editor published in last week’s issue, reader Shane Brinton challenges the Militant’s stance of opposition to the two-party system of capitalist rule in this country. Advocating a vote for Democratic candidates as a legitimate “tactic” for socialists today, he argues for a “broad coalition (the All-People’s Front) against Bush and the ultra-right.”

What is the stance of revolutionaries toward the Democratic and Republican parties? This is not a matter of tactics but a more fundamental question of strategy. It begins not with elections but with the historic line of march of the working class. Wars of plunder, exploitation, racist oppression, the second-class status of women, the destruction of the environment, and other social ills are all inherent to capitalism—they cannot simply be reformed out of existence. Working people must lead a socialist revolution to eliminate capitalism: a struggle by millions to take power out of the hands of the ruling capitalist class, establish a government of workers and farmers, and create a different kind of state—a workers state.

In this epoch of imperialism that has existed worldwide since the 1890s, as V.I. Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, there is no progressive wing of the capitalist class in the United States or any other country. Today, as capitalism slides toward a worldwide economic catastrophe because of its built-in contradictions, the ruling class as a whole is driven to try to reverse the long-term decline of its system. To do so they have no choice but to launch increasingly brutal assaults on the living standards and rights of working people at home, while unleashing wars of conquest abroad. The U.S. government serves as the executive body for this capitalist class. No matter who occupies the presidency, whether a Democrat or a Republican, their job is to continue to enforce the interests of the real, unelected rulers.

Two-party system

The capitalist ruling families have two parties who work in cahoots with each other to try to hoodwink working people into thinking they have a democratic choice. The outstanding revolutionary leader Malcolm X explained well the dead-end trap of backing either capitalist party. In the 1964 presidential elections, when liberals and most radicals supported “peace” candidate Lyndon B. Johnson against Republican Barry Goldwater, Malcolm noted that “the shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists, knew that the only way people would run towards the fox [Johnson] would be if you showed them the wolf.” At that very moment, he noted, Johnson “had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam!” Once elected, of course, Johnson brutally escalated the imperialist war against Vietnam.

Just as working people need to organize independently of the bosses in the economic arena by forming trade unions—rejecting company “unions”—our class must organize independently of the bosses in the political arena. An “all-people’s front” based on supporting the Democratic Party is like a company union on a political level.

This stance is based on the approach revolutionary socialists have always taken in the United States—since Karl Marx and Frederick Engels collaborated with the young communist movement in the late 1800s, arguing for the building of an independent working-class political party. “Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organization to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power, of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against this power and by a hostile attitude toward the policies of the ruling classes. Otherwise it remains a plaything in their hands,” wrote Marx in a Nov. 23, 1871, letter to Friedrich Bolte, a communist working-class leader in New York. Lenin continued along these lines, explaining in a Nov. 9, 1912, article on the U.S. elections that year, “This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.” The U.S. Communist Party in its early years rejected supporting any capitalist party. And since its founding in 1938, the Socialist Workers Party, following this political continuity, has maintained the perspective of independent working-class political action. I urge Brinton and other readers to study these rich lessons in the two-volume Revolutionary Continuity: Marxist Leadership in the U.S. by Farrell Dobbs; Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO, 1936-55 by Art Preis; and The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes.

Brinton says, “I certainly agree that the Democratic Party is both reactionary and a party of capitalism.” He says that workers “are becoming increasingly dissatisfied,” but that the majority are “sticking with the Democratic Party.” Therefore, he argues, a “tactic” of supporting the Democratic Party in the elections is necessary for workers to “have their own political experience” and for communists not to be isolated from the masses.

To the contrary. The “political experience” of remaining tied to the Democratic wing of the exploiters’ party has been a trap for working people. What our class needs is not dependence on the bosses but a truthful explanation and a political course that raises its class consciousness and trust in its own forces.

In reality, it’s the capitalist minority that needs the support of working people, not the other way around (in fact, the majority of working people simply don’t vote, because they don’t see much difference in choosing between one or the other big-business party). The so-called all-people’s coalition is “a coalition between the owners of American industry and finance, and…the professional ward-heelers and politicians who keep the [Democratic] party machinery oiled, and, on the other hand, the various trade union bureaucrats and leaders of protest movements in American society, whose job it is to bring out the ranks of the coalition at voting time to guarantee the continuance of the rule of this party as opposed to the Republican Party,” said Jack Barnes in a 1965 debate with social democrat Stanley Aronowitz, published in the Pathfinder book The Lesser Evil? Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics. Barnes added that when dissatisfaction among working people toward Democratic politicians and the bipartisan system grows, “it’s those boys who whip things into shape, who go to the workers, to the Negroes, to the socialists, and say, ‘Look, it’s in your class interests, it’s in your interests as socialists, to come out and vote from this group, as a tactic’—in order, of course, to defeat the ‘greater evil.’”

This is the same argument the Communist Party USA has promoted since the 1930s, after the party became Stalinized and abandoned Lenin’s revolutionary course. And this election year, once again, we are warned by Stalinist, social democratic, and centrist groups that the Republican wolf, George W. Bush, is akin to “fascism” and that we should go running toward the Democratic fox—John Kerry or whoever gets nominated.

Explaining this revolutionary course is the opposite of sectarian isolation. Precisely because of the dissatisfaction among many workers that Brinton points to, there are greater opportunities than ever for communist workers to discuss a class-struggle perspective with fellow working-class militants as we join with them in battles against the bosses and other social struggles.

Working people and youth do have a clear class choice in the elections—the Socialist Workers candidates, who put forward a revolutionary working-class alternative to the twin capitalist parties of imperialist war, exploitation, racism, and depression. They will be campaigning over the coming months at union picket lines, factory gates, campuses, on the job, at labor and political actions. Joining with campaigners for the socialist alternative is one of the most effective ways to get a broader hearing for a working-class political perspective and to build a party that will be capable of leading workers and farmers to make a revolution in the United States and join the worldwide struggle for socialism.

Communist Party USA: ‘don’t hold your nose tovote for Kerry, campaign actively for Democrats’

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

October 19, 2004

The Communist Party USA leadership has been arguing recently that the attitude of millions who dislike the Bush administration but don’t identify openly with John Kerry’s campaign could cost the Democratic Party the election.

Some in the middle-class left have been making fun of the CPUSA for being—even more so than previous elections—one of the most fervent proponents of one of the two main parties of American imperialism.

There is a more serious question to be answered, however. What if the false argument of the Communist Party that Kerry is better than Bush, or even better than previous “progressive” Democrats, were true? What if Kerry was calling for bringing the U.S. troops home from Iraq? Would a vote for him and the Democratic Party then be justified?

As the Socialist Workers Party candidates in the 2004 elections have pointed out, the problem for working people is not this or that individual capitalist candidate, or their parties, but the system of capitalism, of class exploitation. Support for one or another “lesser evil” capitalist candidate has been a successful method the ruling class and its lieutenants in the labor movement have used for decades to prevent working people from acting to defend their class interests not only on the economic level but on the political plane too. This is the fundamental reason to oppose the CPUSA’s energetic campaign for a vote for Kerry.

“The remark heard in some left circles, ‘I will vote for Kerry but hold my nose,’ is counterproductive and demobilizing,” declared Sam Webb, national chair of the CPUSA, in an article in the August 28 People’s Weekly World, the party’s newspaper. “It may bring some momentary self-satisfaction to those expressing it. But it will do little to convince swing, undecided, or stay-at-home voters.”

This is the biggest problem the pro-Democratic camp faces, Webb continued, “is not that millions of people will have unrealistic expectations of a Kerry administration, but rather that a substantial section of voters still believe that it doesn’t make much of a difference who they vote for on Nov. 2,” he said.

“The responsibility of left and progressive people is not to spend their time bellyaching over Kerry’s shortcomings, but to convince millions that there is a choice and that the outcome of this election will have enormous consequences for our nation’s future,” Webb concluded.

The Stalinist party presents two principal arguments to back up its support for the Democrats—one of the two main parties of democratic imperialism.

The first is that the Bush administration is the gravest present danger to humanity, bordering on fascism, which makes electing “anybody but Bush” wholly justified. In an article in the September 30 People’s Weekly World, for example, Webb said the Bush administration is not a “‘normal’ bourgeois democratic regime,” but instead a “conservative-authoritarian”

government. “We can’t say that it is fascistic, but sometimes traces of fascist thinking are evident in its speeches and its policies,” he declared.

But simple hate for a bourgeois politician is not good enough to mobilize and energize an electorate faced with what many consider a ghastly alternative, as Webb pointed out. So the second prong of this campaign is an attempt to prettify the pro-imperialist, warmongering, and antilabor policies and record of the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee. In this vein, the People’s Weekly World has been carrying banner headlines and articles trying to paint Kerry’s positions as “progressive” and prolabor.

“John Kerry’s stands on the major issues of the times, since the 1970s, have been a lot better than those of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Bill Clinton,” said an opinion column by Norman Markowitz in the September 25 Weekly World. “He is a progressive Democratic senator from a liberal pro-labor state, Massachusetts, as Roosevelt was the progressive governor of New York.”

The CP implies that with Kerry in office working people will have a good chance of making gains like those of the 1930s, which the party attributes to the “New Deal” policies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. This myth about Roosevelt has been promoted for decades by the union officialdom, as well as liberals, Stalinists, and other middle-class radicals.

The gains working people made at the time—like organizing the unorganized and winning Social Security pensions and unemployment compensation—were the by-products of mass labor struggles that had revolutionary potential, not of Roosevelt’s supposed benevolence.

In reality, Roosevelt made the smallest possible concessions to stave off the working-class radicalization that developed during and in the aftermath of the Great Depression. While unemployment remained above 8 million throughout the New Deal years, the government never provided jobs for more than 25 percent of the jobless.

As Roosevelt prepared the U.S. military for entry into the interimperialist slaughter in the second World War, his administration organized a week-long industry-labor conference in December 1941 that won a commitment from the union officialdom to surrender the right to strike for the duration of the war—the “no strike pledge.” This antilabor measure, used by Roosevelt to freeze wages and extract concessions from the unions, was supported by the Communist Party, which also demanded a “permanent no-strike pledge,” according to Art Preis, in his book, Labor’s Giant Step—The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55.

As the Militant explained in an August 31 editorial urging support for the SWP 2004 ticket, “the cause of the worsening economic and social crisis—from exploitation by the bosses to wars of plunder abroad—is not an individual politician or a particular party holding office, but the capitalist system and the tiny handful of billionaire families that perpetuate their rule at the expense of the vast majority.

“This capitalist class has two parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Their two party system is a trap designed to hoodwink working people into thinking that we have a choice—alternating between one gang of predators and another—and to keep us from attacking the real problem, capitalism.

“Nor are the ‘independent’ campaigns of Ralph Nader and the Green Party an alternative for working people. These are pro-capitalist third parties that are not independent from the ruling class. They serve as pressure groups on the Democrats, reinforcing the two-party con game.”

As the Militant has explained, working people do have a choice in the November elections that’s in their interests. And that is to vote socialist, to support the working-class alternative in 2004 to the parties of capitalism: the SWP ticket.

Is Clinton A Slightly Lesser Evil?

September 30, 1996 Wouldn't a Democratic administration - even though the current one under William Clinton is surely no friend of labor - be preferable to a victory by Robert Dole and Jack Kemp, "who have outright fascists entrenched deeply in their party"? asks reader Nicholas Burns in a letter on the opposing page. From the standpoint of someone who considers himself a socialist, isn't Clinton a "lesser evil"?

This is an important question that has been debated among supporters of parties that function in the U.S. working-class movement for decades.

The Democrats and Republicans comprise the bourgeois two- party system in the United States, which monopolizes politics and attempts to force dissent into channels acceptable to the ruling rich.

For at least half a century, the Democratic Party has been identified with the "labor-liberal" coalition that was first put together under the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and expanded to a "labor-liberal-civil rights" coalition in the 1960s and 70s. Through mighty class battles the working class formed the industrial unions and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and wrested gains like Social Security from the employers. The leaders of the CIO, backed up by the Stalinist Communist Party and many in the Socialist Party at the time, derailed the real possibilities of this social movement leading to the independent organization of the working class in its own political party. In 1936, these forces urged support for the Democratic Party, establishing this coalition. Ever since, workers are told by the union officialdom to pull the Democratic lever every four years to defeat the "greater evil."

Throughout this period, the two bourgeois parties that have alternated in running the White House and Congress have carried out a close to identical foreign policy - using the U.S. military and economic superiority coming out of World War II to advance the imperialist interests of America's sixty ruling families by attempting to crush rebellions by the exploited and oppressed from Korea to Vietnam and Nicaragua. Tactical differences on domestic policy between the two parties were held up by the labor bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois leaderships of Black rights organizations to identify the Democrats as "friends of labor" and the oppressed.

But ever since the onset of the first post-war worldwide capitalist recession in the early 1970s, which signaled the latest downward segment in the curve of capitalist development, the bipartisan foreign policy has been mirrored by an increasingly bipartisan domestic policy. The bourgeois politics of both parties have shifted to the right, as the U.S. rulers have tried to shore up declining profit rates. And the labor- liberal-civil rights coalition of the Democratic Party has begun to come apart.

This has become crystal clear under the Clinton administration. Clinton's record is unambiguous as having taken the lead in the rulers' assault on the social conquests of the working class. As a series of recent Militant articles have outlined, the Democratic president opened the employers' onslaught against the Social Security Act of 1935 by signing the welfare bill, has led the recent probes against democratic rights, and is on the forefront of the ideological assault on labor as shown around the passage of recent antigay measures. Clinton is also among the most warmongering presidents of modern times.

In fact, there is a realignment among the political poles of the two bourgeois parties as registered at the Republican and Democratic conventions this summer. Dole and Kemp now push their "economic growth" theme as an alternative to Clinton's status quo that defends current employment levels and the slow decline in real wages for working people as the best capitalism has to offer. And Kemp is leading Republican efforts to make inroads in his party's appeal to Blacks and other oppressed nationalities. In doing so, the Republican leadership, and the entire U.S. ruling class, has pushed to the margins ultrarightists like Patrick Buchanan, whose forces have had to retreat since last spring. Until new explosions of labor resistance occur, the rulers do not quite need the Buchanan alternative.

It is true Buchanan and other rightists function within the Republican party. But their perspective of building an incipient fascist movement is aided as much, if not more, by votes from liberals for antilabor measures like the "Defense of Marriage Act."

The fact of the matter is that with either a Democratic or Republican administration, the working class goes to the wall. The only way working people can defend ourselves, or achieve any reforms under capitalism, is through the class struggle and organization independent from the parties whose program serves the bourgeoisie.

Malcolm X made some very useful points in this regard commenting on the 1964 presidential race between Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater. "The shrewd imperialists knew that the only way that you will voluntarily run to the fox is to show you a wolf. So they created a ghastly alternative and had the whole world ... hoping Johnson would beat Goldwater.... Those who would claim to be enemies of the system were on their hands and knees waiting for Johnson to get elected because he's suppose to be a man of peace; and he has troops invading the Congo right now and invading Saigon."

Those who try to convince working people today to vote Democrat once again aim to make us accept responsibility - and thus being demoralized tomorrow - for the real policies Clinton will implement once he is elected, which will be consistent with his record of the last four years.

That's why a vote for the Socialist Workers ticket is not a "wasted vote." And an even more important step is joining the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists to build a movement capable of leading workers and farmers to take power when objective conditions permit and put an end to the threat of fascism and war once and for all.

-- MEGAN ARNEY

These selections are for my own convenience as a reference, and are not created with the knowledge or consent of The Militant newspaper