First Published: Revolution, Vol. 2, No. 1, October 15, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Besides the election show in the main ring between Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford there are numerous other minor parties running candidates for election. Two of them the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), claim to be for the workers and oppressed people and claim to be revolutionary, socialist and communist. They have succeeded in getting themselves on the ballot in many states and they are campaigning as the “real alternative” to the two main capitalist parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
The CPUSA and the SWP are taking their campaigns to the factory gates, to the neighborhoods and onto the campuses. They have bought time on TV for political messages. They are getting free time on TV to reply to editorials and are popping up in the news as they file a flurry of court suits, demanding to be treated equally with the Democrats and the Republicans.
More people have heard the political message of these two parties this year than- any in recent memory. But these election campaigns, like the parties that spawned them, are not revolutionary, socialist or communist. Not only are they not the “real alternative” for the workers and oppressed people, they are actually attempting to further shackle the people to the trap of bourgeois democracy, to the rule of the exploiters. Both parties are working the same side of the street. Both “expose” the promises of Carter and the Democrats at every turn and then elaborate a program that will “really deliver” for the masses, a gift from the “real party of the workers.”
The CPUSA asks, “Would you vote for your boss to be shop steward? Then why vote for his candidate for public office?” But why vote for Gus Hall, the CPUSA’s presidential candidate, who has a snowball’s chance of hitting the White House? The CPUSA’s strategy does not foresee winning a major election right now. So, they say, casting a vote for Gus Hall is casting a “vote with clout.”
Roughly, this means that the more voters pull Gus’s lever, the more scared the bourgeoisie, and especially the more “liberal” of them in the Democratic Party, will get. Out of stone cold fear of this vote, the capitalists will suddenly forget their own class interests and begin dishing out all sorts of goodies to the people. The capitalists who have defended their regime a hundred times with bullet and bomb will be put to flight by the terrific force of paper ballots. Jarvis Tyner, Hall’s running mate, summed this up in saying, “If the bourgeoisie spends millions to stop communism in Italy, Portugal, Chile, Angola, etc., a big Communist vote will make them spend millions in the U.S. on the cities.”
The CPUSA lays out an election program with far more lavish promises than Fritz Mondale would have ever dreamed: jobs for all, massive social service programs, an end to racism and injustice, and peace and disarmament.
The program the Communist Party, USA is running is “a people’s anti-monopoly coalition,” “a new legal framework,” and detente with the Soviet Union. The heart of the program – and what it promises will really deliver the goods to the people – is the’ “people’s anti-monopoly coalition.” Its policy is to “lessen the burdens on working people by compelling shifts in surplus value from monopoly to working people through governmental budgets and at the point of production ... ” An example of this is cutting the military budget by 80% and funnelling the money saved into social services. (What these “communists” want the U.S. government to save the other 20% for is unclear, maybe just enough to invade Mexico or shoot down demonstrating workers?)
Why exactly are social services getting slashed and what could possibly “compel” the capitalists, short of revolution, to disarm themselves?
What the CPUSA “anti-monopoly coalition” ignores – or more to the point, tries to hide – are the laws of capitalism. First off, they imply that the cutting of social services in favor of big defense budgets is some kind of reversible “policy.” Money sunk into libraries, garbage collection and fire protection returns no profit for the majority of the capitalist class. It is a fact that the capitalists are caught in a profit squeeze, they can’t grab enough capital through “normal” means to fuel all the necessary new investment. New York City is just the sharpest example of what this capital crisis means for cities – it’s happening all over – as non-productive capital gets moved out and over into profit-making ventures.
Lenin, whom the CPUSA claims to uphold, pointed out more than 50 years ago that imperialism, with the relentless drive for profit of competing great powers, always drives towards war, independent of any “policy” on the part of this or that capitalist. All the votes in the world never will get the bourgeoisie to disarm.
The CPUSA program includes a big push for detente- “world peace” – as if the capitalists can lay down their arms and be friends with everybody.
“A few years ago, at big demonstrations, we sang the song ’All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance’.Well, now in this election year, we are again saying, ’Give detente and peace a chance,’” says Gus Hall, CPUSA candidate for President. The two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, are driven by the laws of imperialism to constantly reach out for more people to exploit and more markets to dump their goods. Where one is on the offensive, the other defends and vice versa. This contention, often carried out under the banner of “detente,” has led to armed clashes by proxy in Angola, showdowns over the Mideast, and covert political infighting as in Portugal.
Instead of facing the truth – and arming the masses to understand this imperialist clash and its class basis – the CPUSA spreads lies and illusions by upholding on the one hand the peace loving, “socialist” Soviet Union and condemning on the other the vile, evil U.S. military-industrial complex which is preventing more enlightened imperialists in the U.S. from wholeheartedly embracing detente. If only the U.S. voters will turn back the boys from the military-industrial complex, then peace and 80 of the military budget is ours!
The whole show serves both imperialist bandits fine, a world where war or peace is a matter of policy among reasonable men and where the Soviet Union is the socialist motherland and so, by definition, cannot be aggressive. But it’s just not that way.
This detente trick, this whole illusion pushed by the CPUSA, is dangerous. Besides, of course, pimping off the deep felt desires of millions for peace, the CPUSA serves up the slogan, “Detente means jobs.” This is only the flip side of another equally deceitful and deadly bourgeois line; “War means jobs,” put out by Scoop Jackson and his bunch.
Either line is poison for the working class, both mean more power in the hands of the bourgeoisie because they line up the working class right behind the capitalists, hoping and pressuring for salvation within the workings of their system. But neither the illusion of detente nor the misery of war will cure unemployment, which is part and parcel of capitalism. Should workers be reduced to the useless task of weighing the number of jobs detente would supposedly mean compared to a small war or maybe a world war? For the working class the task is to expose the sham of detente, the real contention “the real drive to war and build up, the working class struggle against war preparations, unemployment and the real source of all these miseries .– the imperialist system.
The CPUSA’s “new legal framework” is one that would “outlaw all forms of racism and abolish all anti-democratic and repressive laws.” In fact, the whole history of the civil rights and Black liberation struggle of the last 20 years shows that the basis of the oppression of Black people is capitalist exploitation and, while the struggle has won some democratic rights, real equality is impossible under capitalism no matter what laws proclaiming formal “equality” are passed. And the CP’s only purpose in raising this “legal frame-work” is to hide this lesson, resurrect old fairy tales and use this “framework” to confine and squelch real struggle against national oppression.
Then comes the clincher of the CP’s election campaign. With the current political system increasingly discredited after Watergate and a thousand other exposures, up steps the CPUSA to pretty it up by posing as this system’s revolutionary inheritors. “The fulfillment of the democratic promises of the Declaration of Independence,” they say, “are still the unfinished business before the people.” This then is supposed to be the revolutionary goal of “communists“ and the historic task of the working class – to extend the existing “democracy” to cover the workers and minorities as well as the capitalists.
But the real question is the class question – of which class rules society. How is it possible to speak of equality and democracy when millions are forced to labor just to survive so a parasitic few can reap the fruits of this in immense wealth and power? Only on the basis of establishing, the rule of the working class by overthrowing the capitalist system and its class relations can the working class end all forms of oppression, practice its own democracy and exercise dictatorship over the overthrown class of exploiters.
This is the real truth, pointed to by Watergate and a thousand other recent events where the face of the enemy has become clearer. This, of course, the CP will not bring out, but works overtime to hide by peddling their view that the task of the working masses is not to make their own revolution, but to somehow finish the bourgeoisie’s, begun 200 years ago and long since over: To make exploitation and oppression, the heart and soul of capitalism, more “fair” rather than do away with them.
Along with all this goes the CP’s slick TV commercial pitch to “put a worker in the White House” (presumable much better than putting a peanut grower in the White House, Jimmy Carter’s angle.) And what would this worker do? Perhaps this was best expressed by Gus Hall himself on a recent Tomorrow show on TV: When he was asked if a communist president could work with a Republican-dominated Congress, Hall eagerly answered yes. Rockefeller, for example, will be relieved to hear that he can still have all of his blood-sucking “rights” under the CP’s revolutionary view of future society. All this just underscores that “putting a worker in the White House” has nothing to do with the working class taking political power.
Somewhere – but not in their election literature for the masses, only in the party theoretical journal for fellow party members – the CPUSA finally ’fesses up:’ “No measures, however, short of socialism can completely eliminate ... the basic contradictions of capitalism.” But this evades the basic question – how to get there? A big vote for Gus? Really get the Democratic Party all freaked out? The point is the CPUSA does not lead the struggle forward towards revolution, the only road to socialism. The CPUSA has covered up the class nature of bourgeois democracy, obscured class exploitation, twisted the nature of the capitalists’ laws and hidden the class content of the contention between the imperialist superpowers. This is the net effect of their “communist” election program.
The CPUSA’s concoction of “communism,“ though feeble today, is of great potential commercial value to the capitalists. With more and more misery each year’s harvest, the masses demand that life not continue in the present way. The bourgeoisie must convince the masses that such change can be won without revolution, without overthrowing bourgeois rule. This service the CPUSA willingly provides.In a time when “our democracy” is getting very frayed around the edges, we find a new push behind the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and their “socialist alternative.” And what is this “socialist alternative?” Making this “democracy” – bourgeois democracy – work.
This year, with Peter Camejo heading up their ticket, the SWP is running its most extensive campaign ever, with candidates for all sorts of offices in 33 states. Just getting themselves on the ballot they claim is a big victory for the masses. In doing this they are “defending the democratic rights of the majority” and “putting socialism on the ballot.” Unlike the CPUSA whose main hope is to build its “clout” with the Democratic Party and push them “leftward,” the SWP entertains hopes of winning a position here or there, if not this election year, maybe the next.
The SWP has been getting a lot of coverage in the bourgeois press lately with their civil suit against the FBI spying on them. They hope the publicity will overcome their lack of reputation among the masses. They are quite proud of their suit against the Feds. “History will record,” they declare, “that the most important event of the bicentennial was not a bunch of ships sailing up the Hudson, but the defense of the Bill of Rights by the SWP, which has mobilized public opinion and exposed the FBI and government for what they have done.”
What the SWP is really all about can be learned by looking into their suit against the government. The FBI had been spying on them for 35 years and had not found a single piece of evidence of an illegal act. The SWP worked hard to convince the government that there was nothing illegal about their party or its activities. What was actually in question was whether the SWP was really a threat to the status quo. The SWP finally won. On September 14, the Attorney General of the U.S. ordered the FBI to keep its mitts off the SWP: They were no threat to capitalist rule, they were no danger.
Which is it? Is socialism and working class revolution harmless and acceptable to the capitalists or is the SWP’s “Socialism” a sham, a lie, a trick? Of course, it is the latter.
The heart of the SWP’s election program is the “Bill of Rights for Working People.” This would give people the right to a job, to live in any neighborhood they wanted to live in, etc. But just as the SWP forgets that full employment was officially made government policy in 1947, open housing in the mid-’60s, and so on. Obviously, it takes more than fine-sounding proclamations to bring about change, it takes struggle and ultimately revolution.
Another fairy-tale illusion the SWP promotes is the possibility of “letting the people vote in a referendum before the country is dragged into any more wars.” Electing “peace candidate” Lyndon Johnson in ’64 showed that the American people didn’t want to go to war in Vietnam but that hardly made a difference to either LBJ or the bourgeois rulers he represented. The capitalists tried to make an example out of the Vietnamese liberation struggle, to drown it in blood and “persuade” other oppressed people not to rise up. To say a referendum would make it otherwise, is to try to turn history upside down.
Much of the SWP’s program boils down to petty-bourgeois appeals for “democracy” in the abstract, democracy for everyone, including, it seems, for the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The SWP so loves the bourgeoisie’s democracy they’ve demanded it be extended to Nazis organizing on campuses. When the scholarly Professor Shockley tours the country to speak about how Blacks and other minorities are genetically inferior, the SWP demands that no one interfere with his right to speak! They have even attacked the revolutionary Student Brigade, the RCP’s student group, for shutting down this reactionary dog.
Playing to people’s desire for real change, the SWP says all this will only be possible “if the government itself passes completely into the hands of the majority – the masses of working people.”
What the SWP’s stinking opportunism has in common with the CPUSA is a total abandonment of the Leninist analysis of the state. “ ... the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power, which was created by the ruling class ... ” (Lenin, State and Revolution, FLP, p, 9, emphasis in original)
This points to the real role of the campaigns of both the SWP and the CPUSA. It comes to more than simply the sum total of their ineffectiveness and the pocketful of illusions with which they litter up the scene. Their real effect is to be a kind of advanced guard for the bourgeoisie, filling a breach the capitalists and their “regular” politicians cannot fill-putting a “communist” and “socialist” label on some increasingly discredited political snake oil, fixing up what is unfixable, the capitalists’ political system. The CPUSA and the SWP prop up the very illusions the bourgeoisie promotes among the masses by portraying the state apparatus – the government, the legal framework, etc. – as some kind of neutral “high ground.” Right now, the capitalists occupy that high ground but the masses must seize every opportunity to advance their struggle and prepare for the opportunity to push them off and seize the heights for themselves.
But “the state is an organ of class rule, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ’order’ which legalises and perpetuates this oppression ... A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism ... it establishes power so securely, so firmly that no change, either of persons, of institutions, or of parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” (Lenin, State and Revolution, FLP, pp. 8 and 15-16, emphasis in original)
What Lenin is driving at is that the whole state apparatus, the army, police, courts of law, bureaucracy, etc., was created by the bourgeoisie to serve the bourgeoisie. That state apparatus is ultimately defended by the guns of the army. In spite of illusions spread by the CP and SWP to the contrary, is there any reason to believe that the U.S. ruling class, who have overthrown many a legally constituted government overseas, would sit still and let some “socialists” legislate away the bourgeoisie in their own backyard without resorting to the same violent methods?
Taking all this into account, it’s clear that to cast a vote for Gus Hall or Peter Camejo is not even a protest vote, it is only a sign to the bourgeoisie that their servants are doing their jobs well in prettifying up their system.
The elections are an important arena for struggle between the working class and the exploiters and cannot be ignored. The tasks of communists around elections are the same whether or not the Party actually fields a slate of candidates. V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks participated in elections in Czarist Russia successfully and were able to advance the workers’ cause. The lessons Lenin summed up apply to the working class struggle today and also are a good yardstick by which to judge which class the CPUSA and SWP serve.
“Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed masses at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the ’democracy’ of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage slaves. It is precisely this contradiction’ that is opening the eyes of the masses to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of Socialism are constantly exposing to the masses, in order to prepare them for revolution!” (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, FLP, p, 24, emphasis in original)
Millions of Americans are disgusted with the present political setup. There is a growing feeling that the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are owned lock, stock and barrel by the rich and can’t really serve the masses. It is an excellent time for exposing the farce of bourgeois democracy and raise the correct feelings of the masses to a solid class understanding of the system. And it is for this reason that the CP and SWP election campaigns are all the more treacherous. They obscure the rule of the handful of exploiters and hold up the illusion of progress, even (socialism, coming from the bourgeois political process.
The questions the masses have about the present system must be answered truthfully, exposing the class relations, oppressed and oppressors, exploiters and exploited, that lay at the root of all misery. The struggle of the masses must not be channeled back into the system but must be broken out of those bonds, to aim towards the day when the working class will rise up and lead the masses forward to socialist revolution.