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-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted
from the July 25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Should workers and progressives support Bill Clinton in the presidential election?
Is the danger posed by capitalist rule through the Republican Party so qualitatively different from capitalist rule through the Democrats that those struggling for a better society should hold their noses and vote for Clinton?
That is the position of a number of groups on the left. It is not the position of Workers World Party, which is conducting an election campaign this year, running Monica Moorehead for president and Gloria La Riva for vice president.
These two women of color are putting forward a strong socialist program in the election while exposing how undemocratic U.S. elections really are.
Look at the record of the last 16 years. Whether the president was Reagan, Bush or Clinton, whether the Democrats or Republicans ran the Congress, the workers lost ground. Wages and working conditions have eroded, millions of better-paid jobs have been eliminated, social services have declined.
At the same time, the rich have gotten richer than ever before. All the recent studies show a growing gap between elite haves and penniless have-nots. Corporate- and incometax laws are so weak and full of loopholes that they provide no restraint on the accumulation of obscene wealth.
Some of the most filthy rich get away without paying any taxes at all.
The political climate here is so favorable to exploitation that U.S. bosses have far outstripped the wealthy ruling classes in competing capitalist countries like Japan and Germany.
The two-capitalist-parties system in the United States has worked like a charm for the rapacious ruling class. Even though workers make up the immense majority of the population and most have the legal right to vote, the present political setup allows the corporate owners to exercise a political monopoly.
What this means is that U.S. capital can get away with exploiting labor here--and around the world--at a rate more brutal and extreme than the rulers in the other industrialized capitalist countries. And the two-party political system has helped them do it.
The polarization of wealth is especially to the disadvantage of the nationally oppressed: African Americans, Latinos, Native people and other people of color. The twoparty system has allowed racism to become institutionalized in all areas of social life.
All this should make it clear that the working class must have its own political party, one that will make no apologies for fighting the bosses.
Control of the political system is decisive in the struggle between the classes.
Those who want to support Clinton in this election reply that while all this may be important some day, the burning issue right now is to stop the right. Black churches are being burned, right-wing militias are on the rise, and the police are riddled with neo-fascist elements.
The only way to stop it, they say, is to keep the Republicans out of office--which means voting for Clinton.
First, there is no evidence that a Democratic victory would stop any of this extreme right-wing activity. Neofascist groups in this country have thrived under both Democrats and Republicans. Often they are even more aggressive when the Democrats have the presidency--as in the early 1960s, when groups like the American Nazi Party, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and other fascists began calling President John F. Kennedy a communist and demanded he bomb north Vietnam.
Kennedy wasn't, and didn't, but his Democrat successor, Lyndon Johnson, did try to bomb Vietnam "back to the Stone Age," as one general put it.
It wasn't voting for the Democrats that set back the right wing and helped end the war. It was building an independent struggle movement that increasingly became more anticapitalist and anti-imperialist.
Finally, Republican Richard Nixon had to pull out the
troops and sign a peace treaty with Vietnam.
In the long run, it is impossible to mount a strong antifascist struggle without identifying the problem: capitalism. And this is something the Democratic Party will never do.
Where does the danger of fascism come from?
The growing polarization and economic turmoil caused by capitalism frighten many in the population and can drive them into the arms of right-wing demagogues. The middle class, especially, fragments in times of social crisis. Small property owners suddenly faced with financial disaster turn to scapegoating ideologies unless pulled strongly in the opposite direction.
The progressive movement tries to unite all workers in a common struggle against the bosses. This need for solidarity arises out of the nature of wage labor, which brings together people whose backgrounds may be very different but who share a common exploiter.
The right wingers are constantly attacking this natural urge of workers to unite. They try to inflame racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, hatred against lesbians and gays, and contempt for immigrants.
However, there is no mass fascist movement in the United States at this time. If anything, the current is running the other way. Even the Republican Party has had to moderate its image in recent months, trying to find some way to win women and African Americans away from the Democrats.
Newt Gingrich has been told to lie low, and right-wing demagogue Pat Buchanan, who tried to whip up extreme chauvinism, is now ostracized by the Republican leadership.
It's the height of political absurdity and opportunism to claim that only a victory for Clinton can turn back a neofascist tide.
This is a time when those who understand the horrors that capitalism can bring to the world should be out there exposing the system and generating confidence in the working class that it can be the driving force to bring about a new system--infinitely more humane and just. This can't be done in the straitjacket of support for a capitalist party. It requires raising the banner of an independent working-class, socialist program.
- END -
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com. Web: http://www.workers.org)