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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 17, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Is it ‘practical’ to vote for Democrats?
Marxism vs. pragmatism
In the 1984 election, the Democratic Party ran Walter Mondale for president and Geraldine Ferraro for vice president against Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Mondale had been Jimmy Carter's vice president from 1977 to 1981. Sam Marcy, the founder of Workers World Party, wrote a critique of those on the left who urged progressives to support the Mondale-Ferraro campaign. Below are excerpts from that article, which appeared in the Aug. 23, 1984, issue of Workers World.
By Sam Marcy
Some in the progressive movement are urging the support of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro on the grounds that this year's presidential election, unlike others in the past, requires a "pragmatic approach."
We are told that it would be not only unwise but unreal to approach the national elections in any other way. A change is imperative, they say.
Revolutionary Marxists have never hesitated to make radical tactical and strategic changes if they would promote the cause of the working class and oppressed people and advance social progress, while arresting unbridled political reaction.
It's something else, however, to adopt a so-called pragmatic approach. Just what is pragmatism?
In common parlance, to be pragmatic means to take a practical approach, avoiding an inflexible or dogmatic position. According to some of the leading early pragmatists of the [19th] century, like William James, the pragmatic method means to measure truth by its correspondence with experimental results and their practical outcome.
Who among us would disagree, so far?
C.S. Pierce, another early pragmatist, stressed the need to conduct investigations on the basis of constant empirical testing of hypotheses. Here, too, we are in agreement with the "pragmatists."
It is worthwhile to pursue this matter and proceed to investigate by empirical verification the hypothesis that our adversaries advance.
Putting foreign policy to the test
No issue is as critical as foreign policy. Indeed, it should be, for foreign policy has always been the concentrated expression and extension of domestic policy. It is therefore the experience of foreign policy that will help illuminate the hypothesis of our adversaries.
The case of El Salvador has been regarded far and wide as the most sensitive foreign policy issue.
The wanton and brutal mass murders by death squads are such a familiar aspect of the Reaganite foreign policy in El Salvador that they have become a universally hated symbol among oppressed people, the working class and progressives throughout the world.
Yet on Aug. 11, [1984,] the two principal leaders and collaborators of Mondale in the House--Speaker Tip O'Neill and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro--unashamedly turned their backs on this very issue. By their failure to appear in the House and demonstratively vote against a Reagan-sponsored appropriations bill for aid to the murderous puppet government of El Salvador, they disqualified their entire two-year verbal opposition to the military adventure in Central America.
The deeper impact of the House vote is that the measure was passed by a Democratic-controlled House, with only 154 of the more than 250 Democrats opposing the Reagan-sponsored military aid bill.
Does this parliamentary development empirically verify the hypothesis of our adversaries, who ask us to be "practical" and demand we "shed old dogmas" and "rigid principles"?
Experience of Carter-Mondale years
The year 1978 was a so-called peaceful year. The Vietnam War was already in the past. There were no great artificially built-up "threats" from the outside. There was no large-scale, overt U.S. foreign intervention. And the economic situation, according to bourgeois standards, was stable.
What does that year tell us with regard to the basic tendencies inherent in the monopoly capitalist system, on which foreign policy is built?
During its 1975-76 campaign, the Carter-Mondale team had pledged over and over again to reduce U.S. military expenditures between $5 billion and $7 billion "now that the Vietnam War is behind us."
In addition, the Carter-Mondale administration had stated in 1977 that it would soon withdraw U.S. troops from south Korea.
[But 1978] was a banner year for the military-industrial complex. It was a year of spectacular growth and development in which the aerospace industry, the keystone of U.S. military production, broke all previous records.
Sales of the aerospace industry rose to a record level of $37.3 billion, almost all on orders to the Pentagon--$5 billion more than the preceding year. By 1979, sales were over $50 billion, in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars.
The military-industrial complex doesn't recklessly engage in research and development without a customer in mind, with whom it has previously negotiated and made agreements.
It was in 1978, according to Colliers Year Book for 1980, that General Dynamics Corp. delivered without much fanfare its first operational F-16 lightweight fighter.
That same year, the U.S. Air Force deployed its first operation squadron of close-support aircraft, the Fairchild A-10.
The Air Force began development of the Lockheed TR-1 tactical reconnaissance plane. It also completed development of the airborne warning and control system, popularly called AWACS--a giant spy plane and flying command post.
Late in 1978 the Air Force introduced the F-18A Hornet strike-fighter, developed jointly by McDonnell-Douglas and the Northrop Corp.
Let's not forget the Army. In 1978 it introduced the Sikorsky UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter. In light of the struggle in El Salvador and other areas in Central America, such as Honduras, this helicopter is most significant because it is designed to carry battle-equipped infantry squads for tactical assaults and other combat missions.
[Editor's note: Black Hawk helicopters are now being sent to Colombia to be used against the national liberation movements there.]
It should therefore be no surprise that the Carter-Mondale administration abandoned its promise to cut the defense budget.
On Aug. 20, 1979, the Carter-Mondale administration called for a halt to the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops stationed in Korea.
On Dec. 12, 1979, Carter made a speech to the notorious Business Council, which is made up of the chief executive officers of the 100 largest U.S. corporations. He outlined his five-year proposal to increase the military budget.
In light of these developments, the Carter-Mondale administration had to concoct a threat to "national security" and "U.S. vital interests." This was done over Afghanistan. The issue was magnified a thousand-fold as an excuse for huge military appropriations. [Editor's note: The CIA funded and trained the so-called "mujahadeen" in a bloody war against the progressive Afghani government, which had instituted land reform and education for boys and girls. The end result was the military victory of the most reactionary, anti-woman forces in Afghan society.]
Is it any wonder that the Carter-Mondale team thereafter brought back registration for military service?
Carter also began what Reagan has continued and intensified--cutting off the transfer and sale of high-technology equipment to the USSR and the grain embargo. The USSR had become the largest customer for U.S. grain. The large-scale purchases by the USSR which began in the early 1970s were considered the one significant material factor that could lay the basis for peaceful relations between the U.S. and the USSR.
Trade, the liberals said, was the way to lay the foundation for peaceful relations with the USSR and other socialist countries.
But it was the Carter-Mondale partnership that broke it up. Their strategic conception was based on an attempt to starve the Soviet people into submission. Starvation would bring mass unrest in the USSR; long lines at the food stores would make the Soviet leadership crumble.
It was a way to solicit surrender from the leadership by attacking the people with starvation. Was it not Mondale who stumped the farming states in an effort to put down the widespread discontent in the farming areas that followed the implementation of this economic warfare?
How did Carter and Mondale react to the hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies of small farmers that followed? By getting the government to make compensatory payments to the very big farmers--the grain monopolists--and letting the little ones survive on their own with "aid" that would not enable them to sell their grain but only indebted them further to the government and the banks.
Cutbacks in social services
Mondale agreed with the Carter budget to begin on Oct. 1, 1979, that involved deep cuts in social services, health care, aid to cities, energy assistance as well as environmental projects. The Congres sional Black Caucus called it "immoral and unjust" and wondered how Carter could reconcile the huge defense budget with his cuts in vital social services.
Reagan has profoundly deepened what the Carter-Mondale team started.
The Carter-Mondale administration laid the organizational and administrative legal basis that enabled Reagan to break the PATCO strike of air traffic controllers. It was worked out during the Carter administration.
Against strong unions, like the Mine Workers, the Carter administration didn't hesitate to invoke the Taft-Hartley law with the deadly weapon of a federal injunction and threats to take contempt measures against the union leaders and the rank and file.
Mondale vigorously supported the Carter administration during the days of the so-called oil shortage. He engaged in the most vitriolic attacks on the OPEC countries, while the administration's policies had the fundamental objective of raising gas and oil prices to the public.
This all brought on the wild, uncontrolled frenzy of capitalist overproduction in oil, which eventually had to collapse, laying the basis for the capitalist economic crisis.
These are some of the compelling and irresistible facts that do not support the hypothesis of our pragmatic adversaries, who ask us to look at reality and face facts.
Unfounded hopes, not facts
They are supporting Mondale solely on the basis of unfounded hopes and his vague bourgeois liberal rhetoric. They are applying a totally subjective approach to the campaign: relying on the supposed individual qualities of the candidates, rather than looking at which class they represent.
Their effort at a pragmatic approach is tantamount to an abandonment of objective analysis of the nature of the capitalist government and the rule of monopoly capital. In effect, it means to discard all objective criteria and substitute wholly subjective ones.
Intellectual adherents of pragmatism have long been fulminating against "immutable laws," "fixed principles" and "closed systems." They declare abhorrence for "abstractions," "final truths" and "absolutes" in society and nature.
Nevertheless, the pragmatists make one definite exception--they regard the capitalist system as fixed, as the final truth. They regard private property in the means of production as an immutable law of nature. This is the essence of pragmatism as a world philosophical outlook.
It explains among other reasons why Marxism in theory as well as in practice is an implacable foe of pragmatism.
Marxism is the most profound philosophy of constant, uninterrupted change, of gradual quantitative changes that result in leaps forward, making a qualitative transformation. Marxism is the theory of social development from lower to higher forms.
Marxism is a theory of evolution that teaches that capitalism, rather than being an eternal system, is a transitory stage in the development of humanity, and will of historical necessity be overthrown by the struggle of the working class and oppressed people.
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