We Need a Workers Party

Not Obama/Romney’s “Only Game in Town” 

CSEW at New York City protest against the racist murder of Trayvon Martin, April 10. (Internationalist photo)

    An out of town gambler gets into a taxi and asks the driver where he can get some action.

    The driver says, “I’ll take you to the game at Joe’s Garage.”

    The gambler says, “But I’ve heard that game is crooked.”

    “Yeah,” says the driver, “it’s rigged, but it’s the only game in town.”

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, millions of decent people wept for joy. In this deeply racist country, Americans voted for a black president – a cultural near miracle if not a political one. He talked about the “audacity of hope” and promised “change we can believe in.” The CSEW was not among the believers, and we forthrightly said so. It soon became painfully clear that although the 2008 election signified an important cultural shift in the optics of race in the U.S., Obama was the champion of change that only Wall Street could believe in.  

Obama took time out from his 2008 campaign to support the huge Wall Street giveaway/bailout. As Alexander Cockburn pointed out, usually Wall Street waits for presidents to get into office before it demands that they demonstrate their fealty. But in Obama’s case, they wanted it before he swore the oath. Many of the players in the Clinton and Bush regimes – Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and others from Goldman Sachs – immediately took the financial reins. And Wall Street has been calling the shots in the Obama administration ever since. To direct educational policy, Obama rejected the liberal educator Linda Darling Hammond in favor of Arne Duncan, self-styled “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools whose corporate education “reforms’ were solidly supported by the city’s business elite. 

Soon after the election, Obama supporters became confused and anguished by the actions and policies of the White House. Instead of the hoped-for change, Obama maintained essential continuity with Bush policies, from war and occupation in the Middle East to attacks on living standards at home. The political connective tissue joining the Obama White House to the policies of the Bush administration  was  everywhere to be seen. There was a lot of disappointment in liberal and “progressive” circles.  Michael Moore, for instance, tried to explain Obama’s personnel choices in an interview with Naomi Klein in the Nation magazine (12 October 2009). Faced with the reappointment of Bernanke and the hiring of Geithner, Summers and the rest of the Wall Street gang, Moore said that “in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to myself…Who better to fix the mess than the people who created it? He’s bringing them in to clean up their own mess.” But Moore knows that such ideas belong in the land of Oz. “Just keep repeating it: ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’” Right-wing gadfly Sarah Palin baited the growing number of disillusioned Obama supporters, with the question: “That hopey changey thing, How’s it workin’ out for ya?”

From Obama to Bloomberg, capitalist drive against public ed means school closings and union-busting. We call to occupy (take over) schools targeted for closing.   (Internationalist photo)

Of course, it’s not working out at all because when all the election hoopla is over, Obama is just another capitalist politician, another CEO of the capitalist enterprise. And capitalism is an economic and social system that has its own relentless logic and consequences: boom to bust economy, imperialist war, racism, ever-increasing inequality, oppression of women, environmental devastation, social dysfunction – a society arranged from top to bottom for the profit of a few.

The capitalists naturally like it better when the word capitalism, not to mention their system, is not too much on the public’s mind. Their entire ideological and cultural apparatus is devoted to the message that capitalism is not just another “ism.” They prefer that people believe that capitalism represents the end of history, a force of nature rather than a historically constructed arrangement of social relations that could be replaced by another “ism,” say socialism or communism. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatch­er and her coterie of hard-right union-busters coined the slogan, “There Is No Alternative” to capitalism, or TINA for short. But the recent boom-bust crisis changed all that. Indeed, there are historical moments when the architecture of the whole system cannot be hidden. We are in such a moment now. 

It’s pretty easy to document the disastrous effects of capitalism in these painful days of what has been dubbed the Great Recession, which most economists agree isn’t going away any time soon, at least as far as the effects on the working class are concerned. The wounds of social and economic inequalities lie exposed and raw. On the same day in October, 2011 that the stock market cracked 10,000 (it’s now over 13,000) and Goldman Sachs resumed handing out billions in bonuses at pre-crash levels, wages reached a 19-year low. Wall Street and the top of the wealth pyramid have already made back all the money they lost in the initial collapse. 

While the mainstream TV networks interview policy wonks and stock analysts about the “green shoots of recovery,” working-class lives are devastated: families are chucked out of their foreclosed homes, wastelands replace once thriving industrial areas, increasingly children live in deep poverty, many suffering from hunger now called “food insecurity”; a healthcare system is devoted to the profits of insurance companies and Big Pharma where the companies’ virtual Death Panels condemn nearly 45,000 uninsured people to die every year (American Journal of Public Health, September 2009). Wall Street is popping champagne corks, but the child poverty rate is up to 22%, homelessness is rising, and 76% of Americans, in a recent ABC poll, said that they thought the country was still in recession.

Back in the fall of 2008, we in Class Struggle Education Workers were almost unique among educator activists in warning that in terms of education, on the war, the economy and much else, Democrat Obama was no better than his Republican rival McCain. In fact, in the presidential debates the candidates explicitly agreed that they had no differences on education. But still, both national teachers unions (AFT and NEA) endorsed Obama, and many teacher activists supported the Democratic candidate, whether openly or implicitly. We caught a lot of flack at the time from others who considered themselves leftists but said “now is not the time” to tell unpopular truths up-front, and there were even attempts to censor us for opposing Obama. Eventually, after three-plus years of unrelenting attacks on teachers, it was OK to criticize the administration in “progressive” circles.

But now it’s campaign season again, and with a nod to the “Occupy” movement Obama is talking about “fairness” and taxing millionaires, so liberals are praising him as finally returning to a “bold vision” of social and economic justice, and union bureaucrats are yet again funneling millions to the Democrats. Not everyone is buying it: at a recent hearing on closing schools in New York (at John Dewey HS in South Brooklyn), a man approached a supporter of Class Struggle Education Workers who was distributing a CSEW leaflet calling for mobilizing the power of labor to stop the closings, which are coming straight from the Obama White House. “I really agree with you about Obama,” he said. “Too many people are giving him a pass.” As for the union leadership, he added: “It drives me to despair. Here they are ‘triangulating’ away like Obama” – trying to position themselves so they stay inside the “conversation” about education “reform” – “and meanwhile a freight train is barreling down the track at us.” 

Not since Lyndon Johnson campaigned on the slogan of “no wider war in Asia” as he escalated the war in Vietnam has the country witnessed more hypocritical campaign rhetoric than that being churned out by the Democrats and the labor bureaucracy. Some self-identified “progressives” continue to be in a state of confusion, and many are deeply demoralized with the actions and policies of the Obama White House. Labor is reeling from significant direct hits by the Obama regime. But they are all lining up to support the Democrats again in 2012 as always. The question is, why?

Lesser Evil... Not

Many people fed up with the policies of Obama and his administration nevertheless support the Democrats as the lesser evil. Talking with teachers and students about our political opposition to Obama and the Democrats (see “Top Ten Reasons...,” page 6), CSEW members are often told: “We agree with you about the Democrats, and we don’t even like capitalism all that much, but damn, have you seen the Republicans?”

The Republicans certainly make this appeal to “lesser evilism” attractive. As the entire political landscape of the country shifts ever-rightward in the absence of real political opposition, the Republican Party – since the early 20th century explicitly devoted to the buttoned-up business values of the Chamber of Commerce – now sounds like a raving Ted Nugent and appears to have become the political expression of the far right-wing lunatic fringe. They rail against contraception and want to subject women seeking abortions to invasive vaginal probes; they want to defund Planned Parenthood and dump Title X family planning programs, kill NPR; build moats and electric fences on the border; they reject evolution and much of environmental science; they call Obama a socialist who wants to destroy free-market capitalism (really?); and their candidate, Mitt Romney, wants to appoint doddering wing nut Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Mainstream critics point out that Republican heroes Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon could not find a comfortable place in the Republican Party in its current mood.

It is not surprising that people support what they take to be a lesser political evil. As individuals we go through life choosing lesser evils in avoidance-avoidance selections. It is rational to choose the better of bad options: nuclear or coal, surgery now or later, 8 o’clock classes or late evenings, J train or Z train, Chris Matthews or Wolf Blitzer. As the New York Times (April 19) put it in a recent article about the election campaign in Ohio, “for many voters here choosing between President Obama and Mitt Romney is like trying to decide between liver and brussels sprouts – a selection they would rather not have to make.” We know brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts are good for you. But President Obama is no brussels sprout –and the Democratic Party is no lesser evil.

In fact, in the field of education and many other respects, things have gotten worse under the Democratic administration. We say that not because we believe “the worse, the better.” Obama’s policies are overall a continuation of Bush’s: more war/occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan; Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB, variously known as “no child left untested” and “no vendor left behind”) has been replaced by Obama’s almost identical “Race to the Top” (race to the bottom); bankers are still getting bailed out; teacher-bashing is still the name of the game. At least against Bush and the Republicans there was a pretense of resistance (though not much in reality). Obama has succeeded where the Republicans failed to impose corporate education “reforms” because the teachers unions and other educators have stifled any real opposition out of loyalty to the Democrats.

Of course, there are differences between the two capitalist parties, because historically they appeal to different constituencies and have somewhat different strategies to advance capitalism and imperialism. And on some specific issues, notably abortion and reproductive rights, the Democrats have positioned themselves to contrast with their rivals and win women’s votes. But even on such specific issues much ground has been lost in the overall rightward drift and shift of the political landscape. The actual state of class struggle, not campaign rhetoric, determines results on the ground. Real opportunities to exercise abortion rights, for instance (not to mention free abortion on demand), are increasingly restricted as abortion providers are forced to retreat. Crippled by loyalty to Democrats, independent labor action shrivels, the capacity for working-class struggle weakens, and the political center of gravity moves ever-rightward.

Support – particularly labor support – for the Democratic Party as the lesser evil follows a pattern of continuing defeats that has resulted in the miserable political state we find ourselves in today. From the perspective of historical outcomes and our current capacity to change society for the better, the Democrats are no lesser evil  –  not in some distant utopian future but on the ground today. It is mainly through the Democratic Party, not the Republicans, that working-class and black struggle is strangled. Working-class independence matters today, on the ground, in every arena where working people have a stake in the outcome. As long as working people are hamstrung by their support to the “lesser evil” Democrats, the pattern of defeat will continue. With their political strategy of “fight the right” and their support of Democratic “friends of labor,” U.S. unions have been significantly diminished in membership and effective power.

This particular American version of debilitating class collaboration has its historic origin in the making of the modern Democratic Party with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition of labor, blacks, and openly racist Southern Dixie­crats. The Dixiecrats exited the Party in the latter 1960s as the Civil Rights Movement developed and the Democrats lost their hold on the racist “solid South.” When reformists and radicals talk about pressuring the Democrats, they invoke FDR and the New Deal. The Nation magazine publisher and TV talking head Katrina vanden Heuvel is fond of quoting a reluctant FDR as saying to the disappointed progressives of his day, “make me do it.” She and her magazine regularly call upon a mythical “mass movement” to pressure Barack Obama to the liberal left.

New Deal or No Deal

FDR is the hero in customary liberal and reformist fairy tales. According to the story, Once Upon a Time when a Great Depression ravaged the Land and even white men rode the rails, a Great and kindly, wise patrician Ruler arose who cared so much about his people he gave them a New Deal. Thus he created prosperity out of economic devastation. The Great Leader slew the multi-headed banks, subdued the awful corporations, made possible union organizing, and reshaped the government to serve working people and the poor. And so the People lived Happily Ever After until one dark day when the Usurper, Ronald Reagan, declared the End of the New Deal. The People are waiting for another Hero and the return of the New Deal. And so it goes…

This myth has little to offer the historically-inclined or those who like their history evidence-based. Roosevelt’s New Deal was instituted not to save working people, but to save capitalism. (Nor did it do away with mass unemployment  – it took World War II to do that.) It largely excluded African American and Latino workers. Its policies were used mainly to divert and undermine a surge of labor organizing. Under the Wagner Act, for instance, the state legally codified its power to suppress labor struggle. The Wagner Act is the legal foundation for New York’s anti-labor Taylor Law and other such laws that sanction capitalist state intervention into labor struggle. Most important, the New Deal forged the coalition between labor and the Democratic Party that still shapes the constricted contours of U.S. political life for working people.

FDR and the politics of the New Deal are not a source for the solution of what ails the working class. The historical collaboration between the capitalist Democratic Party and the labor movement forged during the New Deal represents the centrality of the problem – a political collaboration and partial institutional integration of a major capitalist party and the union movement, established through the continuing class collaboration of the labor bureaucrats, that layer of class traitors pioneer U.S. socialist, Daniel De Leon, dubbed the “labor lieutenants of capital.” More than any other political reality, this historical collaboration between class antagonists answers the question: How did we get to this wretched political state we are in today? Failing to break with the Democrats means that it can only get worse. 

Beyond Tweedledee and Dumb

One might have thought that the current economic crisis of capitalism and the greatest income inequality since the 1920s should have driven a widespread labor, left, and black militant uprising. Instead the U.S. got the “Tea Party.” The recent populist “Occupy” activities attracted many disaffected young people, but a movement based on the 99% vs. the 1% is a statistical reality but a political mirage, blurring the reality of class divisions. Without a coherent, explicit class-struggle political program and leadership to oppose the capitalist system, oppositional activities are not sustainable. There can be no effective political opposition in the U.S. so long as workers, blacks, and the oppressed find their political expression in the Democratic Party, or the Working Families Party, or the Greens, or the Republicans or other capitalist political parties. 

From the point of view of capitalist rule, the genius of the U.S. two-party system is that it restricts choice and constrains political discourse. In school, children are taught that this system accounts for the remarkable stability of U.S. constitutional government. You may choose this or that business party. Popular ideology works full time to marginalize other possibilities and seeks to contract the circumference of political action. Politics is defined narrowly as electoral politics and elections are defined as democracy. As played in the U.S., presidential elections are a TV reality show, a political version of American Idolwhere the audience gets worked up and then let down, and the outcome for continued capitalist rule is assured in advance. 

But the rigged game set up by the two capitalist parties is not the only game in town. Unlike the election game, there is plenty of real political action to be had. Instead of wasting energy and resources in Democratic Party election campaigns, unions could rebuild with campaigns to organize the unorganized, mobilize for struggle, and defend labor rights and the oppressed. For education activists, particularly in NYC, there are compelling struggles to defend closing schools (which we cover in this issue) and public education generally, and to oppose the semi-privatization of CUNY. But the single most important thing to do politically is to break the pattern of defeat that results from clinging to the Democrats. Put our energy instead into building a class-struggle working-class party that could give political expression to the revolutionary potential of the working class as it fights for a workers government. That is the mission of the CSEW.

In this endeavor, we claim the mantle of political realism against those who support the Democrats as a “lesser evil.” For those seeking a meaningful way forward amidst an all-sided social crisis, it is not realistic to support the Democratic Party. One popular definition of crazy is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It is also less than a scientific disposition. And as Marx liked to point out, to be radical means getting to the root of the matter. Capitalism is at the root of each aspect of the increasingly critical situation we find ourselves in; it has to be overturned, with the working class itself taking power.

In the first issue of Class Struggle (November-December, 2008) amidst a virtual tidal wave of liberal Obamamania on college campuses, the CSEW expressed its opposition to the popular Democratic candidate and pointed the way forward to the possibility of a more realistic future:

“The fight for the political independence of the working class is the touchstone for revitalizing the workers movement – and each one of the urgent tasks of defending labor and the oppressed today. This demands an active fight for a class-struggle workers party com­mitted to the fight for a workers government. This understanding distinguishes the Class Struggle Education Workers from all those who seek to ‘pressure’ Obama into ‘changing the priorities’  of U.S. imperialism….

“Only from this standpoint is it possible…to unchain the power of labor against attacks on living standards, jobs, and basic democratic liberties; to mobilize workers’ strikes against imperialist wars; to wage an uncompromising struggle for black freedom and the rights of immigrants, women, gays and lesbians, and all the oppressed, and to stand in genuine solidarity with working people throughout the world.”

– by Charlie Brover