Forget the Democrats, Build The Mass Movements!

by Roy Rollin

In the aftermath of the elections, much of the mainstream left remains
in a state of despair or disbelief over Bush’s victory. Many are
hoping against hope that some scandal of epic proportions will emerge
out of Ohio. Others contemplate packing their bags and moving to
Canada. Not a few of the liberal literati have taken to writing off
most of America’s population as a bunch of religious rednecks who got
the government they deserved by not heeding their enlightened advice
on who to vote for. However, the real tragedy was not the defeat of
pro-war and pro-globalization John Kerry, but the demobilization and
demoralization of the anti-war and global justice movements that the
liberal left’s perspective of Anybody But Bush (ABB) was predicated upon.

Early on the leaders of the anti-war movement decided to go with
whichever Democrat was considered the most acceptable alternative to
Bush in the eyes of "swing state" voters. What that meant was that the
"Anybody But Bush" had to be the anybody most like Bush, i.e., John
Kerry. Only the reformists were so effective in their herding of
anti-war activists into the Kerry campaign Š and off of the streets,
that the Democrats didn¹t even see any good reasons to throw any
crumbs their way. After all, who else were they going to vote for? And
since the ABBers did such a good job of taking the wind out of the
anti-war movement’s sails, the ruling rich saw no need to employ a
Kerry to do so and chose to stick with Bush instead.

Back in the 1960s, Malcolm X warned activists that when they put the
Democrats first, the Democrats put them last. Ralph Nader, the
bete-noir of the ABBers, more recently reminded radicals that when
they get taken for granted, they get taken. Instead of heeding such
sound advice, the left chose to give Kerry a blank check to spend
however he saw fit, just as he and the other Democrats had given Bush
the same free hand when it came to waging his wars. Rather than
mobilizing the masses of anti-war activists when the warmongers were
on the ropes in the wake of Torturegate and the uprisings last April,
the leadership of the main antiwar groups like UFPJ chose to channel
growing discontent against the war into the dead-end of "lesser evil"
politics under the guise of "beating Bush." Thus they built one large
demonstration during the Republican convention, replacing opposition
to the war with opposition to "the Bush agenda."

Likewise they chose to ignore the opportunity of bringing the anti-war
movement closer to the labor movement when they did nothing to build
the Million Worker March, which attempted to unite the struggle
against the war with the struggle for jobs and health care. Instead,
UFPJ, which had taken the trouble to endorse the rally, sent its
activists into ³swing states² to ring doorbells for John Kerry, who
was neither against the war nor for jobs or health care. The AFL-CIO
leadership was no better. It sought to sabotage the march from the
get-go as a ³diversion² from the main task of putting a Democrat in
the White House Š even if that Democrat had supported GATT, NAFTA, the
WTO and the abolition of welfare and was for a $7.00 an hour minimum
wage Š two years from now! Indeed the AFL-CIO, whose ranks now account
for a paltry 13% of the American workforce, spent far more of its
time, energy and resources upon the Kerry campaign than it has on any
recent organizing drives or strike support, let alone taking on
notorious non-union outfits like Walmart.

In exchange for all this, they got a candidate who promised, every
time he got a chance to do so, to exceed the bumbling Bush in
bloodthirstiness when it came to waging the so-called ³War on Terror.²
In case any one other than the ABBers wasn¹t listening, Kerry made
sure that he used the word ³kill² in every one of the debates to drive
home the point. The irony of the liberal left¹s unconditional
surrender to the pro-war Democrats was not lost on conservative
commentator even if those of The Nation or the rest of the
³progressive² publications that lined up behind Kerry failed to see
it. Perhaps that was because their vision was blurred by their heads
being so far up the Democrats posteriors.

That¹s not to say the reformists failed to fight. Like the Democrats
they tailed after, they chose to "beat Bush" by going after the main
enemy, Ralph Nader. Once again building a political party independent
of both bosses¹ parties got put on the back burner since this was the
most "important" election since Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and
Bob Dole were running. For their part, the Democrats made it clear
that they would rather lose the election than lose their captive
constituencies to Nader. So they spent millions of dollars, and, more
importantly, forced Nader to do the same in opposing their efforts, in
getting the latter knocked off the ballot in as many states as
possible. So desperate were the Democrats to maintain their vice-like
grip on working people¹s votes that they even went after small fry
socialist candidates in some states.

One guy that they didn¹t go after in the key "swing state" of Florida
was George Bush, where the Republicans filed late and could have been
technically disqualified if they had made a case of it. Of course,
they didn¹t make much of case against Bush¹s Jim Crowing thousands of
Black people out of their votes there in 2000 either. And as soon as
the pundits had pronounced Bush the winner in Ohio, Kerry rushed to
surrender, instead urging "unity" behind Bush and his assault on
Fallujah. Like Gore four years ago, Kerry had no desire to unleash any
popular mobilizations against electoral fraud, which might get beyond
the control of the Democrats and embarrass American "democracy" in the
eyes of the world. After all, that might jeopardize the legitimacy of
the "war on terror," which Kerry, no less than Bush, sees as the key
vehicle for exporting "freedom" (or is it "free" enterprise) around
the world.

Eugene V. Debs once said that he¹d rather vote for something he wanted
and not get it. The ABB left, on the other hand, preferred to vote for
something they didn¹t want and got it regardless of which capitalist
candidate came out on top. In Star Wars, Yoda told Luke Skywalker to
honor those who fight for what they believe in. The liberal left
prefers to pretend to believe in what others fight for while at the
same time they fight against those who actually do fight, like Nader.
Just as the ABBers accepted Kerry as the only game in town, so too did
Kerry accept Bush¹s "war on terror" as the only acceptable parameters
to campaign within. Thus whatever differences there were between the
two were over how to better conduct imperialist aggression around the
world and enforce austerity and repression at home to pay for it.
Kerry and Edwards were as much for the PATRIOT ACT as were Bush and
Cheney. Nor were they about to live up to Bush¹s charges that they
were tax and spend liberals. All they promised was trickle down
Reaganomics, i.e., more corporate welfare for the rich, if only the
latter would create jobs or health care, since any increase in
government spending on social services was out of the question.

While the more naive amongst the lesser evilists may have hoped that
Kerry was just pulling a fast one by faking to the right, the fact of
the matter is that both sets of capitalism¹s candidates have the same
program because they work for the same employer, if only on different
sides of the street. For the past thirty years, Republicans and
Democrats have taken turns in dishing out layoffs and cutbacks at home
while waging wars of imperial aggression abroad as American capitalism
looks to maintain itself as the unchallenged master of the universe.
And even though all of capitalism¹s candidates blatantly stated their
desire to do more of the same, the liberal intelligentsia continued to
look for a lesser evil. So who was really stupid then? For their part,
Bush and his buddies haven¹t wasted any time in citing their victory
as a "mandate" for more attacks on working people at home and abroad.
No doubt Bush counts on the Democrats rolling over for him for the
next four years the same way they did during the previous four. The
real question is whether or not the left will continue to roll over
for the Democrats. The Bush gang will create many more enemies for
itself here when it attacks workers living standards, just as it is
now doing in Iraq with its attack on Fallujah. In other words, there
will be no lack of opportunities for the left to organize around.

We can start by reviving the anti-war movement in response to the
current carnage in Iraq. There already exists massive anti-war
sentiment throughout the country; at least 50% of the population is
opposed to the war and 80% of those who voted for Kerry did so because
they, unlike their candidate, were against the war. There are
thousands of antiwar and global justice activists out there who,
rather than move to Canada, would rather stand and fight right here.
They may have mistakenly believed that putting Kerry in office was a
way to open up space for such a fight, when, in fact, it was a way of
putting off that fight. Now there are no more excuses. The question is
what kind of fight there will be.

Will the left be content to wait until those who betrayed the anti-war
movement to the Democrats put away their Kerry crying towels and do
something, or will we at least try to start something in the here and
now while American GIs and Iraqi civilians are dying in the streets of
Fallujah? And when the big guns of lesser evil liberalism do decide to
mobilize, usually when they see that the left has beaten them to it,
will we once again surrender to them just as they surrendered to the
Democrats? Will we allow the reformists to abandon them out of fear of
alienating the Democrats and their "swing state" voters, or will we
reach out to the most oppressed and exploited as allies by linking
their struggles to the fight against war?

Will we build an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist pole of
attraction within the mass movement that can challenge the reformists
for hegemony so that we won¹t have to repeat the same debacle in 2008
– only with a Democrat even more right wing than Kerry? That means
picking up where the Nader campaign left off, by building an
independent party of, by and for working people.

Roy Rollin attends the College of Staten Island (CUNY)