Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 21:53:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Political Strategy Is Not Political Principle



I don't draw a hard line between princiole and strategy. It's a fixed
principle for me that the emancipation of the working classes must be the
work of the working class themselves, but what that amounts to in practice
very much depends on the circumstances. Leo doesn't hold to the particular principle I do, since he doesn't
believe that class has any particular importance, and I don't even know
whether he aims towards a goal of worker's self-rule or socialism. But I
do, so I tailor my actions towards that end.

Now in my experience, both on the basis of work that I have done in
practice, organizing both with and apart from the Democrats, and also in
theory, with research into the nature of the Democratic Party and its role
in the labor and socialist movements, ot its effect on them, I have been
dead to the conclusion that the DP is a dead end not only for socialists
but also for people who care about progressive values. 

This doesn't mean that there are no circumstances in which I would vote
for or work for a Democrat. In fact I have done so recently; a friend of
mine is a progressive DP school board member, and I worked on her
campaign, stuffed envelopes. But school board elections here are
technically nonpartisan. If the opposition was bad enough I'd support--and
by "support" I mean not that I'd take a generally positive attitude
towards, which I wouldn't, but that I'd actively work on the campaign
of--a Democrat who was significantly better. I'd have worked on Edward's
camaign in Louisiana against David Duke. ("Vote for the crook.") There are
real lesser evils. 

In general, though, my experience has been that the DP is not a lesser
enough evil and it keeps getting less lesser all the time. I made the
point about Clinton being worse than Nixon, which Leo concedes. He says I
just don't understand that the times are different. Nixon was as
comparatively good as he was because of the mass movements of the 60s.
Quite right. So my answer is, we have to rebuild movements like that to
pressure the Clintons to be like Nixon, God help for having to say that.
And more to the point, tobuild our own organizations so taht in the end we
don't have to rely on Clintons and Nixons, who are our enemies. 

Leo dismisses all extra-major party political activity as mere
syndicalism, politically irrelevant. This may be because we have sonewhat
different goals. If all one wants to do is win concrete and limited
reforms, there _might_ be some sense to Leo's position, although I doubt
it. Even there, it seems to me that if the DP can take us for granted,
they will, as they have done with labor, and will sell us out while
playing to the right, as they have. In fact the DP has been a pretty lousy
place to seek reforms of late. I think reforms are best won by raising
hell and making the others idea--because the DP is the other side--come to
heel. Lyndon Johnson once told an adviser who recommended using nuclaer
weapons in Vietnam that there were several hundred tjousand people outside
the White House fence who'd swarm over and kill him if he did. I think
that's the attitude we want from Democrats: terrified. 

But I want more than reforms. I do want reforms, but I also want working
class self organization. I want the workers to have their own resources,
including their own parties. We will not get this by forgoing independent
political organization and working to build the Democratic Party. Leo
doesn't want this goal, or thinks it's impossible and utopian, and so he
doesn't care about this argument. He thinks theDemicrats are just the only
game in town. If that's so, and it is in part, I think we have to move out
of town and start a new game. As I've explained, this doesn't mean quitting
practical politics. It means widenuing our conception of politucs beyond
the election of candidates to building movementsand ultimately parties.

> prospects of success and advance." This means, for starters, that I am not
> very sympathetic to abstentionist and syndicalist views of politics, which
> leave the political and electoral stage up to the established, dominant
> political forces while they build for that future day when a "principled" left
> presence will make itself felt. 

This narrows the political to the electorally possible, and then the
election of candidates, A great deal of my political life has been spent
on ballot initiatives, some winning, some losing, but all political. In
1984 I helped run a Nuclear Free Zone campaign in Ann Arbor taht would
have made it a violation of a city ordinance--a crime, punishable by a
fine--to do classified nuclear weapons research. Of course it was legally
hopeless--there is this small detail about the supremacy clause of the
Constitution--but it was effective even though we lost 2-1. The other side
spent a quarter ofa million dollars to our 12,000 and we still gor a
third of the vote; the campauign dominated the 1984 election headlines in
Detroit and statewide as well as in Ann Arbor, and it was a much better
way to spend our time than campaigning for Mondale, who supported the
weapons programs we wanted cancelled. That's politics. The Freeze, in
1982, we actually won. 

In contrast, my experience with the Jackson campaigns was a
disappointment. I worked quite hard on these, more in 88 than in 84, when
I had my hands full of the NFZ, but what did we get from it? Not even a
meaningless platform plank at the convention. Likewise with the DSA city
council types I helped to elect to city coucil in AA, who spent all their
time expalining that politics is the art of the possible and that was why
they couldn't do anything we wanted. Etc. 

Such apolitical 'politics' are the best
> guarantee that the day of the New Jerusalem will never come, since they are
> unable to intervene in politics in any meaningful way.

That's what Roy Wilkins and the NAACP said to King.

> on the left is to extend the realm of the possible in the direction of
> progress, rather than reaction. When that means intervening within the
> Democratic Party, you do it; when that means that there is a reasonable
> prospect of building a social or radical democratic political party to its
> left that could replace it, you do that.

But of course the latter never is within the realm of possibility, is it Leo?

> (When I was a graduate student in Canada, I was involved in the Canadian
> social-democratic party, the NDP, as this was the place from which one could
> make serious political interventions at that time. Pretty much the same
> arguments that Justin makes against working with Democrats were made against
> working in the NDP. 

There is a slight difference between the two parties.

Now I would trade in the Democrats for an American NDP in
> a second, but that's not they way that politics works. We can hope for a Labor
> Party all we want, but in the absence of any real potential for one to develop
> at this point in American history, we are whistling political Dixie. Certainly
> one did not develop at far more propitious moments in our past, for a whole
> host of reasons including the nature of the American political, two-party
> system which Justin just ignores. 

Oh, I could talka bout it at length. I have no great hopes for the medium
term development of a third party. That's why I work in the movements,
mainly these days, the labor movement.

> It is also a sweeping and shallow sense of history that sees nothing in the
> past sixty years of American political history but evidence of the need for
> eschewing all political and electoral interventions.

Note again the collapse of "political" into "electoral" and of "electoral"
into "party-candidate" politics. I don't advocate abstaining from politics.
I just think that the politics Leo wants us to intervene in are hollow and
the interventions have to be of a different sort.

 Might we not consider the
> role that left-wing abstentionism, at its height in 1968, played in the
> election of Nixon, and the start of the long decline of the left that has yet
> to be broken?

We have a different assessment of 1968, I guess; most of "the left" worked
for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy and then help its nose and voted for
Hubert. A few high profile radicals played a sort of Whole World Is
Watching Drama, but this wasn't then nor is it now the main tendency on
the left. Nor do I think that Humphrey would have been that much better,
nor that the forces underlying Nixon's election were mainly due to left
abstentionism.

 Might we not take stock of how the CP's walk out of the New Deal
> coalition and into the doomed Progressive Party helped isolate it and set the
> stage for McCarthyism?

In 1948, he says, the CP should have stayed in the Democratic Party that
had just instituted the Loyalty Oath program. The CP did a lot of dumb
things, one of which was joining the New Deal coalition in the first
place, but this is seriously crazy. 

 Might we not consider the consequences of the cavalier
> attitude many of us had toward the possibility of a Reagan victory? How many
> times have we heard that always still-born prophecy -- "After Eisenhower
> (Nixon, Reagan), us"? Independence now, independence forever" is a nationalist
> slogan, not a political strategy.

Oh, wonderful. Now I'm a Thaelmannite. I have never said, After Hitler, or
whoever, us. I don't think that making things worse helps make thuings
better. But that's one reason I don;t support Democrats. They make things
worse, not better,. And working for the means that we don't work on the
organizations and movements that do help make things better. 
 
> My point regarding the numerous socialist and Marxist trade union leaders who
> abandoned the idea of an independent socialist and working class political
> party was not that they were great statesmen of labor, or any of the other
> shallow positions Justin imputed to me. Rather, I think that in general they
> acted on the basis of pretty reasonable political calculations of what was
> politically possible at the moment of history they made that move, and hence,
> of what political intervention from the left with reasonable chances of
> success looked like.

But this is just to say what you deny saying, that these were wise and
reflective statesmen who madea  sensible choice. You don't resoond to myt
analysis, taht this choice, while sincere, was colored and largely caused
by their narriow interests in the labor bureaucracy. They wanted to be
respectable, a fatal mistake.  

 The fact that successful left trade union leaders took
> this path again and again, and that those who did not and saw the form of
> political intervention as a matter of principle ended up in the politically
> irrelevant worlds of the Daniel DeLeons, William Z. Fosters, and such, should
> give a little pause. 

Yes indeed, power remarks those who support it. The left union leaders
were savagely purged and banned from the unions under Taft-Hartley. And
these successful union leaders bequeated us the mob-dominated Teamsters,
which my comrades, mired in political irrelevance according to you, have
struggled so long and with some success to reclaim for the workers. John
Lewis went over the Dems and gave us Tony Boyle. Who's being unrealstic now?

--Justin




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