The left needs to come to its senses about the 2004 election. Some thoughtful analysis has appeared on ZNet and elsewhere, but it seems that too much commentary is coming to reflect the regrettable polarization into a “more-radical-than-thou” camp and a “more-sensible-than-thou” camp. It’s a real shame, because there is a great need for serious strategic analysis today, and the often dogmatic and sectarian quibbling over Kerry is a real obstacle to creating the kind of unified left that is so necessary in the United States.
The Anti-Kerry Camp
I have a lot of respect for Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo; I think the attacks on them as egomaniacs and fanatics are simply rude, and the attempts to keep them off the ballot are disgusting and undemocratic. At the same time, I am extremely skeptical about the usefulness of their campaign. It is telling that many Marxist-Leninist organizations support Nader/Camejo, combining Lenin’s authoritarian vanguardism with what he himself described as the “infantile disorder†of ignoring concrete questions of political power. The fact that Nader/Camejo are running independently instead of focusing on building a grassroots third party seems to indicate that their ticket reproduces what could perhaps be termed “infantile Leninism.â€
It is clear that some people are voting Nader/Camejo in an honorable attempt to remain committed to their principles; however, questions of principle cannot be divorced from questions of strategy. We know Ralph Nader will not win, and I think we can agree that John Kerry is less likely than Bush to bring on a nuclear apocalypse. In principle, that is good enough reason to hope he gets into office, but it goes further. If we don’t have to try to prevent unilateral aggressive wars, as Bush is more likely to keep doing in a second term, we can bring our attention to the military-industrial complex and US imperialism throughout the world. If we don’t have to fight the criminalization of abortion, we can fight for reasonable sex education, welfare for women doing the hard job of raising children, and the rights of all women to have control over their bodies and their lives. If we don’t have to halt attacks on affirmative action, we can work against the long-standing system of economic apartheid and the cultural suppression of people of color. The list goes on.
The Kerry Camp
Many progressives understand this, and urge us to support Kerry, but I find that they often run into another problem. Michael Moore’s recent article is a good example (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=6286%20). Moore gives an effective critique of the media and left pessimism, and points out the importance of getting Bush out of office—but nowhere does he mention the importance of building a movement beyond the election.
Let me say up front that I admire Michael Moore. He has brilliantly brought a left perspective to a mass audience and in that sense he is a model for activists. But his rather meek request that Kerry return to his hippie roots, placed next to his demand that we not criticize him, is a very dangerous move. The reason that electing Kerry will have a long-term benefit for the American progressive movement is the likelihood that more space will be opened up for creating meaningful social change. But this will only happen if we show him that Americans are angry and are willing to fight AGAINST him—not by stating openly, as many progressives have done, that we’ll vote for him as long as his name isn’t George W. Bush. Knowing that Michael Moore and the rest of the progressive community will vote for him anyway, he is free to ignore us and pander to the corporate interests that fund him.
There is a great danger in simply dissolving our differences with John Kerry, because life will go on after November. Will activism? I hope so, but the current rhetoric makes me afraid that once Kerry has won, people will simply celebrate and return to comfortable complacence. Teresa Heinz Kerry came to speak at Penn State University and attracted a crowd of 3,000. But the Human Rights Film Series, a grassroots effort by and for Penn State’s activist community, is lucky to get 100 people to come to its screenings, even after heavy advertising with limited resources. Surely many of the people who came for Kerry are outraged at Bush’s extremism and have earnestly progressive inclinations—where are they when more progressive events take place? Moore and other progressives understand that we should take the advantages of a Kerry presidency for granted; but without focusing on building an anti-capitalist movement beyond the election, we will sell ourselves far too short.
A Common Problem
The fundamental problem here is that both sides fall into the same trap of assigning elections much more importance than they are due. Yes, Bush stole the election last time, and yes, corporations have too much power over politics; these are both important issues. But the real problem with our electoral system is that it reduces political decision-making to choosing bureaucrats to make decisions for us; and in the end, elections function as an ideological tool to delude us into thinking that we have any control over the political process. The low level of voter participation shows that most people haven’t been fooled.
So until we can create a genuinely participatory democracy—which building a third party and effecting electoral reforms would be minor steps towards—let’s just take the elections at their face value. It’s impossible to make any real or important changes with an election, whether it is John Kerry or Ralph Nader or Peter Kropotkin on the ballot; that’s not what elections are for. The only reasonable approach for radicals to take is to hold our noses and try to prevent the kind of damage another Bush term will do, and focus our energy on what really matters: building a grassroots movement in the United States by moving politics out of the polls and onto the streets. As both Naomi Klein (http://www.nologo.org/newsite/detaild.php?ID=397) and Ted Glick (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=87&ItemID=6288) have pointed out, another Bush term would make movement-building extremely difficult. But both getting Bush out of office and effective movement-building require that we criticize the Democrats with honesty and articulate our goals with intellectual rigor.
Left Failures
There is a further complication here—while we debate about Kerry and Nader, Bush may well be winning the election! Although poll results are undoubtedly distorted, and the corporate media has managed to overwhelm its viewers with fear and misinformation, we still have to reckon with the fact that a significant portion of the left’s natural constituency—the working class—supports Bush and other right-wing politicians.
Facing a similar situation, Wilhelm Reich tried to understand how the fascists took power in Germany. He wrote, “While we presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being.” And while we spend all our time meticulously dissecting in exactly which speech Bush lied about what, the American right has been able to convince the American working class that they have its interests at heart by appealing to issues that affect people in their everyday lives: family, religion, culture, security, morality, etc. Instead of letting the right monopolize personal life, we should show that a revolution can extend to the way we interact; we should reject the culture of alienation, hierarchy and conformity, and build one based on solidarity, diversity and freedom.
We have also allowed the right to push the issue of capitalism out of public discourse, and we have not effectively advanced an alternative. Economic issues are perhaps the area in which the American people are furthest to the left. Business Week polls show that 95% of the population thinks business has too much power. Two-thirds of American adults think that Marx’s slogan “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is in the Constitution. But we have not adequately emphasized organizing among working-class people, building a radical labor movement, and spreading and practicing concrete proposals like participatory economics (http://www.parecon.org).
No wonder the right has so effectively convinced people to vote against their interests. If we want to reach out to Bush voters—and we must—we need to demonstrate that another world is possible by confronting capitalism and remembering that the personal is political.
Telling the Truth and Winning the Struggle
Antonio Gramsci wrote, “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a…revolutionary act.” So let us, as revolutionaries, be truthful to ourselves and the American people. Buying into the corporate media’s empty debates and ignoring the issues that leftists should pay attention to makes us seem like hypocrites. People know that politicians are corrupt bastards; that’s why they don’t vote! If like MoveOn.org and Common Dreams we pretend that John Kerry is the hope for humanity, people will not trust us. But if we can effectively argue that getting Bush out of office is part of a wider program of what Andre Gorz called “non-reformist reforms” directed towards radical change in the totality of social life, we will demonstrate that we are committed to the issues that matter to the majority of the population. Why is there so much resistance to being honest about this? Surely Michael Moore does not think the American people are too stupid to understand that we can vote for Kerry and still struggle against the corrupt system that he represents. Surely we are all committed to building critical consciousness and creating a broader base for radical politics.
I am confident that most of us are part of the left because we want to struggle for a new society, a society that realizes the promises of freedom and justice. Getting Bush out of office is important, but we can work for that without getting distracted from the more important work we have to do. As Gramsci said, “It is necessary with bold spirit and in good conscience to save civilization… Are we not ready?”
Asad Haider is a Senior in High School, and an activist, in State College, PA. He can be reached at [email protected]
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