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The Michigan Socialist | Features |
In-Depth - Election 2004
A 'workers' White House?'
The promise and reality
of the Kucinich campaign
By BEN BURGIS
The Michigan Socialist
 AS
SOCIALISTS, we argue that politicians representing the political
machines of the business owning classes can never be relied on to
carry out the interests of working people.
Rather than supporting the “less evil” Democrats
over the “more evil” Republicans, we try to build an independent
working-class alternative to fight for a better society.
After all, the Democratic and Republican parties
are joined at the wallet to a common agenda, within the bounds of
which only very limited disagreements over secondary questions are
every really tolerated.
That is to say, for example (to pick the
difference most frequently cited by supporters of lesser evil
politics), that the debates within and between the two major parties
sometimes cover the rather limited question of whether or not women
should be given the “choice” between aborting fetuses before they
develop into children they can’t afford to raise or raising them in
poverty.
However, no mainstream Democrat or Republican
wants to give women a real choice by providing both free abortions
on demand, as part of a system of universal health care, and, on the
other hand, massive publicly-funded child support so that poor women
who choose to have children can do so without further impoverishing
themselves.
The debates within and between these two parties
rarely touch on the basic shared premises of empire abroad, economic
austerity at home and a systematic prioritization of corporate
profits over the human needs and democratic rights of the majority
of the populace in all spheres.
From this perspective, the presidential campaign
of Congressman Dennis Kucinich is an extremely interesting
development.
Kucinich talks about removing the United States
from NAFTA, GATT and the WTO.
He calls for an end to the American occupation of
Iraq, and openly acknowledges that the primary interest of the U.S.
in Iraq is in Iraq’s primary export, a fluid black substance whose
name has three letters in it.
He argues that if the provide sector is unable to
provide full employment, then the federal government has a moral
duty to do so through massive public works programs.
He believes that the living wage should be the
national minimum wage, and he says that as President he will issue
executive orders preventing heavy-industry manufacturers from
re-locating factories from the United States to the third world on
“national security” grounds.
Emphasizing his plans to use presidential power in
this benevolent sort of way, the congressman’s campaign materials
often say that, under a Kucinich administration, we would have what
he calls a “workers’ White House.”
Needless to say, none of these positions are music
to the ears of corporate America.
Doubtless, many independent left-wingers who
supported Kucinich’s friend and fellow progressive-populist Ralph
Nader in 2000 have put their hopes in the Kucinich campaign as a way
to aggressively push their agenda within the “rules of the game,” so
as not to risk another four years of George W. Bush.
While some doctrinaire radicals might say that
he’s “really not that different” from the traditional two-party
consensus outlook, as a matter of basic honesty we should admit that
(unlike John Kerry, for example) he is not just “Bush-Lite.”
Were he to become the Democratic nominee, the
country would see a presidential race revolving around a sharp clash
of policy programs to a greater extent than has been the case in
living memory.
Does this mean that Socialists should be
supporting the Kucinich campaign?
 |
| A young
Dennis Kucinich talking with his father, a Teamster truck driver
in Cleveland. Kucinich’s working-class background is the basis
for much of his talk about a “workers’ White House.”
Unfortunately, all that talk means nothing as long as he
continues to serve the capitalist class. |
IN ORDER TO answer that question, we need to look
very closely at two things.
First of all, what is Kucinich’s exact political
outlook? What differentiates his politics from ours, and how
important are these differences?
Secondly, what is his role within the Democratic
Party? How does his presidential bid fit in with any kind of larger
strategy for bringing about social change?
The first important point to be made about his
political perspective — which is the same basic progressive-populist
worldview which is also, for example, the dominant political
perspective within the Green Party — is that this perspective leads
its adherence to share at least some of the same short-term goals
that socialists advocate.
Certainly, we agree with him that every one has a
right to a job with a living wage, that health care should be
provided free to every one as a matter of basic human rights and
that “free trade” agreements that hand over power from people’s
elected representatives to unelected an unaccountable corporate
monstrosities like “WTO trade judges” are unacceptable.
On the foreign policy front, it is true that Rep.
Kucinich’s stances are sometimes confused and inconsistent.
For example, he voted in favor of the
post-September 11 “blank check” resolution to allow the President to
respond militarily in any way he deemed fit to the Sept. 11
atrocities.
He has since denounced President Bush’s massive
bombing campaign against civilian targets in Afghanistan.
If Kucinich truly thought that this would not be
part of the way that President Bush utilized the resolution that he
voted for, at best this reflected a dangerous level of naïveté about
the way that the world works.
Similarly, while his persistent opposition both to
the original invasion of Iraq and to the continued presence of
American troops there is certainly admirable — as is honesty about
the economic motives underlying the war — his “UN in, U.S. out” plan
ignores vital points about the way the world works.
The fact is that the UN has never been anything
but a convenient tool for the machinations of great powers and that
in the past “UN-led” military adventures (e.g., Korea) have been as
vicious as “U.S.-led” versions (e.g., Vietnam).
Indeed, the UN has already been a target of the
Iraqi resistance, and it is not hard to see why — by the UN’s own
estimates, well over 1 million Iraqis, disproportionately children,
died as a direct result of U.S.-backed “UN sanctions” between the
first and second Gulf Wars.
Still, at the end of the day, it must be admitted
that he is more or less the only Democratic candidate whose policy
positions point — in however confused and inconsistent a manner — in
the direction of folding up the U.S. empire and bringing home the
vast legions of troops dispatched all over the world to police that
empire.
So there is a large agreement between the stance
of the Socialist Party and the stance of Kucinich’s supporters on
that issue as well.
THAT SAID, there is a very real sense in which
none of Rep. Kucinich’s reform proposals go far enough.
Under capitalism, most of the decision-making
structure is not up for election, and the deeply undemocratic
socio-economic power structures at the base of American society
would still be in place under a Kucinich administration.
Most of us would still be forced to rent ourselves
out to an employer as wage slaves in order to make a living, and we
would continue to have little to no democratic control over most
spheres of society.
Most real power would still be concentrated in a
very small slice of the population — wealthy stockholders, CEOs and
so forth — that would continue to live off of the sweat of others.
Similarly, the terms of political debate would
continue to be set by a tiny handful of media barons who share the
worldview of their fellow corporate oligarchs.
We are, after all, living in a country where every
single privately owned cable channel is owned by one of four
mega-corporations (indeed, if buyout plans already in the works go
through, the number may be reduced to three by the time this article
goes to print) and the situation in radio and print media is not
much better.
Similarly, the mechanisms of political power were
designed to serve the interests of that segment of the population,
and have deeply undemocratic aspects encoded within them.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution explicitly
believed that “while the people are the only source of political
legitimacy, they should not be allowed to govern.”
This is why they put in place all kinds of
mechanisms — the separation between the legislative and executive
branches, “judicial review,” long presidential terms, an electoral
college, etc. — to shield the wise men who know what’s best for the
people (chiefly “men of property” because they have a “stake in
society”) from the “passing whims” of the “ignorant” masses.
None of this will change under a Kucinich
administration, because the congressman’s most ambitious plans do
not go beyond “legal” legislative reformism within the bounds of the
current social, political and economic system. In other words,
rhetoric aside, it will still be their White House, not ours.
So if (at least for those who care about
democracy) the progressive-populist vision espoused by politicians
like Kucinich and Nader does not go far enough, there is also a
troubling sense in which it goes too far.
Ironically, Kucinich’s own political history is a
perfect illustration of this problem.
 |
| Dennis
Kucinich, in his early years, outlining his agenda for bringing
civilization to Washington. (Just kidding about the meaning.
Honestly, we really don’t know the story behind this picture,
but it comes from
his
Congressional website.) |
BACK IN 1978, when Kucinich was the mayor of
Cleveland, the city’s banks demanded that he sell Cleveland’s
municipally owned electricity system, Muny Light, to its
privately-owned competitor, in which those same banks had a
financial interest.
Mayor Kucinich stuck to his progressive principles
and refused, causing the banks to retaliate viciously, defaulting on
the city’s credit and plunging Cleveland into a massive financial
crisis.
In the misery resulting from this, Kucinich went
down to a devastating defeat in the next election.
Fast forward to the year 2003, when presidential
candidate Kucinich was interviewed in Rolling Stone.
The interviewer brought up the battle over Muny
Light, and quite reasonably asked the candidate why he thought he
would get away with his reform plans as president.
Wouldn’t corporate America in general fight back
just as viciously against such reforms as full employment at a
living wage, which would, after all, devastate the bargaining power
of companies with regard to their employees, as the banks of
Cleveland fought back against his disobedience to their
privatization scheme?
What made him think that financial interests
adversely affected by Kucinich’s program would fail to break his
Presidency as ruthlessly as they broke his Mayoralty?
This is a damn good question for any one who knows
a little 20th-century history.
The last several decades have been littered with
the bodies of the followers of reformists elected leaders in such
places as Guatemala and Chile who tried to govern in a way that
displeased the United Fruit Company and other American corporations.
Some of the most brutal dictatorships in the third
world — such as the Suharto regime in Indonesia, which carried out
in proportional terms the largest genocide since Hitler’s
extermination of European Jews — have been installed by Washington
in order to prevent the plans of elected governments to redistribute
wealth.
Nor is this a matter of bad old “Cold War
excesses.” As recently as June 2002, the State Department encouraged
Venezuelan military officers who briefly overthrew that country’s
elected president, the left-populist Hugo Chavez, and installed the
head of Fedecamaras (the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce) as the new
“president.”
While the Bush administration has tried to deny
their fairly clear role in instigating the coup, what they cannot
deny is that within hours of Chavez being put under house arrest,
they publicly recognized the coup-plotters as “the legitimate
government of Venezuela.”
Nor is this pattern confined to the “third world.”
Back in the 1930s, the fascist regimes of continental Europe were
openly backed by local business elites because (quite explicitly) of
a morbid fear of “Communist revolution.”
The fact is that for the capitalist class, an
empty shell of democracy is a good way to preserve the legitimacy of
their rule and make sure things runs smoothly, but when any one
tries to use democratic processes to threaten their privileges, then
“democracy” is a luxury they can no longer afford.
So the question asked by the Rolling Stone
interviewer really was a very good question.
CONGRESSMAN Kucinich, unfortunately, did not have
a good answer. He rather lamely replied that the president has more
power than a local mayor and left it at that.
This is just not good enough, and it points to a
central failing of the progressive-populist worldview.
Its adherents talk about “the people” as if it
were simply an undifferentiated whole and every one had the same
interests.
The fact is that class divisions and class
struggle is a fact of life in this sort of society. Not all of us
have the same interests, and the illusion of common membership in
something called “the American people” can blind us to this in
dangerous ways.
The overwhelming majority of the population is
part of the working class. Socialists don’t define “the working
class” as merely those who are “culturally working-class” or work in
traditional “heavy industry” jobs or as the relatively more poorly
paid categories of workers.
Rather, it is a term that encompasses all of us
who are forced to rent ourselves out to an employer. The fundamental
conflict of interests between workers and the capitalist class of
owners creates a struggle that goes on whether our side is aware of
it or not.
Labor creates all wealth, but those who labor only
receive in wages whatever part of the product of their labor is not
stolen by the ruling class that owns the economic enterprises in
which we work and that lives off of our sweat.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a mass-based
radical industrial union (which was since wiped out by massive
government repression during and after the First World War) was
founded.
In the preamble to its constitution, the
Industrial Workers of the World (or “Wobblies”) declared that the
“working class and the employing class have nothing in common....
Between these two classes, a struggle must go on until the workers
organize as a class, take possession of the means of production,
[and] abolish the wage system.”
This was true then, and it remains true now.
 |
| Kucinich
has put a lot of effort into winning over the votes of unionized
workers by attending Union meetings and walking picket lines. We
wonder what he would do if faced with a strike that is being
broken by a Democratic-led administration. |
IN ORDER TO actually carry out the progressive
social changes that Kucinich’s supporters want, legislative
decisions and executive orders are not enough.
They would have to be backed up by decisive action
from below — strikes, workplace occupations, mass civil
disobedience, soldiers refusing orders to fire on crowds, etc. — to
have any chance of being translated into reality.
Recognizing this reality means overcoming populism
in favor of democratic socialism, recognizing the existence and
importance of the class struggle — which means that the movement
should not stop at “capitalism with a human face,” but must abolish
the existence of classes through a working-class victory in the
class struggle.
This means that we should aggressively fight for a
decentralized, participatory system of democratic socialism.
The private ownership of economic enterprises
should be abolished in favor of a system of real democracy in all
spheres of life. Ordinary people should be able to democratically
control their own workplaces and communities.
Any decisions that can’t be made in the most
participatory way possible at the local level can be made by
assemblies of delegates fully accountable to their constituents and
instantly recallable by those constituents at any time and for any
reason.
The sort of “democracy” that the founding fathers
have in mind should be swept away in favor a full-bodied democracy
where the so-called “ignorant masses” actually call the shots.
Of course, despite these major differences between
Kucinich’s politics and ours, a case could perhaps be made for
giving critical support to the congressman from Ohio’s presidential
bid, helping to elect him to power while aggressively arguing for
the kinds of measures that it would really take to implement his
program.
This sort of case could be made, that is to say,
if he were running as an independent or a third party
candidate.
The problem is that he is “playing by the rules”
of a political machine (the Democratic Party) that is financially,
ideologically and structurally inseparable from corporate America.
It is a foregone conclusion that he will not
receive that party’s nomination.
Despite this, he has said again and again that he
is a loyal Democrat and that he will endorse whatever candidate
receives his party’s nomination.
That means that by this summer he will almost
certainly be campaigning for Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a man
who voted for NAFTA, voted for the USA-PATRIOT Act, voted to
authorize Bush to invade Iraq, helped spread Bush’s lies about
“weapons of mass destruction” and while he now says (talk is cheap)
that the invasion was a mistake, he also says that, as president, he
will keep American troops in Iraq to continue the “battle against
terrorism.”
On the home front, Kerry preaches the
market-fundamentalist line that the government has “no right” to
prevent manufacturers from shutting down factories in the United
States, and merely hopes to convince Congress to reward companies
that stay here with tax breaks — which would shift the tax burden
even further onto the shoulders of working people.
In other words, by this summer at the latest,
Kucinich will be campaigning to replace Bush with “Bush-Lite.”
SO WHY RUN? Kucinich could be quite sincere, and
truly think that he is advancing his agenda. The problem is that, in
the greater scheme of things, his subjective intentions are not that
important.
His objective role is too woo angry, discontented
elements — unionists, leftists and progressive activists
disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s pro-corporate agenda to the
point where they might consider voting third-party — back into the
fold.
Kucinich offers the discontented an illusion that
positive social change can be advanced through voting Democratic and
attempts to convince them to play by the rules of a game that
demands rallying behind the nominee when push comes to shove.
That is to say, however unwittingly, he is
actually playing a useful role for the corporate whores of the DNC
and DLC, luring pissed-off ex-Democrats back into the party, only to
hand over his base to John Kerry or, at best, the equally pro-war,
mainstream Democrat John Edwards.
So where does this leave Kucinich’s supporters?
Our advice to them is very simple: if you support
Kucinich’s goals of universal employment at a living wage, universal
not-for-profit health care, withdrawal from Iraq and so forth, don’t
waste your vote on a candidate who promotes the opposite agenda.
Rather, support the electoral campaigns of the
Socialist Party, which both shares all of those goals and is
realistically aware of the massive class-struggle tactics that will
be necessary to translate them into reality.
Vote for the Socialist Party — Lisa Weltman for
Michigan Board of Education, Ben Burgis for Michigan State
University Board of Trustees, and any Socialist candidates that may
be running for local offices in your area.
Where there are no Socialist candidates, vote for
any left-wing Green candidates who at least espouse an explicit or
heavily implied anti-capitalist and decidedly pro-working class
outlook.
Above all, to paraphrase Joe Hill, don’t just
vote, organize!
Electoral campaigns are a useful platform for
agitating for radical socialist ideas, and putting in place some
candidates who can use their elective offices to be part of the
perhaps struggle, but they aren’t enough.
Join us in helping to build a mass, militant
activist movement, in the workplace, in our communities and on the
streets, to fight for the short-term goals that we share with the
Kucinich supporters and for the long-term goal of the democratic
transformation of American society. |
