“Lesser evilism’s” role in electoral politics
In the U.S., reformists of every ilk – social democrats, DSA and DSA Democrat Zorhan Mamdani, the Greens, Jacobin, past and present currents associated with the Communist Party, the Workers World Party and the Party Socialism and Liberation, the broad environmental and women’s movements – have most often been drawn into “lesser evil,” Democratic Party politics.
Democrat Mamdani’s new campaign staff
The Mamdani campaign was organized by his former chief of staff in Albany, Elle Bisgaard-Church. Its leadership includes a wide range of Democrats, including some of his opponents’ former staff. Mamdani’s pre-primary campaign team included Patrick Gaspard, a well-known adviser to mayors and presidents, Steven Banks, who ran social services under former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maria Torres-Springer, Mayor Eric Adams’s former first deputy mayor and Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the business lobby, Partnership for New York City.
Other Mamdani organizers are Andrew Epstein, a member of the NY State Assembly who is his chief of staff and Assemblyman Julian Gerson, a former speechwriter for Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Today, Mamdani has focused on winning endorsements and support from the Democratic Party’s tops, including ardent rightwing Zionist and House Minority leader, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and leader of the House Democratic Caucus since 2023. Mamdani has met with both in mutually agreed “productive” exchanges accompanied with commitments to organize future meetings with a “broad range” of participants, that is, the central leaders of the Democratic Party.
Need we add that Mamdani supported “Killer Kamala Harris” in the presidential election? Harris, whose campaign included unqualified support to the Zionist genocide plus a new immigrant deportation proposal that exceeded Trump’s in its reactionary nature. In short, the Democrat’s running a handful of “antiwar” Democratic Party liberals has no doubt and once again, disoriented broad sections of the “left,” for whom independent working class politics has been subordinate to “lesser evilism.”
Internationally, the same holds for the “broad left” today tragically including most of the groups affiliated to the Fourth International, whose present engagement in popular front/multi-class electoral coalitions is now generalized worldwide. All this in the name of stopping “fascism!” Winning support for capitalism’s so called democratic or “lesser evil” form, the Democrats, in the U.S. today aims at subordinating working class organization and mobilization to political/electoral support to the class enemy!
This holds true to the largely electoralist-reformist Green Party, that largely abstains from mass movements while endorsing local Democrats and almost always declining to run serious campaigns in contested states. The largely middle class Greens and their “safe-state” strategy, from Ralph Nader to Jill Stein, aim at moving the Democrats to the left rather than posing anything resembling a serious challenge to capitalist rule.
We live in difficult and contradictory times indeed, times when the relative absence of independent and fighting trade unions is glaring, but also times when literally tens of millions, offended by the nation’s rightwing policies and insults to their very being, not infrequently take to the streets in unprecedented numbers. But these protests are qualitatively different from the past, when world capitalism’s crises took place in a context of the rise of world fascism, and large sections of the European ruling class turning to fascism, including in France, Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. The opposition to these currents was largely led by the still powerful but largely underground Communist Parties, that emerged in the post-WWII period with mass, in not majority support across Europe that forced unprecedented capitalist concessions including in a broad range of social service gains that significantly remain today. A discredited capitalism, and the defeat of Hitler, in the face of Communist Party-led mass movements, forced the ruling classes to agree to major concessions. But the various Stalinist parties across Europe, in turn, agreed to participate in coalition-capitalist governments in the immediate post-WWII period. With the beginning of the Cold War period, accompanied by imperialism’s rebuilding its military apparatus, the Marshall Plan and including NATO, the Eastern European Stalinist parties used their military power and their occupation of Eastern Europe to bureaucratically establish deformed workers’ states that essentially abolished the rule of the wartime capitalist-fascist parties and governments. Today, no such mass Communist or Socialist parties exist. Indeed, most of their previous forces have long ago disappeared and/or have been thoroughly integrated into the various rightwing capitalist governments that today rule in Eastern Europe.
Majority of youth favor socialism and oppose imperialist war
Every poll today demonstrates that the majority of youth favor socialism over capitalism. Similar polls indicate deep disgust with the two-party system and preference for a third party. Similar numbers indicate majority opposition to the Iran War. While the nature of this “socialism” and “independence” remain ill-defined, the sentiment expressed is most often of the egalitarian variety, that is, against the super rich, their disgusting wealth and their generalized attacks on working people, basic democratic rights, and the environment. A generalized opposition to the endless U.S. imperialist wars has also been the case for decades.
We must add that capitalism’s bi-partisan de-industrialization policies that have off-shored millions of union jobs to low wage nations have undoubtedly deeply angered working people, in some instances giving rise to racist, anti-immigrant currents oriented to Trump.
In summary on this critical issue, while the fascist card is not presently on the ruling class agenda, much of the “left” employs the fascist term to shepherd the social movements into the Democratic Party. This phenomenon is generalized across the globe from France to Brazil to Peru and the U.S.
None of this is to say that the future will not see the serious rise of well-organized and deadly fascist forces in the U.S. and elsewhere. In some countries they are already quite evident, if not fostered by top elected officials. The Italian elections a few years ago saw the party with the largest vote totals – far from a majority – openly associated with the political heritage and party of the fascist Mussolini – win control of the government. !
There are no magic formulas as to how to combat this horror other the ongoing efforts to rejuvenate and qualitatively expand the labor movement, the mass organizations of the oppressed and exploited and the building of the revolutionary socialist party. The starting point for all these critical objectives is a clear program of working class independence that champions in action workers’ desire for a better life, freedom, equality, security and social well being – the method of the Transitional Program. As capitalism’s deepening encroachments on every aspect of working class life proceed, there is no doubt that the need for independent mass action united front organizations will be posed in bold relief. Helping to initiate and strengthen these struggles, however modest our current forces at the moment, will prove central to Socialist Action and the movement’s future success.
The tragic state of the U.S. labor movement
We have written widely and repeatedly over the years and decades on the terrible state of the U.S. labor movement, today at its lowest level of organization and influence in perhaps the last century, if not longer. Headed by a reactionary hide-bound largely corrupt, totally bureaucratic petty-bourgeois cast, today’s “labor lieutenants of capitalism,” as Daniel DeLeon, with Lenin’s approval, described them more than a century ago, have offered near-zero resistance to capitalism’s ever-intensifying attacks. The AFL-CIO’s national conventions are replete with the passage of vacuous resolutions and decorated by Democratic Party posturing politicians. Its gatherings, local state and national, are almost, if not entirely, devoid of any conceptions of how to advance labor’s cause. It’s affiliates, with few exceptions, are similarly bankrupt.
Today’s labor bureaucrats are tied to the Democratic Party and capitalist politics more than at any time in recent memory. Any break with this deadly alliance is rejected out of hand by labor’s miserable excuse for a leadership even though support for a “third party” is widespread among working people.
Socialist Action remains patient educators regarding complementing labor’s struggles in the economic arena with advocacy for the formation of a fighting independent Labor Party in alliance with all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited. Such a fundamental break with the class collaborationist policies of the bureaucracy, however, can only be effectively based on currents that lead important victories on the picket line, that is, at the point of production. Conscious fighters and the currents they lead will, in time, prove decisive in labor’s future independent entry into the political arena.
For now, however, reduced to less than six percent of the private work force, bureaucratically organized and often re-structured in some areas to virtually exclude rank-and-file participation and control, the bureaucracy retains a firm grip on the unions We live in a time of great contradiction. On the one hand, the vast majority stands opposed to capitalism’s racism, endless wars, social cutbacks and all the rest. On the other, fighting working class institutions, from labor unions, anti-racist organizations and mass fighting socialist organizations are at low ebb. In our view, this contradiction will be resolved when the mass anti-capitalist sentiment that exists today is matched by the emergence of socialist fighters, schooled in class struggle politics and deeply integrated in the inevitable coming mass struggles.
Again, every poll demonstrates that significant majorities, recently 67 percent, support unions and unionization. Workers today increasingly, understand that the boss class is not their friend and that elementary unity is a pre-requisite to advancing their interests. But the gap between this reality and struggle to re-build, democratize and fundamentally transform and expand the union movement remains. Time and again in recent years, millions have taken to the streets to protest capitalist injustice only to be reoriented to “lesser evil politics” via the Democratic Party and its open and/or partially disguised supporters. Nevertheless, the lessons of the role of revolutionaries in the 1930s and 1940s including the role of our Trotskyist predecessors during the mass Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934, apply with full force today. This began with a handful of conscious militants who won the leadership of mass union forces, closed down the vital trucking industry and related industries, won the hearts and minds of the city’s workers and proceeded make to Minneapolis a union town. Their example paved the way for the unionization of the entire Northwest. This in turn, paved the way for the generalized growth of the broad labor movement. The Minneapolis victory, including the implantation of Trotskyist cadre in unions across the country, in time, contributed to the formation, in collaboration with Trotsky, of the Fourth International itself.
The construction of revolutionary socialist Leninist parties
Socialist Action’s perspective remains to transform our very modest nucleus of revolutionaries into a mass revolutionary socialist Leninist party with a rank-and-file deeply rooted in all the present and future struggle of working people. That has been our uninterrupted reason for being since our formation over four decades ago, during which time we have accumulated invaluable class struggle experiences and won respect from important layers of serious activists. As difficult as the times may sometimes be, that perspective always stands before us, with every modest gain cherished and embraced as a preclude to greater achievements to come.
Our orientation to patient and steady party-building and united front-type mobilizations that demonstrate workers’ power in the streets is key to the our future.
That a working class fightback will in time assume a massive character is undeniable, That experienced revolutionaries – long distance runners – will play a key role in fighting for the movements’ independence and ever-deepening unity is contingent on what revolutionaries do today.
Capitalist “solutions” in the real economy
Life in capitalist America and worldwide repeatedly informs us that there can be no “good capitalists” or good capitalist parties or capitalist politicians. All are compelled by the very system they uphold to live and function at the expense of all humanity. In the real economy, as well as in the highly speculative financial sectors, the same holds true. Capitalists are compelled to counter declining average profit rates with ever-intensifying attacks on working people.
Every one of the above measures center on making workers pay for capitalism’s central and inherent contradiction. And when these heinous measures prove insufficient to stem profit declines in the U.S., the ruling elite embark on massive efforts to transfer production—through de-industrialization and off-shoring—outside their own borders to free themselves from the gains workers have won following decades of struggle. The result is the ever-increasing exploitation, super-exploitation and degradation of life across the globe, not to mention endless wars of plunder and conquest, and the catastrophic increase, not decrease, of fossil fuel production that threatens, in the short term, life on earth itself. Capitalism’s degradation of human beings knows no limits!
The system itself cannot be significantly reformed. Ousting Trump resolves nothing: the “genocide Joe” Biden example was proof positive. There are no “good Democrat” alternatives! Capitalism must be abolished. And the only force on earth capable of doing so is an independent, fighting, militant working class, democratically organized at the point of production and in the political arena in the tens of millions, and whose ranks have been infused with the ranks of a mass revolutionary socialist party aimed at building a new world free from all forms of capitalist degradation, exploitation and oppression.
