[Marxism] Cynthia McKinney Announces Run for President

[Shacht at aol.com]

Yes, the SWP persisted in a sectarian fashion in elections. For  example, in 
1967 they opposed the attempt of the P&F forces to get on the  California 
ballot. I remember distinctly one west coast anti-war meeting held in  San 
Francisco where their lone longshoreman got up to explain that "Workers  aren't for a 
third capitalist party." He was referring to P&F, of  course.
 
Part of this, of course, was the long standing crudity of Marxist analysis:  
Political parties have to represent a social class or nothing. The fact is 
that  the P&F reflected a social movement - the anti-war movement. It was that  
movement, not the SWP or the IS or the CP that had a future other than as a  
recruiting ground for someone's sect.
 
On the other hand, while the Wallace campaign may have been the CP and its  
periphery and, in fact, something the party got stuck with once Taft lost the  
nomination to Dewey the response that it drew and the magnitude of its 
following  hold an important lesson. 1948 had Dixiecrats, not just Wallace. In short, 
four  parties in the field other than the SLP, SEP and SP. And the dixiecrats 
polled,  I believe, almost as many vote as Wallace. Truman's support of the 
civil rights  plank in the 1948 Democratic platform had spurred the Dixiecrat's 
withdrawal.  Democrats, in short, were sounding better, at least, on civil 
rights than they  had in the past. This hardly compelled the socialists to 
support Truman,  however.
 
Wallace campaigned for civil rights in the south, drawing abuse, anger and  
cabbage pelting. This is one of the examples the Progressive Party should be  
remembered for. The other is that it did reflect a willingness to break with 
the  Democratic Party on the part of those who voted for it, an intellectual 
step  that it seems fewer people are willing to do, proportionately, since the 
2000  and 2004 elections.
 
Emil Mazey is reported, anecdotally to be sure and perhaps inaccurately, as  
having refused to give his vote on the UAW executive board to endorsing 
Wallace.  If he had, that union's vote was so close that it would have endorsed the  
Progressive Party in 1948. Then one of the most militant and progressive 
unions  in the US, what a difference that would have made in the Progressive 
Party's  base and the public's awareness of it.
Mazey? Well, he wanted Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. And there is  
an example of the ills of sectarianism.
 
We've come a long way from that sort of sectarian error now - not only  
because those sects are gone, but because we have a much more popular base of  
support than ever support - or potential is perhaps the right word. In 1952 and  
1956 the SLP and SWP together did not get 4,000 (counted) votes nationally.  
Compare that to 1968 with the vote for P&F and its affiliates, then with  Nader 
in 2000. There is an enormous difference and it doesn't havt to do with  
population increase. Disaffiliation with the status quo is more marked now than  in 
decades, the problem is translating this into a third party movement.
 
Nader is hardly a revolutionary. There was always the danger he could  revert 
to support of democrats and in fact did support some "progressive"  democrats 
during his 2000 campaign. In fact, this will always be the problem  with a 
"Third Party" based on repulsion at graft, embezzlement (the proper  function of 
bureaucracy), CEO enrichment, corporate burglary and discrimination  - racial 
or other. Because there is always some "progressive" to come along on  the 
Democratic ticket espousing such causes, and the nascent movement collapses  
into the Democratic Party again. Or falls into the swamp of "lesser evilism"  
again. A real third party has to be opposed to the system, not its excesses, to  
capitalism as its root, to the capitalist state to be smashed, not captured.  
Regardless of programs or slogans, so much of the Green Party follwing of 
eight  years ago seems to have reflected the reformist, not the revolutionary 
feeling. 
 
 



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