Wouldn't a Democratic administration - even though the current one under William Clinton is surely no friend of labor - be preferable to a victory by Robert Dole and Jack Kemp, "who have outright fascists entrenched deeply in their party"? asks reader Nicholas Burns in a letter on the opposing page. From the standpoint of someone who considers himself a socialist, isn't Clinton a "lesser evil"?

This is an important question that has been debated among supporters of parties that function in the U.S. working-class movement for decades.

The Democrats and Republicans comprise the bourgeois two- party system in the United States, which monopolizes politics and attempts to force dissent into channels acceptable to the ruling rich.

For at least half a century, the Democratic Party has been identified with the "labor-liberal" coalition that was first put together under the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and expanded to a "labor-liberal-civil rights" coalition in the 1960s and 70s. Through mighty class battles the working class formed the industrial unions and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and wrested gains like Social Security from the employers. The leaders of the CIO, backed up by the Stalinist Communist Party and many in the Socialist Party at the time, derailed the real possibilities of this social movement leading to the independent organization of the working class in its own political party. In 1936, these forces urged support for the Democratic Party, establishing this coalition. Ever since, workers are told by the union officialdom to pull the Democratic lever every four years to defeat the "greater evil."

Throughout this period, the two bourgeois parties that have alternated in running the White House and Congress have carried out a close to identical foreign policy - using the U.S. military and economic superiority coming out of World War II to advance the imperialist interests of America's sixty ruling families by attempting to crush rebellions by the exploited and oppressed from Korea to Vietnam and Nicaragua. Tactical differences on domestic policy between the two parties were held up by the labor bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois leaderships of Black rights organizations to identify the Democrats as "friends of labor" and the oppressed.

But ever since the onset of the first post-war worldwide capitalist recession in the early 1970s, which signaled the latest downward segment in the curve of capitalist development, the bipartisan foreign policy has been mirrored by an increasingly bipartisan domestic policy. The bourgeois politics of both parties have shifted to the right, as the U.S. rulers have tried to shore up declining profit rates. And the labor- liberal-civil rights coalition of the Democratic Party has begun to come apart.

This has become crystal clear under the Clinton administration. Clinton's record is unambiguous as having taken the lead in the rulers' assault on the social conquests of the working class. As a series of recent Militant articles have outlined, the Democratic president opened the employers' onslaught against the Social Security Act of 1935 by signing the welfare bill, has led the recent probes against democratic rights, and is on the forefront of the ideological assault on labor as shown around the passage of recent antigay measures. Clinton is also among the most warmongering presidents of modern times.

In fact, there is a realignment among the political poles of the two bourgeois parties as registered at the Republican and Democratic conventions this summer. Dole and Kemp now push their "economic growth" theme as an alternative to Clinton's status quo that defends current employment levels and the slow decline in real wages for working people as the best capitalism has to offer. And Kemp is leading Republican efforts to make inroads in his party's appeal to Blacks and other oppressed nationalities. In doing so, the Republican leadership, and the entire U.S. ruling class, has pushed to the margins ultrarightists like Patrick Buchanan, whose forces have had to retreat since last spring. Until new explosions of labor resistance occur, the rulers do not quite need the Buchanan alternative.

It is true Buchanan and other rightists function within the Republican party. But their perspective of building an incipient fascist movement is aided as much, if not more, by votes from liberals for antilabor measures like the "Defense of Marriage Act."

The fact of the matter is that with either a Democratic or Republican administration, the working class goes to the wall. The only way working people can defend ourselves, or achieve any reforms under capitalism, is through the class struggle and organization independent from the parties whose program serves the bourgeoisie.

Malcolm X made some very useful points in this regard commenting on the 1964 presidential race between Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Barry Goldwater. "The shrewd imperialists knew that the only way that you will voluntarily run to the fox is to show you a wolf. So they created a ghastly alternative and had the whole world ... hoping Johnson would beat Goldwater.... Those who would claim to be enemies of the system were on their hands and knees waiting for Johnson to get elected because he's suppose to be a man of peace; and he has troops invading the Congo right now and invading Saigon."

Those who try to convince working people today to vote Democrat once again aim to make us accept responsibility - and thus being demoralized tomorrow - for the real policies Clinton will implement once he is elected, which will be consistent with his record of the last four years.

That's why a vote for the Socialist Workers ticket is not a "wasted vote." And an even more important step is joining the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists to build a movement capable of leading workers and farmers to take power when objective conditions permit and put an end to the threat of fascism and war once and for all.

-- MEGAN ARNEY  
 
 
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