Gus Hall lines up behind Democrats

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Democratic Party convention demonstration in Chicago in 1968. Mayor Daley's cops swing their way into an antiwar rally in Grant Park.

Gus Hall, the Communist Party candidate for president, sponsored an ad in the June 3 New York Times captioned, "Why Politicos Fear Labor Independence."

This slippery little piece of doublespeak portrays the "Jesse Jackson candidacy" and the labor bureaucracy's "delegate committees for Walter Mondale" as "a growing mass power that can put an end to the time-worn electoral system based on the two old parties of big Big Business." Hall goes on to make his basic premise clear:

«What do the old-line politicos, especially those on the Right, fear? They fear that labor's independent role-particularly if united with the surging Jackson movement-can be decisive in defeating not only Reagan but the Reaganites in Congress." Labor's independence, in this Orwellian logic, is expressed through helping one gang of capitalists win an election over another!

The Communist Party presidential candidate goes further in muddling up the conception of class independence by portraying the Democratic Party as reformable!:

"They [old-line politicos] fear labor's role at the Democratic national convention and the impact of labor's mass demonstration, scheduled for the opening day of the San Francisco convention. They fear the impact of labor and its allies on the convention's platform and the pressure for planks on peace, jobs and equality."

The logic of this analysis inescapably leads the reader toward joining the bosses' party to change its policies, as well as toward supporting its candidates. To remove any doubt as to his conclusion, Hall's final paragraph declares:

"Such a united force [labor and the Jackson supporters within the Democratic Party] can sweep away Reagan and Reaganism, make a 180-degree turn in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and move on to a course of peace, jobs and equality."

The Communist Party introduced its schizoid electoral tactic in 1936. CP leader Earl Browder was nominally the party's candidate for president, while in actual practice it was supporting capitalist candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This duplicitous policy was expressed in its slogan: "Defeat Landon [the Republican presidential candidate] at all costs!" Today's "Communists" run "independently" under the slogan "Dump Reagan!"

Why is independent action necessary?

Political independence from capitalist parties has been the policy of the revolutionary workers' movement since the middle of the last century. Why is it a principle of such decisive importance? Why can't independent working class political action be advanced through building a labor-Black-women's faction inside the Democratic Party or any other capitalist political formation?

The key to understanding is simple: The working class and its natural allies constitute an enormous majority of the population. The capitalists, in contrast, are a tiny minority. They can rule only by deception or by naked force. They prefer to rule with the consent of the majority if they can. But they can only rule in a bourgeois democracy by convincing the majority to accept the stacked deck of capitalist institutions. This includes corraling the workers inside the political parties controlled by the employer class or its agents.

Today, once again, the judas goats among us give credence to token votes of resistance to "Reagan" policy in Central America and the Caribbean by the "anti-Reagan" Democratic Congress. Antiwar forces, whose anti-interventionist sentiments are shared by a majority of American people, have been diverted from independent political action into campaigning for Democratic Party "peace" candidates.

The Democratic congressional majority is "unable" to stop funds that continue to flow into the war chests of the CIA and the "Contras" in Nicaragua, and of the bloody regime in El Salvador. The Democratic majority supports the largest war budget ever, while they quibble over whether a few billion dollars more or less should be spent for mass destruction. The effect of this charade of fake opposition between Democrats and Republicans is to defuse opposition to the actual U.S. intervention in Central America.

The same game is played in every sphere. Democratic Party pledges to repeal anti-labor laws have been repeated in every election from 1948 Arian Shannon union in the country could become the headquarters of the local labor party club.

The millions of dollars in the hands of the capitalist parties could be more than matched by the millions of volunteer campaigners available to a party based on the unions. Control over city and even state governments could be won in short order. The political muscle of labor in the course of strike struggles could be multiplied qualitatively. A labor mayor could order the cops to keep their hands off pickets.

But more important would be the ability of a workers' party to tell the truth without fear of embarrassing its capitalist "allies." A massive campaign for a 35-hour workweek with no reduction in pay, such as the struggle now unfolding in Germany, could be launched here.

A program that would articulate the needs of all working people, organized and unorganized, Black and white, female and male, employed and unemployed, old and young—as well as the needs of labor's natural allies-could unite workers and their allies into an Reactionary role of the CP The Communist Party is up to its old tricks. They continue to give a left coloration to the class collaborationist official union leadership-running a Communist candidate for President, while applauding the policies of the official labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.

A new period of struggle is opening up. Nothing can stop it. The workers will fight back. The first heat-lightning of the coming storm has already occurred. More such heralds of coming battles will flash before the generalized struggle opens up: Class conscious workers need to prepare for the coming fight.

A new leadership will be constructed capable of carrying out a class-struggle policy based on the independent generalized economic struggle of workers against bosses and the bosses government.

This class struggle left wing that will emerge must familiarize itself with the history of labor struggles, absorb its lessons, and be ever on the alert to extend this knowledge among workers.

The crowning lesson of past struggles, however, is the need to construct a revolutionary workers' party based on a scientific program derived from historical experience. Without such a party, as led the workers to victory in Russia in October 1917, a final victory will escape the grasp of the world's workers. Socialist Action is an organization committed to this goal. Join us!

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