Is a Barter Ne Tuc

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Marchers against U.S. intervention in Central stration in Los Angeles.

500, and countless forums, film showings, and fundraising events in solidarity with Central America.

The demonstrations show a growing understanding by anti-intervention and antinuclear forces that there is a connection between the threat of intervention in Central America and the escalation of the nuclear arms race.

A leaflet distributed by Los Angeles Casa El Salvador Farabundo Marti at could only move to contain it within the confines of bourgeois law. To do this the law had to be adapted to fit the new reality.

"Separate but equal" schools would no longer be accepted by Black people, so the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional. The Supreme Court could have made that ruling at any time since 1896, but it was never moved to do so until the masses in the streets threatened the stability of the system.

Other decisions extending rights to free speech and assembly merely put a judicial stamp on rights that thousands SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLKE NEGABORHODO!

of protesters were taking for then iselves in the streets. Without the mass movements of the 1960s the Warren court would not have have achieved its liberal record.

Now that great movement has ebbed and the ruling class is trying to regain the ground it lost. Upon Earl Warren's retirement in 1969 President Nixon appointed a "strict constructionist, SOCIALIST ACTION Socialist Action/Marc Bedner at July 28 demonthe August 5 demonstration expressed that convergence: "They're not using nuclear bombs-yet. But we of El Salvador and Central America know the names Hiroshima and Nagasaki very well. Don't let Guazapa, Chalatenango, and Morazan be remembered as the new Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Don't let El Salvador become the next Vietnam. Raise your voices to say: No more genocide in our name!"

Warren Burger, as chief justice of the United States. He had a mandate from Nixon to restore law and order and respect for authority.

The Burger court Burger could not do that singiehandedly. He has eight associate justices to persuade. Few opinions are reached by unanimous vote. Many decisions are split as closely as five to four. A number of justices swing from the liberal to the conservative side as new issues and arguments are raised and as the political scene changes.

The Supreme Court does not operate in an ivory tower. The Warren court felt the pressure of the masses in the streets. The Burger court feels the pressure of the president and Congress. When congressmen took exception to a pro-abortion decision they introduced a bill to exclude that subject from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. The court's independence is only relative to the pressure put on it to come up with the right decisions.

There is no doubt that Reagan will nominate the most conservative men or women he can find if he returns to office. Five of the justices are over 74 years old. But Mondale will not turn the Supreme Court around by nominating a couple of crusading liberals. He will appoint only middle-of-the-road conservatives like himself. They would do little more than moderate the swing to the right.

Liberals who say they must vote for Mondale because they fear the effect of more Reagan appointments are like the antiwar activists who voted for Johnson in 1964 because they feared Goldwater would expand the war in Vietnam.

The force that will turn the Supreme Court around is just over the horizon. It is a new upsurge of labor, minorities, and women who are demanding an end to repression and poverty. When they mobilize, organize, and take to the streets they will defy many of the Supreme Court's reactionary edicts. The court will then have to face a new reality, and bend to class forces that are more powerful than any group of justices sitting on a court bench.

SEPTEMBER 1984

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→ A response to The Guardian "Lesser evil" won't work The "Guardian Viewpoint" on the 1984 presidential elections (Guardian, Aug. 8, 1984) is a bundle of contradictions. The editors of the Guardian clearly recognize that both the Democratic and Republican parties represent a capitalist class on the offensive against both working people in the United States and revolutionary movements and governments abroad. They claim to understand that the Democratic Party has been a graveyard for the struggles of workers, Blacks, women, and gay people. They proclaim that the crucial tasks confronting the socialist left in the United States are "not in the voting booth, but in continued organization around the vital issues of the day; against nuclear war and U.S. intervention; against racism and for women's liberation; and for working people's struggles."

Yet despite all of these correct observations, they still tell us that "It is crucial that Reagan be removed from office....This includes voting against him— and for his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale."

While support for Mondale is, in many ways, a logical extension of the Guardian's support for the Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson campaigns, we must examine the specific reasons they give to justify setting aside all the lessons of 50 years of socialist, labor, and minority support for the Democratic Party. Just why are the editors of the Guardthis time either action, ERA, and voting rights have been watered down. On military and foreign policy, all the proposals to limit the scope of U.S. intervention in the Third World or to cut the rate of growth of the war budget were rejected. Mondale himself was brutally honest when he said "Look at our platform. There are no defense cuts that weaken our security; no business taxes to weaken our economy; no laundry lists that raid our treasury" (Kelly, "Dems").

This platform of "Reaganism with a human face" abandons all of the Democrats' usual lures for working-class and minority voters and codifies the Democrats' role in the bipartisan, capitalist class offensive to take back every gain working and oppressed people in the United States have made in the last 50 years and to reassert U.S. imperialist hegemony on a world scale.

From their support for Reagan's cuts in social services and increases in military expenditures (including continuing aid for the Salvadoran dictatorship) to their acquiescence in Reagan's military adventures in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East ("opposing" them, as in the cases of the Marines in Lebanon and the contra attacks on United States? Democratic Party campaigns (like those of all capitalist parties) are run in a strictly top-down manner. Full-time party officials, along with their supporters in the union officialdom, try to mobilize working and minority people as passive and individualized voters.

This sort of mobilization does nothing to build the self-confidence and grassroots organizations of working people. This is especially true when labor, minorities, and women are mobilized in support of parties, like the Democrats, who promise little and will deliver even less. The results of such electoral campaigns will only be demoralization, cynicism, and passivity.

What kind of "independent" polities?

The Jackson campaign, despite the radicalism of its rhetoric and the racial and class character of its mass voter base, clearly fell into this pattern. The "Rainbow Coalition" as a force capable of uniting and mobilizing various sectors of the working class independently of the twin parties of capital never existed and certainly will not come into existence now that Jackson's bid for the presidency has ended. (The "Rainbow Coalition" may continue in the form of an electoral vehicle for Black Democrats.)

The Jackson campaign's total inability to win any of its important platform planks and Jackson's de facto support for Mondale will probably deepen the political despair of the Black community, very likely resulting in a drop in Black voter participation in 1984 as compared with 1982. Can we expect any more from a Mondale campaign, whose rhetoric is a hundred times less "progressive" and whose potential mass voter support comes from much less working-class constituencies than the Jackson campaign?

A diversion A "Dump Reagan (Elect Mondale)" campaign

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GOD BLESS IPRESIDENITI WARNING!