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CP and DSA want to translate healthy anti-government sentiment into votes for liberal Democrats in the upcoming elections.

The unofficial - yet unmistakable - goal 10 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1986 campaign as "necessary to stop Reagan." He said he was aware that Mondale's social program was virtually identical to Reagan's and that Mondale, attempting to cut off Reagan from the right, had called for an embargo of Nicaragua.

Gwen Patton of the Alabama New South Coalition, another "independent" formation "to empower Blacks and the poor in the South," was the final panelist. "Independent politics and forming an independent party do not necessarily mean a third party," she stated. "Rather, they are organized vehicles to make the Democrats responsive. We run independent campaigns and then, as a matter of strategy, go back into the Democratic Party."

The conference ended with a fund pitch by Peter Camejo of the Northstar Network, a loose association of radicals generally oriented to the left layers of the Democratic Party. Camejo praised the speech by ODell and invited conference participants to attend a fundraising benefit sponsored by an electoral coalition of left Democrats, the Berkeley Citizens Alliance (BCA).

Camejo announced that the fundraiser would feature "three mayors" —the current Democratic Party mayor of Berkeley, Gus Newport; the "future" Berkeley mayor, BCA's candidate, Democrat Loni Hancock; and Bernie Sanders, mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Sanders, who expressed his support for the BCA and the Rainbow Coalition, like many others at the conference, evokes a vision of middle-class socialism which sees the working class as marginal to the process of social change.

Members and supporters of the Communist Party U.S.A. were also active in the conference proceedings. The CP newspaper, the People's Daily World, regularly promotes the Democratic Party. For the Communist Party, like the DSA, work in the Democratic Party has taken first priority for decades.

The July 29 People's Daily World, for example, reported on the decisions of the CP's recent national gathering in New York. "Delegates to the three-day national conference of the Communist Party USA mapped strategies to defeat Reaganite candidates in November...The most im -portant peace action the U.S. people will conduct this year will be on November 4, Election Day."

The CP, like the DSA and the Rainbow Coalition, aims to direct the energies of the various movements struggling against U.S. intervention in Central America and against U.S. support for South African apartheid "to build[ing] a congressional peace majority in the 1986 elections." Toward this end, its national gathering "called for peace rallies from October 25 through November 4."

Revolutionizing the Democratic Party For the CP and the DSA, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition is important only insofar as it serves as a vehicle to channel social movements into the Democratic Party. This was the main function of the Jackson campaign during the 1984 Julianne Malveaux, staffwriter for the Black community-based San Francisco Sun Reporter and moderator of the "Fightback Against Reaganism" panel stated the role of Jackson's Rainbow most clearly: "Jackson revolutionized the Democratic Party," she proclaimed. "We wrote the minority platform at the Democratic Party con -vention. We may have to hold our nose and vote for the Democratic Party, but we can make a deal while we do it—maybe over a Supreme Court judge."

These kind of "deals" have been the stock in trade of the Jackson movement. As Jackson stomps the country, registering Blacks into the bosses' party, he has buttressed the individual political fortunes of a layer of Black elected officials who have become experts at the game of capitalist politics.

These politicians include liberal Black Democratic mayors Coleman Young of Detroit and Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, both of whom recently sought court injunctions to break the militant strikes of mostly Black municipal workers.

But the Black officials who receive Jackson's support are by no means at the "left end" of the political spectrum. In Oakland, Calif., for example, Jackson lent back-handed support to the re-election effort of conservative Black Mayor Lionel Wilson.

Wilson was challenged by City Councilmember Wilson Riles Jr., the original head of the Jackson campaign in Northern California. Jackson preferred the company of mainline Democrats closer to

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of the conference organizers was simply this: "Stop Reagan and vote Democrat.