'Spoiled beer and bad mushrooms'

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Action Staff: Alex Chis, Paul Colvin, Gerry Foley, Joni Jacobs, MayMay Gong, Malik Miah, Hayden Perry, Barbara Putnam, Carole Seligman, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Socialist Action (ISSN 0747-4237) is published monthly for $8 per year by Socialist Action Publishing Association, 3425 Army St., San Francisco, CA 94110.

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2 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1992 Socialists usually don't pay much attention to the Democratic or Republican party primaries. It doesn't make much difference to us which capitalist politician wins the slug-fest to run for and occupy the White House for the next four years.

A Wisconsin voter summed up this year's contest pretty well during a radio interview. She said choosing between Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown was "like asking do you want a spoiled beer or a bad mushroom?" Not very appetizing fare on the Democratic menu this year.

You have to admit, these guys got chutzpah. Both Clinton and Brown turned up at the April 5 pro-choice march, despite the fact that neither one can properly be called "pro-choice."

Bill Clinton does not think teenaged women deserve the right to choose, so he signed Arkansas' parental consent law. He does not think public money should be used to fund abortions for lowincome women, so he's consistently opposed legislation to do so. He does think abortion Joni Jacobs should be legal—not accessible, just (barely) legal.

Jerry Brown says he discovered that abortion is murder while sitting on a mountaintop in Nepal. He thinks the Democratic Party should continue to support antichoice candidates and incumbents. And he refused to take a stand against Operation Rescue's campaign of violence against family planning clinics. Of course, that was three years ago, when he was only the chair of the California Democratic Party, not a presidential candidate.

The gall of these duplicitous egomaniacs pandering for votes at the biggest pro-choice march in history, as if they deserved to get any! It made me realize how absurd and surreal the entire electoral process has become.

It's surreal to see the labor bureaucracy backing an openly union-busting, "right-to-work-forless" candidate like Clinton. It's surreal to hear Clinton referred to as a liberal, when Arkansas is one of the most conservative, antiworker states in the union.

It's surreal to hear both Clinton market capitalism. As long as the economy is organized on market capitalism, there will be periods of overproduction that lead to recession and depression. These periods of crisis are becoming more frequent and intense.

But there is nothing the politicians can do to change that as long as they stay within the capitalist system.

That's what socialists mean when we say there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, that they're two sides of the same coin, two doors that lead to the same room, etc., etc.

These cliches highlight the fact that there isn't a two-party system in this country. There's a one-party system with two factions, both of which represent the interests of the rich against those of working people.

The Democratic Party is just as responsible as the Republican Party for driving down the living standards of working people. They are both parties of union-busters, anti-choicers, anti-civil righters, corporate polluters and war makers. Candidates like Clinton only make this more clear. It's hard to persuade voters that an "anybody but Bush" voting strategy is going to make a difference if the end result is a "Republocrat" like Clinton.

In the New York primaries, an astounding thing happened. Eighty-six percent of those eligithink it was important for them to make a trip to the polls.

Maybe people don't think their votes will count, or the choices presented aren't real, or whoever's in the White House won't make a difference in their daily lives, or a combination of these or other factors.

Whatever the reasons, the sham that America is a democracy is wearing thin. Fewer and fewer people participate in the electoral process because they know that their vote does not decide what will be the policies of the employers and their government. Getting more people to go to the Editors: MICHAEL SCHREIBER, JOSEPH RYAN Business Manager: BARRY SHEPPARD Second-class postage is paid at San Francisco, Calif.

San Francisco, CA 94110.

$30. (Money orders, checks should be in U.S. dollars.)

Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views expressed in editorials. with mass mobilizations—in the streets and on the picketline.

Working people need true democracy. We need workplace and community-based committees to decide not only the laws of the land, but what to do with the earth's resources and our ability to transform them into products that meet human needs. We need a system where those who create the wealth decide what to do with it. In other words, we need socialism.

Working people need choices beyond spoiled beer and bad mushrooms. But we aren't going to get that in this year's election.

Closing date:

April 29, 1992

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