Interview with Jeff Mackler

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W day. The campaign of Bernie Sanders, who claims e are seeing a renewed interest in socialism to­ to be a “democratic socialist” to mask his 98-percent Democratic Party-line voting record, has given public­ ity to the word “socialist,” and many young Sanders supporters call themselves socialists. The Sanders candidacy is no accident. His “democratic socialist” and anti-establishment-sounding “political revolu­ tion” rhetoric is aimed at sheepherding the growing hatred of tens of millions back into the safe channels of capitalist elections and the rule of the one percent.

Due to this evidence of the possibilities available to socialists right now, Socialist Action has decided to run a presidential candidate, Jeff Mackler, to build support for working-class, independent, socialist politics. I sat down with Jeff Mackler to talk about the campaign, key issues in the election, and the increased interest in socialist ideas.

I asked Mackler why he had entered the U.S. presi­ dential race, despite having no chance of winning. “Elections in capitalist America are the billionaire’s game,” he responded. “Working people have no horse in this race. We have no billionaire candidates, cor­ porate funders, or corporate media behind us. We control no aspect of the rigged electoral charade. But socialist election campaigns can win in another sense. We can use the occasion when interest in politics is at a high point to advance the struggles of the vast ma­ jority (the 99 percent) who today struggle against the inherent evils of capitalism.

“Socialist Action is a party of and for every struggle that aims to organize capitalist’s victims indepen­ dently of and against the policies of the ruling rich. We strive to be part of and help lead the independent, democratic, mass-action united-front mobilizations that are aimed at increasing working-class self-orga­ nization, consciousness, confidence, and unity.

“We aim to be an integral part of organizing the vast majority against the one percent—not only against the one percent in the abstract, but against all their in­ stitutions of power. Socialism, as opposed to its adul­ terated conception put forward by Bernie Sanders, is truly a revolutionary project as well as a necessity.

The real socialist revolution in the U.S., and every­ where else in the world, will usher in for the first time in human history a society in which the vast major­ ity who create the nation’s and the world’s wealth will democratically rule in their own name, through their own institutions, and in their own interests, as opposed to the private profit corporate anti-human interests of the present ruling elite.”

I asked Mackler why he believed that the electoral system was rigged. “Capitalist elections are in the ex­ clusive purview of the billionaire rich. Their twin par­ ties—the Republicans and the Democrats—and their 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2016 local, state, and national electoral and judi­ cial institutions devise, interpret, and en­ force their exclusionary election laws. Their corporate propaganda media effectively ex­ clude coverage of all views but their own. At best, and at great cost, socialists are able to achieve ‘legal’ ballot status in but a hand­ ful of states—and even here, no matter the seriousness of our campaign efforts, we are consciously excluded from coverage.

“Having said this, however—and with full knowledge that the elections are rigged—So­ cialist Action’s campaign does intend to win in a very real sense. That is, we are asking our campaign supporters to check out our Facebook page, website (www.socialistac­ tion.org), and other social media outlets, and meet us in the streets where people unite to fight back. We want to win these thousands to our socialist campaign.”

I asked what Socialist Action’s key campaign objec­ tives are. Mackler responded, “First and foremost, we want to educate and help organize radicalizing people to definitively break from the twin parties of capital­ ism and all of its candidates.

“We believe that all of the evils that people across the globe are becoming keenly aware of are inherent in the capitalist system itself. These include endless wars; government-promoted racism, sexism, and ho­ mophobia; mass deportations and demonization of immigrants; all-pervasive government surveillance in the name of ‘national security’; the imposition of mas­ sive across-the-board austerity measures against the broad spectrum of working people and youth; and the irreversible consequences of fossil fuel-induced glob­ al warming. This system threatens all life on earth. Its madness daily poses the existential threat of burning the planet until it becomes uninhabitable or nuclear wars that murder billions in almost an instant and re­ duce the planet to a state of radioactive oblivion.”

Mackler continued, “Today capitalism and its very intelligent purveyors, that is all those who consciously understand its horrors and yet organize to sustain it, have gone to great lengths to camouflage and disori­ ent its growing numbers of critics. The Democratic Party, ever fostering the illusion that the system can be effectively reformed, has always been capitalism’s first line of defense. It is complimented by a host of other firewalls against the emergence of independent expressions of working-class organization, including the present parasitic pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy.

“Selecting the least offensive of the millionaire and billionaire candidates that the ruling rich periodically offer us during the election season,” Mackler insisted, “is both a utopian pipedream and a critical impedi­ ment to principled working-class politics.”

“Socialist Action’s campaign is aimed at today’s (Top) Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action candidate for president. (Below) Karen Schraufnagel, candidate for vice president.

new fighters against injustice: at the youth who have learned from experience that their prospects are bleak in the capitalist framework, at the demeaned and ex­ ploited immigrant workers, at those who are inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement’s wide-ranging rejection of U.S. racism and its institutionalized sys­ tem of police murder, at the millions who are rapidly coming to understand that the fossil-fuel corporate magnates, like all others, subordinate the future of humanity to their private profits.

“Our campaign is aimed at working people who want to revitalize and democratize the trade unions and expand union power to the 90 percent of workers who are without unions today. It is aimed at foster­ ing the construction of a class-struggle left wing in the unions, a militant fightback current that seeks to orga­ nize the majority to fight in the political and economic arenas to challenge the bosses’ parties on all fronts.

In this context we are advocates of independent working-class political action based on a reinvigorat­ ed, fighting, and democratic trade-union movement in alliance with all the oppressed and exploited—that is, for a labor party that compliments and enhances labor’s power in the economic arena with its own in­ strument in the political arena.”

Mackler concluded, “Whenever working people independently organize to advance their own inter­ ests—in mass mobilizations in the streets, in tradeunion struggles at the point of production, on picket lines, and at public meetings and rallies—we are part of the struggle.

But we harbor no illusions in the nature of the beast. It must be replaced in all its fundamentals by the mas­ sive and concerted actions of the vast majority. That’s the real meaning of the social and political revolution that serious socialists fight for every day and seek to bring into being in a new world, where the horrors of the present social order are forever ended.” n