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October 2004   

The following leaflet was distributed by the Internationalist Group at the October 17 “Million Worker March” in Washington.

On October 17, a “Million Worker March” has been called at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., declaring that “by organizing in our own name and putting forth an independent workers’ agenda, we shall hold everyone’s feet to the fire.” The march has been called by dissident union officials, who are unhappy with the blank check that the top labor officialdom of the AFL-CIO has given to Democratic Party nominee John Kerry. Millions of working people are burning with outrage over the way the cynical Bush regime has trampled on them, along with the exploited and oppressed the world over. Yet the march organizers, with their social-patriotic calls to “restore America” and “restore our democracy,” are diverting this potentially explosive anger into the safe channels of capitalist electoral politics. Symbolizing this is the fact that one of the featured speakers is none other than Jesse Jackson, whose calling has always been to corral disaffected black and working people back into the Democratic fold. The attempt by the Million Worker March is to push this capitalist party to the left – a dead end if ever there was one.

Certainly, MWM organizers talk of the need for “independent mobilization of working people across America.” The union local that initiated the march, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in San Francisco, is well-known for its “progressive” tradition. In keeping with that tradition, the resolution calling for the march denounces the Bush administration for attacking union rights, waging an unjust war, labeling opposition unpatriotic, etc. with not a word of criticism of the Democrats. The MWM’s list of demands raises nothing that liberal Democrats haven’t called for in the past, starting with a “single-payer health care” system harking back to the attempt by Bill and Hillary Clinton to reform the private medical insurance industry. It calls to increase taxes on corporations and the rich, fund public education, protect Social Security against privatization, and to “slash” the military budget (that is, scale it back, rather than opposing one cent going for U.S. imperialism’s killing machine).

With the march being held in the capital, two weeks before the presidential vote, it doesn’t take advanced mathematics to see what this adds up to: a forlorn attempt to pressure Kerry & Co. into “addressing our needs and our agenda.”

In the final weeks leading up to the November 2 elections, we’re offered the “choice” between two millionaire candidates, John Kerry and George Bush, representing the partner parties of American capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans, who are competing over who can be the “toughest” commander in chief of U.S. imperialism. And as a supposed “alternative” to the two-party system, there’s a millionaire “third party” candidate, Ralph Nader, running on the right-wing populist Reform ticket with the support of some left-wing opportunists. The Republicans want to scare the population into re-electing Bush by waving around the threat of terrorism. The Democrats want to scare people into voting for Kerry by brandishing the threat of four more years of the sinister Bush regime.

As tens of thousands of Iraqis are slaughtered by the Pentagon’s army of occupation, and over 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in Washington’s “endless war” to rule the world, millions of workers in the United States have lost their jobs. Forty million lack any kind of health insurance. Real wages are steadily falling. More than 15,000 immigrants rounded up under the USA PATRIOT Act and other police-state laws have been ordered deported. More than 20,000 names are on the government’s “no-fly” list. From the outset, the imperialist war on Afghanistan and Iraq has also been a war on workers, the poor, oppressed minorities and immigrants “at home.”

Millions of working people in this country know they are getting royally screwed. They’re fed up and pissed off. The question is what to do about it.

In Europe and other advanced capitalist countries, workers are tied into the system by social-democratic parties that claim to represent, in some sense, the interests of working people. In the U.S., labor is directly chained to the capitalist Democrats. Traditionally, the way this has worked is that opposition movements are defused by the arguments of “lesser evilism,” that they have to vote Democratic in order to “fight the right.” But since Bill Clinton, this has been a hard sell, since the “New Democrats” hardly differ from the Republicans. Enter Ralph Nader, who cobbles together a populist platform appealing both to the “left” and the right, lambasting “totalitarian China” and “illegal immigrants” while decrying “corporate control” of the government. This has little appeal to “progressive” trade unionists, who fear votes for Nader could open the way for a Bush victory. So they opt for an “independent mobilization” to pressure the Democrats.

It’s by no means the first time this ploy has been tried. In 1936, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran with “Dixiecrat” segregationist John Garner as his vice president, in the midst of the labor upsurge that gave birth to the CIO industrial unions. To make voting for FDR palatable to the most conscious workers, the American Labor Party was founded in New York so that unionists could vote for the “progressive” capitalist president on an “independent” ballot line. (The Communist Party ran Earl Browder for president, but CPers were told to round up votes for FDR.) In the 1960s, there was a similar scene, when New Leftists were induced to vote for Vietnam warmonger Lyndon B. Johnson against rabid right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater under the slogan “part of the way with LBJ.” The current formula for this “lesser evil” capitalist politics is “anybody but Bush” (ABB), meaning “nobody but Kerry.” What the organizers of the Million Worker March want is for working people to vote for Kerry on November 2, while “holding his feet to the fire” by coming out on October 17.

Last June, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney had a memo sent around to all state and local labor councils informing them that the federation “is NOT a co-sponsor” of the Million Worker March, arguing that it is “absolutely crucial that we commit the efforts of our labor movement to removing George W. Bush from office.” In response, the MWM organizers made it clear that their action does not undercut the drive to channel labor’s votes yet again to the Democrats – on the contrary. Chris Silvera, secretary-treasurer of NYC Teamsters Local 808, wrote: “The Million Worker March is a crucial vehicle for voter mobilization. The timing of it, coming two weeks before the election makes the march the cheapest, most effective get-out-the-vote initiative ever undertaken by the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO.” More left-wing labor activists, such as the Maritime Workers Monitor (13 October), put out by ILWU Local 10 executive board member Jack Heyman and longshoremen in Portland and Seattle, call for “critical support” to the Washington march, “because workers in this country are catching hell and we need to organize to fight back.” But saying workers should be “leery of the participation in the march by Jesse Jackson, the pied piper of the Dixiecrat/Democrat Party,” this grouping builds support for this class-collaborationist march.

The march’s position on the war is characteristic. The ILWU Local 10 resolution mentions the “unjust” war against and occupation of Iraq, although it says nothing about Afghanistan (which most Democratic politicians support). But the demands and mission statement of the Million Worker March say nothing at all about the war, not even mentioning Iraq. Clearly, they wanted to make it possible for union bureaucrats who supported the pro-war Democrats to sign up without formally opposing the war. An affiliated “Antiwar 4 the Million Worker March” was set up under the auspices of the International Action Center and International ANSWER to put out antiwar items. These statements appeal to growing defeatist sentiment among sections of the ruling class with their call to “bring the troops home now,” and to social-patriotic union bureaucrats with the call for “jobs not war,” they don’t take a side against U.S. imperialism and in defense of resistance against the colonial occupation. The MWM decries the “undisguised class war” waged by the bosses against working people, but its conclusion is to try to pressure the Democrats to be more worker-friendly. (Meanwhile it imitates the march name used by the virulently anti-worker Louis Farrakhan, the man who wanted Malcolm X dead.) The Internationalist Group, in contrast, has called on working people to wage class war against the imperialist war, to defend Iraq and Afghanistan and defeat U.S. imperialism.