issue 3

The Clinton Campaign's Center-Right Challenge to the Left: What Is the Nature of Electoral Opposition?
by Eric Mann and Lian Hurst Mann

As the November elections approach, liberals across the nation are making pro forma criticisms of Bill Clinton's capitulation to the Right but planning to "get out the vote" for Clinton, not with apologies but with excuses. For leftists, radicals, or truly left Democrats who are appalled by the Clinton presidency but are having difficulty articulating a theoretical critique or a practical alternative, Clinton's primeval embodiment of the "lesser of two evils" poses a strategic challenge. Those who believe that there is an urgent historical need for a new multiracial internationalist left rooted in opposition to the increasingly reactionary two party strategy of transnational capitalism, as we do, cannot be "critical" of Clinton as if he were doing a poor job when indeed he is doing his job very well. We see the successful Clinton/Democratic Leadership Council crusade to move the Democratic Party to the right and to isolate and defeat New Deal and Great Society liberals as a measure of Clinton's strengths rather than his weaknesses. The current administration led by Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher, Robert Reich, et al. is fighting an international war for U.S. hegemony within transnational capitalism, while playing an aggressive ideological role at home moving the U.S. electorate to the right.

In the United States, winning elections has almost always required a coalition between the ruling and middle classes along with the upper strata of the working class: the ruling class rules while the middle class and what is left of "organized labor" frame the demands for government benefits, often in competition with lower-wage workers, the unemployed, communities of color, and immigrants. Newly-elected AFL-CIO Vice President Rich Trumka told the Los Angeles Times that the Sweeny/Trumka administration intends to organize low-wage workers so that they can become "middle class like the rest of organized labor." In fact, the AFL devoted significant resources of "Union Summer" to voter registration for the Democrats without the slightest programmatic pressure from the left. Clinton, armed with a transnationalist ruling-class strategy, a broad coalition of the middle class, and the gatekeepers of organized labor, has not failed but succeeded in cementing a stable electoral base--the Reagan Democrat at its heart.

Clinton as Bourgeois Transnationalist
Mainstream media manipulators confuse government policy discussion with psychological portraits of Clinton as a pathological vacillator. In fact, from his 1970s support of the Arkansas chicken capitalists to his late 1980s cultivation of Republican moderate capitalists from Orange County to his 1990s promotion of Silicon Valley firms as a competitive wedge for U.S. capitalism, Clinton has been a skilled bourgeois transnationalist. While many believed he could not match Bush's CIA experience in the international arena, this Rhodes Scholar is the leader of U.S. international policy in the post-Cold War era. Thus, it is entirely consistent that Clinton would appoint Warren Christopher (a corporate player from L.A. who tried to get the LAPD to act with a modicum of restraint in one of the U.S.'s most visible world cities) as Secretary of State and the late Ron Brown (a world class comprador bourgeois of color) his point man in forcing U.S. privatization plans on Third World nations.

The heart of Clinton's strategy in this phase of late capitalism is to increase the competitiveness and profitability of U.S.-based transnational corporations in the world market. This is to be accomplished by establishing the U.S. as the only superpower in the new all-capitalist world order. First, he must consolidate complete control of North America through NAFTA (the latest version of the Monroe Doctrine) and then compete and simultaneously ally with Germany, Japan, and other G7 nations for the expansion of U.S. interests in Russia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and to a lesser degree, Africa. Presumably, this growing profitability will trickle down to an increasingly unorganized work force at home and abroad. Thus, "labor" Secretary Robert Reich preaches the gospel of labor/management cooperation while unions are broken, and he makes non-binding entreaties to multinational corporations to "please" pay workers decent wages and benefits while Nike and Walmart continue to make billions through the use of child labor in Malaysia and Bangladesh.

Moreover, contrary to the deceptive liberal myth of Clinton's ineptness in the international arena, his administration is in fact effectively hostile to any self-determination strategies in the Third World and is an active opponent of socialism and progressivism internationally, equally as ruthless as Reagan. Is this exaggeration?

Clinton's blockade of Cuba and aggressive efforts to punish other nations that refuse to participate is a radical escalation from even the Reagan administration and has been condemned by many nations in Latin America and Europe. What threat does tiny Cuba pose, except to offer the last effort in Latin America (even without Soviet aid) to develop a socialist economy and national self-determination independent of the bully to the North. Clinton's efforts to starve out the Cuban experiment in free health care and universal education is one of the most significant human rights violations in the present period.

Clinton's effective domination of Mexico's Zedillo administration and his support for Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) policies furthering environmental degradation and privatization in Mexico is inflicting enormous suffering on the Mexican people. Eric Mann and Martin Hernandez went to Mexico in March to participate in the "International Conference Against Privatization" and worked with more than 10,000 Mexican bus drivers represented by SUTAUR 100 who are fighting the government's efforts to privatize the bus system even while 12 of their leaders have been in jail for almost a year (see page 6). The Clinton administration, through the subterfuge of the international "drug war," is extending U.S. military interference into Mexico's internal affairs: U.S. helicopters will now hover over the Mexican skyline in pursuit of Zapatistas and urban revolutionaries.

In South Africa, while the left wing of the African National Congress (ANC) is looking for funds to expand its social service programs and to borrow against future revenues to pay for them (just like the U.S. does to expand its military budget), the World Bank is restricting loan funds to South Africa to a six percent ceiling with the added requirement that social service programs be limited. Moreover, a U.S. consortium, led by another high ranking comprador bourgeois, former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, is establishing a loan fund to South African businesses, to expand the private sector's profitability. Yes, this fund provides urgently needed capital, but again, it successfully ties South Africa to Coca Cola, Lehman Brothers, and other linchpins of U.S. transnational capitalism.

In Russia, Clinton's electoral counterpart Boris Yeltsin, embarrassingly even for him, made up government subsidies as he went along the election trail, pledging an additional $1 billion in social service programs and benefits. Does this seem contradictory for a free-market capitalist? No, because in Russia there is now a re-organized Communist Party to his left, and Yeltsin must attempt to protect the people from some of the extreme deprivations of the new capitalist order that he, Clinton, and Christopher have ushered in. While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank regularly impose "structural adjustment" policies on Third World nations that try to expand debt to feed their people, they allowed Yeltsin to use their $10 billion loan as a re-election fund to defeat the Communists, apparently a necessary cost of doing business in the new capitalist Russia. Conversely, the IMF effectively warned Russian voters that if they voted for a communist government the fund would cut off all loans and aid to Russia--so much for free elections!

Clinton as Domestic Economic and Social Rationalist
On the home front, Clinton's strategy must, accordingly, cultivate the economically-insecure-but-socially-conservative middle class to align with the interests of the U.S.-based transnational bourgeoisie. Such a strategy must further institutionalize the racialization, feminization, and criminalization of poverty and aggressively oppose any demands on the state or corporations by the low-wage working class and urban poor. At the same time, Clinton's center-right plan must appeal to the middle class of color and middle class women on their core issues--affirmative action and abortion. Thus, it is thoroughly consistent that Clinton would uphold abortion rights but not ensure government funding for women who cannot afford to exercise that right, that he would feign support for affirmative action in government contracts and at universities but cut life and death social programs for low-income people of color who urgently need the government to act affirmatively against poverty. It is consistent that Clinton would advocate raising the minimum wage (for those able to get a job) to a still-poverty level of $5.15 an hour, but actually cut the social wage of the same workers through cutbacks in the public schools, hospitals, and transportation, dismantling support for the growing body of unemployed. It is consistent that Clinton would run for office on the promise of a nationalized health care plan, but deliver a reform-in-name-only package tha protects the role of insurance companies in financing health care and guarantees their profits. It is consistent that Clinton would expand corporate welfare--for the failed savings and loans, for subsidized international investment and even for those whose investments lost money in Mexico, for rail contractors in Los Angeles, and for hospital bailouts in L.A. County as long as the hospitals agreed to privatization plans--while continuing a cruel and unusual attack on women of color--destroying AFDC and general assistance without the faintest regard to the declining job market or the lack of early childhood care, agreeing to a five-year limit on benefits but not on poverty. All this in a quest to dismantle "welfare as we know it" and defeat "the culture of dependency." It is consistent that the military budget, 500 percent over any reasonable use of government funds, is still increasing under Clinton in a world in which the "defeat" of the Soviet Union has yielded no retreat by the U.S. military industrial complex.

In our work in Los Angeles, we repeatedly confront the Clinton administration's aggressive dismantling of social progress. The Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros (BRU/SDP), a project initiated by the Strategy Center, has been directly injured by the administration's prioritization of rail construction funding for the suburbs, contracts to corporate developers, and public service auctioning by the mayor while cutting inner-city bus operating funds to make the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) a porkbarrel pay-back to Democratic and Republican elites. Similarly, the Strategy Center's WATCHDOG environmental organization fought and was eventually defeated by the Clinton/Gore/EPA apparatus' support for RECLAIM, the buying and selling of air pollution credits, which contributed to the wreckage of the South Coast Air Quality Management District's minimal efforts to impose "command and control" constraints on corporate polluters. Further, having helped defeat the Bush administration's "Weed and Seed" program in Los Angeles, we now encounter the Clinton administration plan to continue the systematic undermining of the civil rights for inner-city youth through its support for the "war" on gangs, on poor people's "crack" cocaine, on youth gatherings in public places, and on the underground economy of Los Angeles, all reflections of young people of color resisting the brave new world order.

Moreover, Clinton is further institutionalizing a conservative, middle class "New Democrat" electoral bloc as a way to insulate himself from left pressure inside the Democratic Party. Clinton's mythologizing of the so-called "deserving middle class" has further emboldened the Reagan Democrats--white suburban and upper working-class voters. Taken as a group, this is a mean-spirited bunch that has sympathy for the Freemen but not the slaves and that becomes more greedy and xenophobic as their standard of living declines--if not checked a potential neofascist threat. They want every possible government benefit for the "middle class"--excellent public schools in the suburbs achieved by separating exurban school districts from those of the inner city, low college tuition and subsidized student loans, tax write-offs for home ownership but not home rentership, and write-offs for every real and imagined business expense (what petit bourgeois homeowner is not running some small business out of their garage). Class bias and racism allow this group to presume their government benefits a "right" while feeding an insatiable need to punish those they believe are undeserving and criminal. Thus they relish each new anti-crime bill and believe no punishment too harsh for the urban poor of color: cut welfare, cut food stamps, three strikes and you're out; while you're at it, take away lunches from immigrant school children! These are the "New Democrat" voters cultivated by California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and President Clinton.

Continue >>