<<Continued from

 
Continued...The Clinton Campaign's Center-Right Challenge to the Left: What Is the Nature of Electoral Opposition?
page 2

Action in Opposition
The debate in U.S. progressive electoral circles, given energy by the early organizing work of the New Party and Labor Party, has focused on tactical organizational questions such as when to run new candidates, how to develop a dual endorsement plan so that New Party members can vote for Democrats on the New Party line, and how to develop independent candidacies without incurring the wrath and retribution of the Democratic Party and its labor establishment. But the far more profound challenge to progressives let alone leftists is to engage the Democratic Party's presently conservative and even reactionary trajectory, to realize that any alternative will involve a politics that is not a liberal extension of the Clinton strategy but its negation. Imagine, an actual Opposition!

The tactical debate about whether to "focus" on electoral or non-electoral organizing, while relevant within particular organizations trying to make hard choices about the disposition of forces, often hides the more fundamental questions of strategy and political line, whether carried out in the realm of grassroots movements or of electoral insurgencies. We have chosen to spend the vast majority of our energies, through the Labor/Community Strategy Center, on the exceedingly difficult tasks involved in building multiracial, multiclass, autonomous social movements that confront corporate and governmental elites--in the arenas of civil rights, mass transportation, labor union reform and organizing, and environmental justice. In these arenas, we reiterate, we have never had a concrete organizing campaign in which the Clinton administration was even a passive ally; rather in many cases, Clinton has been an adversary or even an enemy.

Precisely because we do not focus on electoral organizing, we welcome new breakthroughs by others in that arena. So far, however, we do not see the new electorally-oriented forms presenting a coherent, radical critique of the Clinton administration and its center-right politics, with organized efforts to actually influence national electoral politics. For example, regarding welfare rights, neither the Rainbow Coalition, the New Party, the Labor Party, the Green Party, nor any other electorally-oriented group has initiated a national campaign that would directly take on the Clinton administration, or even implied that support for his re-election is in some way conditional upon his political practice. And the "march for children" in Washington, an action by a social welfare movement with strong Democratic Party leadership, went out of its way to avoid confronting Clinton on his criminal treatment of children in his "welfare reform" package. Without opposition on key policies or cost for his betrayals, Clinton will continue to display overt contempt for the left and take liberals for granted as he claims the center-right.

An actual Opposition would go beyond liberal shopping lists of demands to foster militant social movements with a coherent programmatic challenge to the policies of two-party bourgeois democracy: 1) end U.S. imperial domination--that is, grant full rights for immigrants, forgive Third World debt, support Third World nations' struggle for self-determination in Cuba, South Africa, East Timor; 2) socialize public welfare services--protect all essential government services, such as Aid to Family with Dependent Children, universal health care, income maintenance, and public transportation, from market-based means requirements; 3) reduce class stratification--increase the minimum wage, construct a high social wage, tax income and corporations progressively; 4) oppose racism and xenophobia at all times and redress historic wrongs with reparations and affirmative actions; 5) expand the arena of democratic political rights by ensuring the right to strike, making permanent replacements illegal, prohibiting police interference in labor and civil rights struggles, and instituting proportional representation to allow third parties to elect candidates based on their percentage of the overall vote.

How Do We Vote Left?
Until recently, we were deliberating, even disagreeing with each other, about how to "vote," given our common analytical and strategic perspective. We have spent months in wide-ranging discussions with many friends who are still trying to reform the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration, leaders of grassroots movements, and leaders within our own organization and membership, as well as reading the literature of the new parties. We considered, with others, that a vote for Clinton might make a real difference, say on affirmative action. But affirmative action organizers report that the Clinton administration is withholding funds from the campaign against Proposition 209, the initiative that repeals affirmative action policies (the demogogically-named "California Civil Rights Initiative," see page 9), not wanting it to shape his candidacy in California. As we have already learned, he knows very well how to "go on record" against CCRI while fostering the very racism and xenophobia that spawned it.

Then in August 1996, the Democrats in Congress and the Clinton administration went over the line and ended our deliberation. Bill Clinton signed the "Welfare Reform Bill" that, for the first time in the 61 years since the hard-won post-Depression New Deal benefits, abrogated the federal government's responsibility to provide minimal income and food supports for the nation's poorest people. Reinstituting states' rights over social services is an act perhaps as historic as the 1877 Hayes/Tilden compromise through which northern capitalists agreed with southern plantation owners to abrogate the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed only 11 years earlier, establishing "Jim Crow" legal segregation and effectively reinvigorating the defeated slave economy. Under today's Clinton/Dole "compromise," a process of "devolution" of responsibility for poverty back to the states will allow Mississippi, California, and every conservative/reactionary state to receive federal block grants to be used however they see fit. In a nation already deteriorating into a network of armed gated communities of the wealthy surrounded by a growing mass of unemployed, homeless, and sick, this historic reversal portends escalating civil strife. Comparable to the Democratic Party's leadership in the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, no argument other than a "vote no" on the Democratic Party can now be accepted by us.

Therefore, eager for a left party organizing a national struggle in the electoral arena, we strongly disagree with any wasted-vote argument that says third parties improve the chance that Dole might win. No new left party can begin to grow without pulling votes from Democrats and taking responsibility that a left vote could create the margin necessary for defeat of Democrats and election of Republicans. While we understand that such a choice should be made judiciously, we would welcome candidacies that are seriously organized and that break radically from Democratic Party center-rightism so as to make that choice to vote third party one worth taking. But the New Party and Labor Party (we belong to both) have not yet developed a national campaign strategy and will not run a presidential candidate. And the Peace and Freedom Party poses no serious electoral campaign, but offers rather the perhaps useful option of registering a clear left vote. But, while we can vote against the Clinton administration, we cannot so easily vote for a paper party. Such a vote belies our commitment to building social movements and actually seeking to alter relations of power. The Green Party's Ralph Nader candidacy--at press time functioning as a virtually all white middle class Green operation at a sadly amateur level (Nader playing virtually no public role)--offers a possible third pole choice, a way of registering our "no" to Clinton and yes to a real social movement, the environmental movement, of which we are a part. But, Nader's stated refusal to take a stand on immigrant rights, three strikes, or affirmative action--heart and soul issues to us and our fellow members--shows his own indifference in linking environmentalism to the progressive agenda at hand. In this light, a vote in support of Nader would simply reinforce the same "you have no choice" offer presented by Clinton, that is, unless Nader seizes this moment of Clinton's unveiled reaction and decides to speak out forcefully demanding a repeal of the five-year limit on welfare and launching a national campaign against the Clinton/Dole child starvation plan, against race- and gender-based poverty, and against immigrant-bashing.

We are not abstentionists or purists, and we accept daily making choices among few options as we organize to radically expand future ones. Yet, on November 4, 1996, we will walk to the local Korean church in our neighborhood, a few blocks past the public elementary school our now-teenage daughters attended, and in the process of casting our ballots against the viscous and twisted California Proposition 209 and for the California Minimum Wage Initiative, we will most likely register our "no" votes by passing over the presidential candidates.

But until the day of the election, and even more urgently the day afterwards, we welcome organizing efforts by liberals, progressives, and leftists regardless of their voting choices to frontally assault the overall strategy that defines the Clinton administration's policies. If there are to be relevant new parties in this country, they must root themselves in defense of the young men and women condemned to prison for the rest of their lives before they even reach adulthood, the Cuban children facing starvation from the U.S. blockade, the Mexican workers permanently dismissed through privatization, the South African youth condemned to a generation of World Bank imposed poverty, the welfare mothers in Pico Union, South Central, and Koreatown, Los Angeles, feeding their kids cornstarch at the end of the month, the immigrants living in fear of sweatshop labor conditions and INS repression, the women being battered in their homes with no safe places to escape, the working poor without beds in which to sleep, and the bus riders in Birmingham and Los Angeles waiting in lines for public transportation. Such a new politics would go beyond a tepid populism with an explicit opposition to transnational capitalism and be willing to struggle for an equitable redivision of society's resources and a view of the equality of people that explicitly challenges racism and xenophobia; it would struggle primarily with corporate elites but also the increasingly reactionary sectors of the middle class and upper stratum of the working class.

We look forward to being part of a new left that--like the New Left of the 1960s that grew up in opposition to the Democratic Party's racism and Vietnam war--is willing to seize a tremendous opportunity to organize mass constituencies far to the left of the Democratic Party and create defections and a new alignment of left forces. We realize that the new electoral forces are worried about being isolated, about losing Democratic liberal and labor votes who represent potential progressive constituencies. But we believe there is a great possibility (born out of reaction if not progress) of coalescing new electoral constituencies to the left of the Democratic Party and, yes, in contradiction to it, that are looking for bold, unapologetic leadership. Social movements that "draw lines in the sand" could be led by a coalition of grassroots groups and the fledgling new electoral parties, reflected in national mobilizations but also independent oppositional candidates.

Militant national campaigns for immigrant rights, for a 50 percent cut in the military budget, for a doubling of AFDC payments, single payer health care, expansion of race-based electoral districts, and an end to the U.S. blockade of Cuba--all would place us on a collision course with the Clinton/Dole state apparatus. Let such movements come to the fore before we repeat this demoralizing electoral "choice" again in 2000: the debate about left alternatives in the national elections could be reflected in a significant slate of candidates on one or several new parties reflecting an explicit programmatic challenge to the bipartisan New World Order.

This article also appears in Z Magazine (September 1996).

LIAN HURST MANN
is a founding member of the Strategy Center and co-editor of Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices (1996). Ella es Disenadora Editorial de AhoraNow.

ERIC MANN
is director of the Strategy Center and author of the forthcoming book Mass Transportation for the Masses for Verso Press. Encabeza el "comité de demandantes" de la demanda por derechos civiles.