Part 2, Liberation News Voter Recommendations

(Photo: Vote Jay Martin, for California Superintendent of Public Instruction)

Liberation News Voter Recommendations for June 8, 2010
Part 2, The Party Primaries and the Candidates

By Steven Argue

For part one, with introduction and recommendations on the ballot initiatives, see:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/05/19/18648343.php

Part 2, The Party Primaries and the Candidates

Vote Leonard Jay Martin, for California Superintendent of Public Instruction

This is supposed to be a non-partisan race, but when it comes to the interests of the working class versus those of the capitalist class, there really is no such thing. Leonard Jay Martin draws a thin class line in representing the interests of the working class against those of the capitalists.

The only candidate Liberation News is recommending a vote for is Peace and Freedom Party Candidate Leonard Jay Martin for California Superintendent of Public Instruction. Martin stands up against the privatization of schools and for an equal distribution of the educational budget. As Martin States:

“As to your second question, I do not believe that the level of services provided to a bankrupt district ought to be the threshold by which everything else is judged. Again, as in Oakland, there may be extenuating circumstances that justify the situation that disturbs you. I don’t know, and I doubt if any other candidate knows. And I doubt that any of them will be willing to send a communication as detailed as this to you. I can only say that if elected – which is not likely considering the political power of either Torlakson or Romero – I pledge that I will insist on fairness in the distribution of the state’s $37 billion education budget. If we stop the mad rush to charter schools our real public schools will not be as short of funds as they currently are, with charters draining off a billion or more of that money to line the pockets of the privateers who run them. ”

While the Peace and Freedom Party is nominally socialist, it lacks much of what is needed for a socialist change of society that could bring guaranteed education, health care, jobs, housing, environmental concerns over profit, and workers’ democracy. Yet, it will most likely only help in the struggle to elect Leonard Jay Martin against the other status quo, pro-privatization, anti-poor, and anti-worker candidates.

Other Primaries, Liberation News Gives No Endorsements

No to the Capitalist Republican Party, No to Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman

For the Republican Party the contest for governor seems to be mainly between the extremely well financed far right Insurance commissioner Steve Poizner and e-Bay CIO and billionaire Meg Whitman. Poizner, criticizing Whitman from the right, is trying to portray Whitman as a liberal. Yet, Meg Whitman has committed herself to immediately suspending the small, but important, steps taken with the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, opposed same sex marriage with her support for the Proposition 8, and supported Proposition 4 that would have forced parental consent on minors seeking abortion. No to the entire Republican Party!

No to the Capitalist Democrat Party, No to Jerry Brown

On Principle, Liberation News opposes both the Democrat and Republican Parties as capitalist parties funded and controlled by big capital. Continued corporate control of America will only bring more wars, austerity, unemployment, environmental destruction, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, and a further erosion of democratic rights.

The most prominent of the Democrat Party’s candidates for governor, former governor Jerry Brown, carried out dramatic cuts to welfare in the mid-1970s when he was governor at that time.

J.D. Lorenz, Governor Brown’s first employment director, tried unsuccessfully to get Brown to adopt a jobs program for the mid-70s recession. When this failed, Lorenz left the Brown administration and wrote the book “Man on a White Horse”, a book extremely critical of Governor Brown. The book quotes Brown talking of Brown’s strange fantasy of work camps for teenagers where Brown says, "The black kids can teach the white kids how to fight and the white kids can teach the black kids how to read". On women, as opposed to advocating socialist programs, like publicly financed day care, he said, "More women should be in the home, taking care of their children. Then we'd have fewer social problems." On publicly financed school lunches for lower income kids he said, “I don't know why we should subsidize school lunches. Nobody ever gave me a school lunch when I was a kid." Yet, with Brown coming from the privileged background of the son of a former governor, this statement is laughable.

As governor, Brown also helped shift the tax burden further away from the wealthy and more onto the backs of the working class. This gave the disastrous right wing tax revolt of Proposition 13 popular political support. The alternatives to Proposition 13 that Brown supported were also extremely regressive in nature and Brown failed to support a better proposal backed by labor unions. Brown’s actions helped cause the passage of Proposition 13, and the passage of Proposition 13 in turn has been a cause the California’s budget crisis and an excuse of ruling parties not to adequately fund needed programs like education and care for the disabled. For this reason some have asked, “Is he coming back now to finish us off?” No to the candidates of the Democrat Party, the other party of war, racism, austerity, sexism, environmental devastation, and unemployment. No to Jerry Brown!

No to the Capitalist American Independent Party

On the far right in this election is the American Independent Party, a party that calls for, in its platform, freedom from "from the lawless oppression of Liberal rule". They advocate, "marriage is between a man and a woman". They are strongly opposed to abortion rights, call for strong actions against immigrants, and constantly invoke “God” as well as the “rights of man” in their right wing sexist and religious extremist platform. The only point of agreement Liberation News can find with them is their defense of Second Amendment gun rights, but that commonality doesn’t mean much when a primary need for guns may well be the need to protect ourselves from people like them. No to the American Independent Party!

No to the Capitalist Libertarian Party

The Libertarian Party is a capitalist party that, while being opposed to drug laws, the invasion of Iraq, and prostitution laws, also has at the heart of its "Libertarian" program the dismantling of Social Security and the Department of Education as well as other basic social programs, and the elimination of worker and environmental protections. Advances like single payer health care? No way. The Libertarian message is that people need to take care of themselves, that there shouldn't be any such government programs, or regulations, with no government interference with the private profits of the wealthy. While they put forward reasons for not supporting war abroad and opposition to drug laws, their domestic policies would dismantle 200 years of social progress at home. No to the capitalist Libertarian Party!

No to the Petty Bourgeois Green Party

While the Green Party and its candidates generally have fairly good immediate positions on US imperialist wars and a number of other social issues, Liberation News does not support Green Party candidates because the Green Party is a capitalist party that often gives its support to the Democrats as “lesser evils”, often giving full support, or other times advocating voting for them when races between Democrats and Republicans are close. The fact that the Green Party is soft on the Democrats flows from the fact that that’s basically what they are, Democrats. They are liberal Democrats who have lost their “home” in the Democrat Party as the Democrats, and U.S. capitalist politics in general, have shifted further and further to the right.

The Green Party also fails to put forward either a socialist or a working class program. In fact, the Green Party is clear in their program. They state that they are for a system of small businesses, (i.e. small capitalism). Yet the small capitalists commonly have a smaller profit margin and often exploit workers worse than the big capitalists to make up for it. In opposition to such a vision of small and inefficient capitalist exploiters, Liberation News looks to labor struggles, breaking the labor movement from the anti-worker Democrat Party; and instead building the ability of labor to shut down production to force the bosses and their government to meet workers' demands. We call for building a revolutionary workers’ party that fights to overthrow the current leadership in the unions to carry out this kind of struggle and that has a long-term goal of the socialization of industry under democratic workers’ control through authentic workers' democracy, with democratic rights including freedom of press, as the way to fight and neutralize the power of the corporate exploiters, bring justice for the working class, and run the production of society in a way that meets human and environmental needs.

It was a massive and militant labor movement, led to large extent by socialists; that forced the American ruling class and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms in the 1930s. This was out of fear of further unrest and potential revolution. It is the position of Liberation News that the most meaningful reforms do not come from petty bourgeois reformism, pacifism, and “in and out strategies” to influence the Democrat Party, such as those promoted by the Green Party, but instead from revolutionary and working class struggle.

An example of the Green Party’s class character can be seen with former Green Party and Santa Cruz City Council member, Tim Fitzmaurice, who the Green Party never withdrew support for despite his support for anti-homeless laws and despite his general support for the repressive anti-homeless and anti-leftist Santa Cruz Police. Those positions he took reflected his petty bourgeois program and his base within the petty bourgeois shop-owners of Santa Cruz who demand these kinds of police actions against the poor and political activists. No to the petty bourgeois Green Party!

Contesting for the Green Party nomination in their run for governor are Laura Wells and Deacon Alexander.

Laura Wells complains on her website that the disparity between rich and poor has grown and that the job climate in California is very bad. True enough. But what does she blame for the problem? Not capitalism. She blames the 1978 passage of Proposition 13. Sure enough Proposition 13 has, as she says, "robbed our state of funding for transportation, earthquake preparedness, water resources, parks, firefighting, and other vital needs". Education really should also be specifically named as well because under Proposition 13 California’s educational system has taken extreme hits.

While repeal of Proposition 13 would be a step forward, the problems of capitalism and austerity in California go far beyond anything caused by Proposition 13. Other states that have no Proposition 13 are also carrying out similar austerity and are suffering similar unemployment. All of the problems caused by capitalism, from the world economic crisis of capitalism to unemployment and the drive of the capitalist Democrat and Republican Parties to make the working class, and not the bourgeoisie, pay for the decline of the capitalist economy through austerity, are all rooted in the fundamental problem of capitalism itself. A socialist society could easily provide full employment, health care for all, good free public education, and housing for all. The failure of Laura Wells to confront the problem of capitalism and to instead focus on small reforms would, if she sticks to that reformist program, put her in the position of defending the capitalist system that denies us employment, health care, education, and housing if she were elected. No vote to Laura Wells for Governor.

Of interest on the Green Party race for governor is Deacon Alexander. He is a former Black Panther Party member who also proudly proclaims that his father was a member of the Communist Party and the fact this had an important influence on him.

The Communist Party was formed in the United States from a split from the reformist Socialist Party after the Socialist Party’s international had become establishment parties across Europe with its career professionals defending the capitalist system and going so far as to vote their support to their particular bourgeoisies in their entry into the First World War, a war for the imperialist expansion of competing capitalist classes. Sixteen million people died in the WW1 with the help “Socialist International” (Second International), with the vote for war credits by the vast majority of the SPD representatives in the German Reichstag causing German communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, to declare the Second International dead.

The country where the revolutionary socialist movement became stronger than the reformists was within the Tsarist Empire where the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky opposed all governments in WW1 and called on workers and peasants to stop shooting their guns at each other in the trenches and instead overthrow their own bourgeoisies. In the most successful anti-war movement in history the workers and peasants of Russia turned on their masters and overthrew the Tsar in the February Revolution. But the February Revolution only put the reformist “socialists” of the Menshevik Party in power. The Mensheviks did not carry out a land reform, did not overturn capitalism, and started the war back up with Germany.

As a result of the betrayals of the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks led the workers and peasants to power in a second revolution, the October 1917 Russian Revolution. This was a revolution that fulfilled its promises. It ended the war with Germany, carried out a sweeping land reform, socialized the means of production, gave women basic rights like the right to vote, education, and abortion, was the first country in the world to grant Gay / Lesbian rights, formed ethnic national regions as republics of the USSR where those groups were given self-determination and the many languages that were illegal under the Tsar were legalized, made education and health care priorities, and ended government backed pogroms against Jews.

Naturally, workers around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution. In the United States an important Communist Party was formed out of a split from the reformist socialist party. That Communist Party went on to become important leaders in the labor movement of the 1930s, including the ground breaking 1934 San Francisco general strike, and in the formation of the militant industrial CIO union, all of which forced the Roosevelt administration to make some big reforms in favor of the working class which included Social Security, a minimum wage of forty cents an hour, the 40 hour work week and overtime, the outlawing of child labor, and the Works Progress Administration which created two million jobs for the unemployed. The motivation of the ruling class to carry out these programs was to preserve the capitalist system in the face of mass working class and socialist resistance, in part led by the Communist Party. While there were very important problems with the Communist Party, Deacon Alexander has some good reasons to be proud of his father’s Communist influence on him.

The Soviet Union did, however, degenerate with Stalin’s bloody political counter-revolution against the party of Lenin and Trotsky after Lenin’s death. Stalin murdered all of the original leaders of the Russian Revolution, with the exception of Alexandra Kolantai, and murdered massive numbers of supporters of Leon Trotsky’s left opposition to Stalin. The roots of the Stalinist degeneration of the USSR laid in the invasion of 14 imperialist armies after the October Revolution, including the United States, who also encircled the USSR and blockaded it economically, while the imperialist backed pro-Tsarist White Army wrecked havoc on the economy by burning crops, destroying factories, and committing mass murder of communists and Jews (100,000 Jews in the Ukraine alone).

Despite winning the war against the White Army and imperialist invaders, most of the best communists and other workers died in the war. Bureaucrats with little or no commitment to the goals of the revolution were relied on more and more for administration as a result of those deaths. That bureaucracy was corrupted even more by the economic devastation of war and imperialist blockade. Stalin’s conservative leadership had its social base amongst this bureaucracy which he granted privileges above the working class. And on their behalf, Stalin used repression against the working class to prevent legitimate workers’ democracy.

Under Stalin, other important gains of the Russian Revolution were lost as well. Abortion was banned. Gay and Lesbian rights, which had been won with the revolution, were overturned. The rights of some nationalities were stomped on as well, such as those of the Ossetians whose Republic was established under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership, but was abolished and divided between the Russian and Georgian Republics under Stalin into north and south Ossetia.

But despite the many gains of the October Revolution lost due to Stalinism, many remained despite his political counter-revolution and misleadership. One of the most fundamental of these was the socialist planned economy. It was as a result of that socialist planned economy the USSR was able to build what had been one of the poorest countries in the world into an industrial powerhouse capable of defeating Nazi Germany and capable of rebuilding after two major imperialist invasions and providing everyone with a job, housing, health care, and education. It was the positive side of that planned socialist economy, recreated in Eastern Europe after the USSR defeated Nazi Germany, that helped inspire the working class of Western Europe to fight for a social progress that they managed to win, like socialized health care.

The planned economy of the USSR was also used to better many of the traditionally oppressed and poorer regions of the USSR by giving them favored investment and lifting them up economically. Nowhere else in the traditionally Muslim world were women better off than in Soviet Central Asia, with access to higher education and, in places, more doctors were women than men. In addition, the USSR played a mixed role in the world, with the USSR sabotaging revolutions at times to gain trade with capitalist countries, and the USSR inspiring repetitions of Stalinist mistakes, but also the USSR lent important material support to the anti-imperialist revolution by doing things like giving the Vietnamese military aid to defeat the U.S. occupation and puppet dictatorships and by breaking the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, in part not only by giving trade, but also by giving Cuba a fairer price for their sugar than was offered on the world capitalist market.

In contrast to the Communist Party, however, Liberation News and the League for the Revolutionary Workers’ Party supports the ideas of Leon Trotsky in opposition to Stalinism. For the Soviet Union, like Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea today, this means we defended the socialist planned economy from imperialist attack and internal capitalist counter-revolution while at the same time calling for political revolution to overthrow the repressive Stalinist bureaucracy and bring true workers’ democracy that includes freedom to form political parties just as long as they don’t get foreign funding and don’t take up arms against the revolution, freedom of the workers’ controlled media, subsidies for any working class press or other media that meet a certain readership criteria, and authentic contested elections controlled by the working class majority.

As opposed to this Trotskyist program of political revolution, Yeltsin came to power in a coup d’etat that privatized the economy, eliminated guaranteed employment, caused life expectancy to drop by ten years, carried out bloody nationalistic repression against other nationalities like the Chechnyans, and ended favorable trade relations that were helping lift countries like Cuba and North Korea up economically. The counter-revolution in the USSR, carried out by a click within the Stalinist bureaucracy, was a world historic defeat of the working class with important lessens today for China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. Legitimate Trotskyists as well as the Communist Party stood politically on the right side of the barricades against Yeltsin’s fight for power. Liberation News stands with Deacon Alexander in seeing that his father’s membership in the Communists Party was not, as much of American bourgeois society would claim, something to be ashamed of.

Deacon Alexander is also a former member of the Black Panther Party (not to be confused with the so-called “New Black Panther Party”, which has no continuity with the old). The Black Panthers were a socialist and Black nationalist grouping who stood up to the pernicious and violent racism of the American capitalist system. For doing this the U.S. government exterminated their party through violent political repression orchestrated by the FBI. Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover said, “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Under Hoover’s command, in the late 1960s and early 70s, the U.S. government proceeded with the liquidation of the Black Panther Party through the murders of 39 members, including the police shooting of Fred Hampton in his sleep in a coordinated operation where an FBI infiltrator drugged Hampton’s drink the night the police moved in to shoot him. The FBI also carried out political frame-ups such as that of Geronimo Ji Jagga (Pratt) who was finally exonerated (i.e. found innocent) after 30 years in prison. Other framed Black Panthers still sit in prison and Black Panther Assata Shakur lives in exile, granted political asylum by Cuba, but with a one million dollar bounty put on her head by the New Jersey government. A number of framed former Black Panthers remain in prison to this day, including Mumia Abu Jamal, and Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald remains in prison as a casualty of that war who was simply trying to defend himself from the murderous rampage of the FBI and local cops.

The Black Panther Party was destroyed due to the murderous nature of the U.S. government, yet there is also the question of why the U.S. government was able to isolate them from the multi-racial working class and physically annihilate them. The deep racism of U.S. society no doubt played a role. The fact that U.S. capitalism and sections of the U.S. working were doing pretty well at the time also played an important role as well. But there is also the question of what program will achieve Black liberation in the United States. While the Black Panther Party put forward a program of Black Nationalism, legitimate Trotskyists at that time were advocating Dick Fraser’s program of Revolutionary Integrationism, a program that advocates Black liberation through the actions of the multi-racial working class and through socialist revolution.

While Black nationalism is understandable under our present racist system, there just isn’t a geographical area where a Black nation could be carved out of the United States, nor could the extreme hardships thrown on the working class by creating one ever be justified. What is truly needed in the United States is a socialist revolution led by one or more revolutionary vanguard parties that are tribunes of the people, championing the rights of all of the most oppressed, including the Black working class and leading the multi-racial working class to power in a socialist revolution that brings with it Black liberation, and among other things, full employment, and socialized health care, which would eliminate the lower life expectancy of Blacks and eliminate the higher unemployment suffered by Blacks in the United States.

Within the context of Black Nationalism, there was also an understanding of the need to fight for socialism within the Black Panther Party. There was a high attraction to Maoism within the Black Panther Party who sold Mao’s Little Red Book on college campuses. This was also understandable in seeing the Chinese people, a people who had been subjected to the exploitation and humiliations of imperialism under the U.S. imposed dictator Chiang Kai Sheck, overthrow that dictatorship and rapidly move forward on key issues like women’s rights, literacy, land reform, abolition of slavery, and the doubling of life expectancy in Mao’s time of rule. In comparison, India, a country that never benefited from a social revolution, has a life expectancy 10 years less than China, and, while literacy for Chinese women is around 95% in China, far less than half of the women of India are literate. Yet China was also Stalinist from birth, with Trotskyists rounded-up and imprisoned during Mao’s entire time in power. The top down practices of rule as well as bureaucratic privilege had been copied in China from the USSR. While Trotskyists defended the Chinese Revolution from internal counter-revolution and imperialist attack, we, unlike supporters of Maoism, did not see it as the model for socialism in the United States and put forward the Trotskyist program for political revolution in China.

Deacon Alexander, despite his history, is running as a Green Party candidate and does not put forward a socialist program. No Deacon Alexander.

A Thin Class Line, Register and Vote with the Peace and Freedom Party

The only nominally socialist party on the ballot in the California elections is the Peace and Freedom Party. As a party they lack clarity on what socialism really is, containing everything from Stalinists to social democrats to those who lean towards legitimate revolutionary socialism. While lacking much needed deeper political clarity and not drawing the needed clear class line between socialist politics and the pro-capitalist politics of the Democrat and Green Parties (even allowing Peace and Freedom Party endorsements for those parties in city elections), the Peace and Freedom Party does, however, draw a thin class line that differentiates them from all of the capitalist parties on the ballot.

In opposition to this kind of watered down socialist unity, the League for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party advocates clarity on the program of revolutionary socialism, which includes opposition the two main political currents that have betrayed socialism, those being Stalinism and the social democracy. As Leon Trotsky wrote in "Stalinism v Bolshevism" (August 1937):

"Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is above all not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current. If an unfavorable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy "sectarian." Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide."

While Liberation News sees the need for an authentic Marxist (i.e. Trotskyist) program rather than supporting the Peace and Freedom Party’s attempt at a lower common socialist denominator that includes “socialist” tendencies that long ago sold out the working class, this does not preclude us from giving critical support to Peace and Freedom candidates who draw a class distinction from the candidates of the bourgeois parties. Nor does it even preclude us from potentially running on our own candidates on our own program within the Peace and Freedom Party at some future date. Within the program of the Peace and Freedom Party still lie essential components of revolutionary socialism. This includes their advocacy socialism and workers’ democracy, as they state in their program:

“We support social ownership and democratic management of industry and natural resources. Under capitalism, the proceeds of labor go to the profits of the wealthy few. With socialism, production is planned to meet human needs. To us, socialism is workers' democracy, including the principle that all officials are elected, recallable at any time, and none receives more than a worker's wage. Socialism can only be brought about when we, the working class, unite and act as a body in our own interests. Our goals cannot be achieved by electoral means alone. We participate in mass organization and direct action in neighborhoods, workplaces, unions and the armed forces everywhere.”

This program is in contradiction with the Stalinist and social democratic tendencies that participate in the Peace and Freedom Party. In contradiction to this program is Stalinism, a movement that when it overthrows capitalism lacks workers’ democracy and government officials do have privileges above those of the working class including wages higher than those of the working class.

Also in contradiction to this program is the so-called “social democracy” or “democratic socialists”, a world movement that has both a left and a right wing. The right wing of the social democracy long ago gave up the struggle for socialist planned economies and instead became bourgeois parties, bourgeois parties that are now carrying out austerity against the working class for the capitalist class in country after country across Europe, including what Prime Minister Papandreou in Greece.

Although much less prominent, a sincere left wing of the social democratic movement also exists, with former Chilean president Salvador Allende an example. Allende was elected and carried out some deep socialist reforms of the economy, but, in league with the “social democratic” program, he underestimated the murderous counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionary socialists know that when profound inroads are made into the profits of the capitalists for the benefit of the working class, as Allende started to do, the ruling class will be on their way to kill us. Allende never armed the working class and never got rid of the old bourgeois state, which at its heart is the repressive apparatus of the military, cops, courts, and prisons. It was through the continued existence of the old military that the Chilean bourgeoisie, working with the CIA, overthrew Allende in a bloody counter-revolutionary coup.

While the Peace and Freedom Party is running for a number of seats, only one nomination, that of Peace and Freedom Party candidate for governor, is being contested. It is contested between three candidates, two social democrats and one Stalinist.

Stalinist Candidate for Governor, Carlos Alverez

The Stalinist movement is represented in the primaries by the candidacy of Carlos Alverez of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a split, with very few ideological differences, from the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party was established out of a pro-Stalinist split with the then Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party over the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.

While the Workers World Party and other Stalinists supported that invasion, Trotskyists opposed it. We saw that Soviet troops were being sent in to put down a workers’ uprising that had the potential of establishing workers’ democracy as opposed to Stalinist top down rule. We also saw that the movement in Hungary was not anti-socialist. These two basic elements fit with our program of defending the socialist planned economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe from imperialist attack and internal counter-revolution while at the same time calling for political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies in charge and for the creation of socialist workers’ democracies. The essence of workers' democracy is creating a socialist society run by neither capitalist owners nor Stalinist bureaucracy. Workers’ democracy includes the right to form parties (as long as they don't take up arms against the revolution), freedom of the workers' media (corporate control of the media will be eliminated), and the right to elect and re-call representatives through contested elections held by the workers' democracy.

Stalinist from birth, the Workers World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation went on to uncritically support every Stalinist regime in the world. The Stalinists are part of a world movement that, when it overthrows capitalism, is capable of providing everyone with a guaranteed job, education, housing, and health care, through a socialist planned economy, as well as making significant advances for women’s liberation and liberation from imperialism. Yet they consistently deny the workers true workers’ democracy and murder or jail legitimate revolutionary socialists (i.e. Trotskyists). Trotskyists fight for the advantages of socialism without the disadvantages of Stalinism. While the Party for Socialism and Liberation plays an important role in organizing actions against the injustices of capitalism from imperialist wars and environmental destruction to LGBT rights, their Stalinist program represents one of the great betrayals of the working class and, to a very large degree, is an obstacle to true workers’ power.

“Democratic Socialist” Candidate for Governor, Stewart Alexander

So-called “democratic socialism” is represented in the Peace and Freedom Party primaries by Socialist Party candidate Stewart Alexander. The Socialist Party, while not a member of the sell-out “Socialist International” (also called the Second International) which is currently headed by Greek Prime Minister Papandreou, it is not for lack of trying. They requested membership, but it was denied in favor of two groups who were part of a three way split in their party in 1972, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who supported the war in Vietnam and joined the Democrat Party and the Social Democrats USA (SD USA) who went on to join with the Reagan Administration. The DSA and SD USA each get half a vote in the proceedings of the Second International. Granted, the Socialist Party is the left-wing out of that three way split (they actually opposed the US war in Vietnam where the US slaughtered 3 million people), but they are part of a tendency that, for the most part, long ago abandoned legitimate socialism world-wide to become capitalist parties that administrator the bourgeois state.

Early in the 20th century, while the Socialist Party of the United States stayed in the Second International, it was this same “democratic socialist” movement that voted in their parliaments across Europe for entry into the First World War. By doing so they joined with the capitalist classes of Europe and the United States in slaughtering 16 million people in a war that only represented the interests of the capitalists; a war that was fought under similar Kings, a Tsar, a Kaiser, and a U.S. president to expand imperialist holdings of capitalist countries. Those “social democratic” parties that voted in their parliaments for war had become, and remain, merely new bourgeois parties supporting their own bourgeoisies' imperialist aspirations instead of fighting for socialism.

In the United States, to their credit, the Socialist Party did not support US entry into the war and Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs was jailed for his opposition. From prison, Eugene Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket and garnered nearly a million votes.

In Europe, splitting from the social democrats on the key questions of war and revolution were powerful revolutionary socialist movements that promoted many successful troop insurrections against war. In Germany this movement was led by Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg who nearly led the working class to power. Yet, the German “social democrats” of the Second International, in power, murdered Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg to smash the fight against the war, smash the fight for workers’ democracy, and smash the fight for socialism. These murders helped pave the road Hitler took to power. So much for the "democratic socialists" being either “democratic” or “socialist”.

Eduard Bernstein was a “social democrat” who was part of the capitalist government that murdered Luxemburg and Liebnecht. He had joined the other side, yet pretended he was for some form of slow transition to socialism, called “evolutionary socialism”. Bernstein also claimed that the class struggle was no longer important. In addition, he is the darling of many “socialists” who claim to be pacifists because he abandoned the Marxist idea that the capitalist government, at its heart the cops, military, courts, and prisons, needed to be overthrown to put the working class in power. Yet Bernstein was only a pacifist when it came to fighting against the enemies of the working class, when it came to killing legitimate socialists for the capitalists, he was part of the team, and when it came to waging imperialist war, his party was also part of the team. Bernstein was among those early SPD leaders who were happy with their new jobs as capitalist politicians and kept the peace for capitalist exploitation by murdering the socialist opposition. About 20 years before this happened; Rosa Luxemburg debated against Bernstein’s betrayal of socialism in her famous 1900 work:

Reform or Revolution
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm

Today, the “social democratic” parties in Europe continue to represent the capitalist class and, with the decline of capitalism, they have been leading the austerity drives against the working class in every country where they have power. These include Greek Prime minister Papandreou who not only carries out austerity against workers for the capitalist class, he also sends out the cops against striking workers and protesters demanding the capitalist class, and not the working class, pay for the crisis of capitalism. “Social democrats” of this variety are in reality capitalist politicians. They administer the capitalist state and do not call for the overturn of capitalism. Their leaders use toned down socialist rhetoric to fool workers and other progressive minded people into supporting them while the leaders get cushy jobs in the unions or capitalist government offices. In these offices they promote an agenda of class collaboration, masking the fact that they are betraying the interests of the working class with false arguments about the common interests of workers and exploiters and arguments about what the situation is rather than struggling for what the situation should be.

Against the corrupt social democracy, and against the political counter-revolution of Stalinism in the USSR, the ideas of legitimate revolutionary socialism were instead carried forward by people like Luxemburg, Liebnecht, Reed, Cannon, Lenin, and Trotsky.

Yet the Socialist Party has failed to adopt the historical lessens in Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution” and, instead say in their program, “Our tactics in the struggle for radical democratic change reflect our ultimate goal of a society founded on principles of egalitarian, non-exploitative and non-violent relations among all people and between all peoples.” These kinds of pacifist are dangerous. On the one hand these sorts of illusions can be used by the Papandreous of the world to try to promote pacifism in the working class while he at the same time carries out violence against them; on the other hand it can be a disarming ideology for more legitimate socialists like Salvador Allende who unfortunately bought into the pacifist illusions of the Second International.

“Democratic Socialist” Candidate for Governor, Mohammad Arif

Also running for governor is Pakistani born Peace and Freedom Party candidate Mohammad Arif. He poses for campaign literature photos in front of the American flag. This is the same flag that flew over the murder of 1.3 million Iraqis, 3 million Vietnamese, and over 3 million Koreans, amongst others; and has kept the world in poverty through the World Bank, IMF, unfair prices, military intervention, coups, and threats of US military intervention.

Liberation News takes no position on which is better or worse or better, the “democratic socialists” or the Stalinists. In their own perverse ways both are injecting socialist ideas into the election and none of the candidates or parties running have personally carried out any crimes against the working class, yet, so Liberation News is not opposing or endorsing any candidate in particular in the primaries except Leonard Jay Martin for California Superintendent of Public Instruction and will likely give critical support to which ever candidate the Peace and Freedom Party decides to run in the November election, but at the same time sees the critical need of building a Trotskyist party as an alternative. Join the League for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party.

Proposition 13, Vote No
Proposition 14, Vote No
Proposition 15, Vote No
Proposition 16, Vote No
Proposition 17, Vote No

Vote Jay Martin, for California Superintendent of Public Instruction

Liberation News
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