Vote Socialist, Not a Union Dime for the Democrat Party!

[Photo: Chris Hutchinson]

Vote Socialist, Critical Support for Chris Hutchinson for Congress

Not a Union Dime to the Anti-Working Class Democrat Party!

By Steven Argue

Connecticut has its first socialist candidate on the ballot since 1960. His name is Chris Hutchinson and he’s a candidate for the group Socialist Action. Hutchinson is running on a program that calls for, among other things, creating jobs, ending cuts to social services, and protecting Social Security. How does he say this will be paid for? Through cutting spending on prisons and the military. This a message very different from that of the Democrats. With the Democrats pretending to represent the interests of working people, Hutchinson’s kind of message in opposition to the actions of elected Democrats is spot on.

Would the ruling class ever allow such a program short of a revolution in the United States? Yes, at least in part, because they have done it before with the New Deal of the 1930s. Similar pressures of mass strikes, demonstrations, and working class socialist consciousness today could win big changes again. The reason for the successes of the movement at that time was largely due to a socialist leadership in the working class.

Three socialist groups, the Communist Party, the Trotskyist Communist League of America, and the Workers' Party were important leaders of that movement. The Trotskyists led the ground breaking 1934 Minneapolis General Strike, the Workers' Party did the same with the Toledo Autolite Strike, and likewise the Communist Party led the equally important 1934 San Francisco General Strike. These strikes helped bring about the rise 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.

Had the working class taken power in a workers’ revolution at that time and put American society under the democratic control of the working class, through workers’ democracy and a socialist economy run for human and environmental needs, rather than profit, we would not be in the mess we are now. Unemployment would have been eliminated. So to would U.S. imperialist wars. We would have socialized healthcare. And the oil and coal companies would not have had the power to push us to the edge of the precipice where we now sit as a result of climate change.

Yet, the rebellion of the working class of the 1930s brought many important gains for the working class, and another successful rebellion like it would be a first step towards defending and extending the gains of the 1930s, and going beyond that in the struggle for socialism in the United States.

A key to building the kind of resistance that forced the ruling class to give us the type of New Deal reforms won in the 1930s is building a socialist movement that can be seen as a clear alternative to the Democrats. Likewise, the “leaders” of the labor unions need to stop squandering our union dues on electing Democrats and instead put that money towards strike funds that strengthen the working class’s ability to hit the bosses where it counts, in the pocket books, and in so doing win demands.

The fact that Chris Hutchinson is the first socialist candidate on the Connecticut ballot for fifty years is evidence of the fact that the socialist movement of the United States has been in bad shape for some time now. Hutchinson’s party, Socialist Action, is a product of the disintegration of the once Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP).

The Socialist Workers’ Party, the group whose founders led the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, abandoned Trotskyism for reformism and opportunism in the early 1960s. Instead of putting forward a Trotskyist program of revolutionary socialism combined with the need for workers’ democracy, they began tail-ending other movements which included Fidel Castro’s Stalinist regime in Cuba and Malcolm X’s religious Black Nationalist movement in the United States.

Yes, the 1959 Cuban Revolution was a major advance from the U.S. backed dictator capitalist Batista who was overthrown by Castro’s movement. That revolution brought guaranteed health care, education, housing, and employment to the Cuban people under a socialist economy. These were gains made by nearly every Stalinist led revolution that overthrew capitalism, and Trotskyists defended those gains in every country without giving the Stalinist leadership political support.

Like all Stalinist regimes, Castro’s did not allow workers’ democracy and suppressed Trotskyists. Likewise, while stifling political discussion within Cuba, Castro pursued his own version of socialism in one country, a policy of sabotage and betrayal of the international socialist revolution in order to gain trade from the capitalist countries. One of the more shocking examples of this was Cuba’s support for the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre by the Mexican government. In this massacre the capitalist Mexican government slaughtered hundreds of protesting leftist students. Cuba’s betrayal of the movement in Mexico helped Cuba secure oil from the capitalist regime in Mexico. The SWP, in pretending that the Cuban leadership was anything but Stalinist, had betrayed the revolutionary internationalist principles of Trotskyism (i.e. legitimate Marxism).

Today the gains of the Cuban Revolution are under threat, not only from imperialism, but from the Stalinist bureaucracy of Cuba which aims to carry out massive lay-offs and austerity against the working class. While the socialist economies of the deformed workers’ states, like Cuba, bring many gains for the working class, some bureaucrats see that economy as a hindrance to making more money for themselves and their ability to pass privileges on to their children. In the face of such policies by the Stalinist bureaucracies of Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and China, it becomes necessary to carry out a political revolution, not just to bring workers’ democracy and an internationalist program, but to defend the socialist planned economy itself from internal capitalist counter-revolution.

Yet, Socialist Action comes out of an SWP that, over time, rejected the Trotskyist program for socialist countries suffering from Stalinist rule. That Trotskyist program is one of advocating the defense of the deformed workers’ states from imperialism and internal capitalist counter-revolution while at the same time calling for political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy to bring about workers’ democracy and a healthy internationalist program. Instead, the SWP, and to a large extent Socialist Action since their formation, saw the Cuban Communist Party as a healthy political leadership of the working class. On the other end of the extreme, they at he same time abandoned even the defense of the other deformed workers’ states from capitalist counter-revolution, cheering on the capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR that brought with it a ten year drop in life expectancy and a loss of the socialist gains of the October 1917 revolution like guaranteed employment and health care as well as an end to the socialist planned economy and fair trading practices with countries like Cuba who benefited from the USSR paying higher prices for sugar than those prices set by the world capitalist economy.

The SWP’s uncritical support for Malcolm X also led them away from a Trotskyist program. Yes, Malcolm X had some good things going for him as a militant spokesperson of Black people who were catching a lot of hell in America. And that militancy was to be supported by the Trotskyist movement, but not without putting forward a socialist program that called for ending racial discrimination through the united action of the multi-racial working class and for Black Liberation through socialist revolution. Lacking this kind of clarity, what was the SWP telling their Black supporters to do? Join a religious cult that was rightly militant about the treatment of Black people in America, but that lacked a basic understanding about capitalism, women’s liberation, socialism, and religion.

As a result of these glaring mistakes, the SWP failed to build themselves up as an important revolutionary force in the Black liberation movement, failed to be an important alternative to Stalinism in the world arena, including in Mexico where the SWP’s Castroist “Trotskyism” was discredited by the Tlatelolco Massacre. And over time these types of capitulations to the existing movements worsened with the SWP of the 1980s no longer even criticizing union leaders for leading strike after strike to defeat as a result of their capitulations to the capitalist courts, cops, bosses, and Democrats.

The founders of Socialist Action broke from the SWP in the 1980s as that party abandoned all remnants of Trotskyism, but Socialist Action itself still has not come to grips with the degeneration of the SWP that began in the early 1960s. Nor are there other well-organized healthy alternatives. The Robertsonites, who split from the SWP over the very questions mentioned above, formed the Spartacist League. Yet, while they were right about many key questions, they have little understanding of crucial environmental questions, most importantly climate change, a problem that demands immediate action to save humanity. On this question Socialist Action has been far better and more consistent. In addition, the Spartacist League, despite a large degree of programmatic clarity, lacks a basic ability to talk to others as human beings and to participate in the real struggles of the working class in a meaningful way.

While Socialist Action lacks programmatic clarity on important questions, they are a clear working class alternative to the Democrats, Republicans, and Greens, so Liberation News urges support for Chris Hutchinson’s campaign for Congress. Further steps are needed to build a better Trotskyist movement in the United States and a stronger working class movement for jobs, health care, housing, education, opposition to imperialist war, and immediate action on climate change, but Hutchinson’s place on the Connecticut ballot, as well as in the struggles of the working class, represents a step in the right direction. Chris Hutchinson for Congress!

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