BY NICK SANDS

SAN FRANCISCO - Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate for U.S. president, is on the ballot in California and 20 other states. Some youth and others attracted to Nader's campaign praise his attacks on big corporations as a prime example of his "alternative course."

But a careful look at Nader's own words demonstrates that his campaign is designed to keep those attracted to it trapped in the dead end of capitalist politics. His aim is to reform the capitalist system.

The Green Party claims 100,000 supporters nationally. This party operates in the electoral arena, raising demands that focus on the preservation of the environment as it seeks to build a base in the middle class. Their nominee, Nader, has a long track record in the public spotlight as a "consumer advocate." His 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which targeted the lack of safety in Chevrolet Corvair cars, catapulted Nader into national attention. He has testified before Congress on numerous occasions over the years. He is a proponent of a what he terms "tools of democracy" that he says will strengthen "citizen" participation in politics.

After accepting the Green Party nomination, Nader claimed that he would not campaign on the Green platform and that he would not join that party. In introducing his candidacy, Nader stated that the Democrats are in "protective imitation" of the Republicans. "They're both totally beholden to corporate America, and the great American public be damned."

"We have government by the Exxons, of the Du Ponts, and for the General Motors," Nader said in his Green Party acceptance speech in Los Angeles in August.

In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Nader claimed he is trying to "build a new political party and progressive force in America." Nader aims to pressure Democrats
But in other interviews in the big-business media, Nader clarified that his candidacy is intended to put pressure on the Democratic Party. It provides an outlet within the framework of capitalist politics for those unhappy with the shift to the right of bourgeois politics and who want Democratic president William Jefferson Clinton and that party's representatives in Congress to be more sympathetic to their needs.

"If I really wanted to beat Clinton, I would get out, raise $3 million or $4 million and maybe provide the margin for his defeat. That's not the purpose of this candidacy," Nader told the New York Times Magazine. "Corporations will always try to pull the Democratic Party to the right, and there's got to be a pull to the left. If the Democratic Party thinks it's going to lose 5 percent of the vote - locally, nationally - they'll pay more attention."

Nader added in another interview that he is running to "bring more young people into progressive politics," and to help ensure that the Greens are on the ballot in numerous states for future elections.

When asked about the Green Party platform and its plank in support of same-sex marriage, Nader said, "Well there's about 120 different topics, and I'm not informed about a lot of them. So I don't take stands on things I'm not informed about.... I want to focus on strengthening democracy in concrete ways, concerning the various roles people play-voter, citizen, consumer, taxpayer, worker, shareholder, investor."

When the interviewer pressed him about his stance on abortion rights, the consumer advocate stated, "I'm not talking about social-relation issues. I'm not talking about issues like Haiti or North Korea because I don't want to blur the focus."

Nader's comments were made this fall as the U.S. government launched missile attacks on Iraq, the Palestinians resisted Israel's expansionist aggression, and Clinton signed bills assaulting welfare and banning same-sex marriages.

What about Nader's criticisms of the large corporations, the Du Ponts and Exxon's?

The large corporations are part and parcel of the capitalist system. Corporations are organized to protect and maximize the profits of the tiny majority who rule this country in their own interest. The ruling rich use their two bourgeois parties - the Democrats and Republicans - to safeguard these interests. They tolerate and occasionally encourage third party bids like those of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Nader's campaign this year as safety valves within the framework of bourgeois politics as long as they don't challenge their two-party system.

Nader's attacks on the corporations are designed to appeal to the frustrations and resentment of the middle class as they are squeezed by the ruling families. Nader pushes his "tools of democracy" project claiming citizens can use "democratic" institutions to reign in the corporations and to clean up bourgeois politics.

This hot air ignores the fact that the United States is a class divided society, and that workers and the ruling families have conflicting interests. As their profit rates fall and competition with their international rivals heats up under mounting worldwide depression conditions, the rulers in this country along with their imperialist rivals are compelled to assault the living standard and past social gains of the working class. Nader's use of the term "citizen" is designed to obfuscate these facts.

Nader has been a leading critic in bourgeois politics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He told the Chronicle, "Nobody predicted that the U.S. government would have to have a package of $50 billion to bail out the crooked Mexican government regime and its billionaire oligarchs. Number two, NAFTA promised us more jobs. We've lost almost 400,000 jobs because we have moved from a trade surplus in Mexico to probably a $10 billion trade deficit. And we have a deficit. We're exporting jobs - probably about 350,000 to 400,000 jobs. Thirdly," said Nader, "it's turned out badly for most of the Mexican people; they're poorer, they're more unemployed and they're ravaged by a vicious inflation."

Nader concluded his remarks on NAFTA by stating, "the borders are a nightmare, more smuggling, more pollution, more infectious diseases. The environmental commissions are toothless." NAFTA comments mirror Buchanan
On one level Nader's remarks about U.S. job loss combined with fake "sympathy" for the Mexican workers parallels the outlook of the U.S. trade union officialdom whose opposition to NAFTA is based on protecting the "American" jobs that provide these dues bandits with a hefty income stream and a comfortable lifestyle.

On another level Nader's comments on the "border" more closely mirror the coarse, demeaning remarks directed toward Mexican working people made by incipient fascist politician Patrick Buchanan. Nader has even taken to praising both Buchanan's criticisms of NAFTA and the rightist's anti-corporate rhetoric. In a Mother Jones magazine interview last summer, Nader said, "I think he's [Buchanan] learned a lot in the last few years about corporate power, especially in the context of the NAFTA and GATT fights.... And so he's called a nativist or a nationalist, but he's beginning to have a more thorough conservative critique of radical corporatism. And if he can split the genuine conservatives from the corporatists who masquerade as conservatives, he'll be making quite a contribution to American politics. There is nothing conservative about big corporations," emphasized Nader.

The Naderite-Green Party bourgeois campaign is no more an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans than Ross Perot's Reform Party, which also operates as a pressure group within the framework of the two-party capitalist system.

Socialist Workers Party candidates James Harris and Laura Garza explain that NAFTA is designed by the capitalists of the United States, Mexico, and Canada to carry through a violent transformation of relations on the land in Mexico and provide a huge labor pool for a hoped-for rapid industrialization of that country.

Harris and Garza explain that there is no "we" between workers and the ruling families. The socialist candidates urge common action by workers on both sides of the border in defense of our common class interests. The trade union officialdom's opposition to NAFTA in order to "save American jobs" cuts across building international working-class solidarity.

In their campaign literature Harris and Garza note that nationalist and chauvinist appeals like the ones generated by Ralph Nader are stock in trade "of bourgeois politicians as they attempt to bring their respective populations behind the `national interests,' be they trading policies or war moves." It is the socialist perspective that provides an alternative to capitalism's march toward fascism and war.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home