The excerpt below is from the opening remarks by Jack Barnes in a 1965 debate with Stanley Aronowitz, at the time a leader of Students for a Democratic Society. In 1965 Barnes was the national chairman of the Young Socialist Alliance; today he is the national secretary of the SWP. The entire text of this debate and two others appears in The Lesser Evil? The book is copyright 1977 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.

When you talk about the Democratic Party, or read someone discussing the Democratic Party, as a labor-Negro- liberal coalition - and when you include the great mass of the American workers in it - you are not really talking about a party membership, you are talking about a voting bloc, an electoral weight. That is, the average worker, the average Negro, who once every four years or once every two years pulls the Democratic lever, is a voter, not a party member. He plays no role, he takes no daily part in, and he knows damned little about the Democratic Party.

This is very important, because it brings more sharply into focus the basic idea that a political party's policy is determined not by who pulls the lever for it every four years. The party is defined and determined by the program it puts forth and by what set of policies and strategies in the world and at home it puts forth, and what class or group within a class these policies serve.

The class the party votes for in its program and policies, not the party that the class votes for, is what determines the kind of party it is. By this criterion the Democratic Party in the 1930s and 1940s was, and remains today, a bourgeois party, a party whose basic program is in the interests of the American ruling class. The electoral coalition forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by the CIO heads, and by the Communist Party, merely guaranteed a solid constituency, to use a term in common usage, at least for a brief period of time.

What we are really talking about when we use the phrase American labor-Negro-liberal coalition is a coalition between the owners of American industry and finance and, on the one hand, the professional ward-heelers and politicians who keep the party machinery oiled, and, on the other hand, the various trade union bureaucrats and leaders of protest movements in American society, whose job it is to bring out the ranks of the coalition at voting time to guarantee the continuance of the rule of this party as opposed to the Republican Party. They are the safety factor, they are the insurance policy, because when the general propaganda fails, when someone starts to step out of line, when the candidates of the party get to be a little too much to stomach, it's those boys who whip things into shape, who go to the workers, to the Negroes, to the socialists, and say, "Look, it's in your class interests, it's in your interests as socialists, to come out and vote for this group, as a tactic" - in order, of course, to defeat the "greater evil."

Now that we've separated the electoral votes, the coalition, and the party, which are quite different entities, we can answer the most basic question: Who really needs this coalition? If you stop to think about it for a moment, it is crystal clear that the small minority who manage to maintain their rule through this coalition - the American capitalist class - are the ones who need the coalition.

When [pacifist] David McReynolds debated [SWP member] Peter Camejo a few week ago at the forum I referred to earlier, McReynolds kept emphasizing how badly the Negroes need allies, how badly the workers need allies, how badly the antiwar activists need allies how they are all small minorities. He kept forgetting to mention the smallest minority of them all - the tiny clique that rules this country through the Democratic Party. They are the ones who are desperate for allies, because they are the ones who, if it depended on their own numbers, could never put anyone in power. In fact, they wouldn't get nearly as many votes as [New York City SWP mayoral candidate] Clifton DeBerry is going to get next week on election day. If they lost the voting bloc every election day, they would have to find a new way of ruling, a new way of fooling people, or step from the scene. The final argument of coalitionism - the alleged weakness of the American workers and their alleged need for this coalition - stands everything ultimately completely on its head, because they are the last ones who need the coalition; the coalition is what keeps the American ruling class in power.

Just as the major task, the central question, of the 1930s was whether the working class would build a political arm, so the major concern, the major task, of the politicians who serve this minority capitalist class today is to prevent the majority class from organizing itself as an independent political force and destroying this coalition.

Of course, as far as revolutionary socialists are concerned, the key becomes the break-up and destruction of this coalition and the winning over of the mass of the Negroes, the workers, the radicalized students, and the dissatisfied middle class to a new platform, a new program, and opening their eyes to the character of the leadership that has tied them to this capitalist party...

Without the rejection of participation and work within the Democratic Party, no steps forward can be taken. But rejection is only the first step.

The term independent political action, unfortunately, almost like the term peace, is very abstract and very algebraic. You know, just think of the word peace for a moment. [U.S. president] Lyndon Johnson is for peace; everyone is for peace. In fact, the more they slug it out the more they are for peace. In some ways, the term independent political action is almost the same.

Walk up to almost anyone on the street and ask, "Do you want to be independent politically or dependent politically?" They'll say, "Independent." To put any meaning, any concrete meaning in the formula independent political action, we have to go back to the basic question I discussed earlier, the class character of the party.

The Democratic Party carries out the policies and the needs of the American capitalist class; this defines its basic character. If we are going to talk about independent political action, we have to begin to define it as independent of this party and the class it serves. In other words, stop talking about independent political action and start talking about independent working class political action, or independent socialist political action.  
 
 
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