Some in the middle-class left have been making fun of the CPUSA for being—even more so than previous elections—one of the most fervent proponents of one of the two main parties of American imperialism.

There is a more serious question to be answered, however. What if the false argument of the Communist Party that Kerry is better than Bush, or even better than previous “progressive” Democrats, were true? What if Kerry was calling for bringing the U.S. troops home from Iraq? Would a vote for him and the Democratic Party then be justified?

As the Socialist Workers Party candidates in the 2004 elections have pointed out, the problem for working people is not this or that individual capitalist candidate, or their parties, but the system of capitalism, of class exploitation. Support for one or another “lesser evil” capitalist candidate has been a successful method the ruling class and its lieutenants in the labor movement have used for decades to prevent working people from acting to defend their class interests not only on the economic level but on the political plane too. This is the fundamental reason to oppose the CPUSA’s energetic campaign for a vote for Kerry.

“The remark heard in some left circles, ‘I will vote for Kerry but hold my nose,’ is counterproductive and demobilizing,” declared Sam Webb, national chair of the CPUSA, in an article in the August 28 People’s Weekly World, the party’s newspaper. “It may bring some momentary self-satisfaction to those expressing it. But it will do little to convince swing, undecided, or stay-at-home voters.”

This is the biggest problem the pro-Democratic camp faces, Webb continued, “is not that millions of people will have unrealistic expectations of a Kerry administration, but rather that a substantial section of voters still believe that it doesn’t make much of a difference who they vote for on Nov. 2,” he said.

“The responsibility of left and progressive people is not to spend their time bellyaching over Kerry’s shortcomings, but to convince millions that there is a choice and that the outcome of this election will have enormous consequences for our nation’s future,” Webb concluded.

The Stalinist party presents two principal arguments to back up its support for the Democrats—one of the two main parties of democratic imperialism.

The first is that the Bush administration is the gravest present danger to humanity, bordering on fascism, which makes electing “anybody but Bush” wholly justified. In an article in the September 30 People’s Weekly World, for example, Webb said the Bush administration is not a “‘normal’ bourgeois democratic regime,” but instead a “conservative-authoritarian” government. “We can’t say that it is fascistic, but sometimes traces of fascist thinking are evident in its speeches and its policies,” he declared.

But simple hate for a bourgeois politician is not good enough to mobilize and energize an electorate faced with what many consider a ghastly alternative, as Webb pointed out. So the second prong of this campaign is an attempt to prettify the pro-imperialist, warmongering, and antilabor policies and record of the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee. In this vein, the People’s Weekly World has been carrying banner headlines and articles trying to paint Kerry’s positions as “progressive” and prolabor.

“John Kerry’s stands on the major issues of the times, since the 1970s, have been a lot better than those of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Bill Clinton,” said an opinion column by Norman Markowitz in the September 25 Weekly World. “He is a progressive Democratic senator from a liberal pro-labor state, Massachusetts, as Roosevelt was the progressive governor of New York.”

The CP implies that with Kerry in office working people will have a good chance of making gains like those of the 1930s, which the party attributes to the “New Deal” policies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. This myth about Roosevelt has been promoted for decades by the union officialdom, as well as liberals, Stalinists, and other middle-class radicals.

The gains working people made at the time—like organizing the unorganized and winning Social Security pensions and unemployment compensation—were the by-products of mass labor struggles that had revolutionary potential, not of Roosevelt’s supposed benevolence.

In reality, Roosevelt made the smallest possible concessions to stave off the working-class radicalization that developed during and in the aftermath of the Great Depression. While unemployment remained above 8 million throughout the New Deal years, the government never provided jobs for more than 25 percent of the jobless.

As Roosevelt prepared the U.S. military for entry into the interimperialist slaughter in the second World War, his administration organized a week-long industry-labor conference in December 1941 that won a commitment from the union officialdom to surrender the right to strike for the duration of the war—the “no strike pledge.” This antilabor measure, used by Roosevelt to freeze wages and extract concessions from the unions, was supported by the Communist Party, which also demanded a “permanent no-strike pledge,” according to Art Preis, in his book, Labor’s Giant Step—The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55.

As the Militant explained in an August 31 editorial urging support for the SWP 2004 ticket, “the cause of the worsening economic and social crisis—from exploitation by the bosses to wars of plunder abroad—is not an individual politician or a particular party holding office, but the capitalist system and the tiny handful of billionaire families that perpetuate their rule at the expense of the vast majority.

“This capitalist class has two parties, the Democrats and Republicans. Their two party system is a trap designed to hoodwink working people into thinking that we have a choice—alternating between one gang of predators and another—and to keep us from attacking the real problem, capitalism.

“Nor are the ‘independent’ campaigns of Ralph Nader and the Green Party an alternative for working people. These are pro-capitalist third parties that are not independent from the ruling class. They serve as pressure groups on the Democrats, reinforcing the two-party con game.”

As the Militant has explained, working people do have a choice in the November elections that’s in their interests. And that is to vote socialist, to support the working-class alternative in 2004 to the parties of capitalism: the SWP ticket.  
 
 
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