The capitalist society we live in by its very nature tries to hide the real forces that drive it and cloak itself in the appearance of fairness, justice and equality. But when push comes to shove and any struggle threatens to undermine the capitalists’ rule over and exploitation of the working class, the ruling class will violate every “principle” it claims to stand for in order to maintain its power.
New York City transit workers saw this in December 1999, when all the lofty talk about workers having a stake in the system and equal rights under the law were thrown out the window as Mayor Giuliani had the courts inventing fascistic laws and injunctions so he could bring the full power of the state to crush the threat of a transit strike. Last fall the whole country and the whole world got to see how the most sacred bourgeois principle of them all – “democratic equality” – was nothing but empty words when it came to deciding the U.S. presidential election.
Despite partisan differences, the Republicans, the Democrats and the Supreme Court all worked together to ensure that “order” and the “legitimacy” of the capitalist state and its rule would be preserved above all other considerations.
Democracy? It’s quite convenient for the state to maintain the appearance that the people choose its leaders democratically. But when a close vote casts doubt on the outcome, the state feels compelled to declare a winner quickly and arbitrarily. Putting an end to the doubt and uncertainty is the number one concern; as soon as the “democratic process” fails to do that, the state has to step in and pull the plug on it.
Equality? Another reason the system could not tolerate too much democracy in this election was that all the attention suddenly paid to the details of the process in Florida’s counties was revealing too many ugly truths – above all, the racism that prevails in every step of the process. The world was seeing how tens of thousands of Black people were prevented from voting or having their votes counted: police roadblocks, “lost” registrations, missing ballot boxes, early poll closings and much more prevented thousands of Black people from even casting a ballot, and on top of that majority-Black precincts had many times more ballots “excluded” than other precincts did. The truth is that these kinds of things happen in every state in every election, and the ruling class felt threatened that awareness of this racist reality would spread.
Though the Republicans are justly vilified for their crude pursuit of their partisan interests, the Democratic Party played a vital role in letting them get away with it due to their no less firm commitment to preserving capitalist order. The Democrats confined their challenge of the election results to legal technicalities and played down the issue of racism to the point of almost complete silence. Most importantly, the leaders of the mass Black and labor organizations like Jesse Jackson and John Sweeney went along with this and refused to mobilize their ranks in mass protest. That’s because they are tied hand and foot to the Democratic Party and its bourgeois interests. Mass struggles for simple justice can threated to get “out of hand” as far as they’re concerned, because they can help the masses build up their fighting spirit and raise their expectations. Thus when the Democrats decide to shoot themselves in the foot as in this election, it’s always workers in general, and people of color in particular, who get hit first.
The working class and the oppressed desperately need to break from this allegiance to the Democratic Party, foisted on us by bureaucratic misleaders committed to betraying our class interests at every turn. Their subservience allowed Clinton/Gore to get away with harsher attacks against workers – in particular workers of color – than Reagan and Bush Sr. ever dared to make. If they are not challenged, they will only let things get worse under Bush Jr., telling us to “wait for the next election” and vote Democrat.
But this last election showed everyone just how much voting Democrat is worth. It’s high time for the working class to reject the tired arguments of the bureaucrats and set a new political course. We need to build a revolutionary party leadership to challenge and replace the existing union leaderships; to lead mass actions and strikes, including general strikes of the entire working class; and to break with all the capitalist parties. What the working class needs is a revolutionary workers’ party dedicated to overthrowing this rotten, racist and undemocratic capitalist system once and for all.