Electoral Politics, Socialist Policy
Brand, H.
SOCIALISTS AND THE BALLOT Box. A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS, by Eric Thomas Chester. New York: Praeger, 173 pp. $28.95. The author opposes the participation of socialists in the electoral politics of...
...Let us note Herman Benson's Association for Union Democracy...
...Chester traces this evolution in his discussion of the Shachtmanite tendency...
...Short-term considerations of "effectiveness" carried little if any weight...
...Beyond this (which Harrington would not deny), the CP's successes were not so much related to the "line" it espoused at any one time, but "because it was recognized as the U.S...
...Some sort of structuring, or creation of institutions, seems unavoidable...
...Though Chester's argument comes across as a sectarian tract, it would be an error to dismiss it...
...Yet, on grounds of principle, that war made it difficult for a socialist to lend uncritical support to its opponents...
...Great working-class parties came into being, yet their prime objectives consisted in attaining constitutional and economic rights...
...Whether or not the Democratic party can be transformed into an instrument of social democracy has been, and remains, a political rather than a theoretical question...
...Once suffrage had been extended to male adults during the nineteenth century, all political parties became sensitive to workers' interests and competed for their vote...
...The "reformist" approach of such organizations as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or one of its predecessors, the Socialist party, is contrary to "revolutionary" politics—a politics independent of establishment parties and their trade union allies...
...Second, bourgeois democracy proved capable not only of defeating fascism abroad but also of stabilizing the economy at home...
...than the Socialists...
...Some parts of the non-Stalinist left had believed during the 1930s that American society was itself drifting toward a form of fascism, and that this drift would be resisted by an ever more militant and revolutionary working class...
...Without this commitment, their politics would have little concrete meaning...
...At the same time, DSA's link to the Democratic party is more tenuous than Chester avers...
...It covered all too brief a span of time...
...But can we understand Harrington's politics without reflecting upon this background...
...Otherwise, neither consistency of program nor continuity of movement is ensured...
...Chester chides Harrington for having opposed the Vietnam War on pragmatic grounds—its destructiveness and futility...
...He argues as a radical democrat in urging that the broad masses participate in political and economic decisions...
...Militancy is dampened...
...Rather, it stemmed from a major split in the party, unrelated to its attitude toward the New Deal...
...Big as the anti-Vietnam War protest movement was, it dissolved after that war was "Vietnamized" in the early 1970s...
...Nor, according to Chester, could the organizational disintegration of the Socialist party during the mid-1930s be attributed to its continual criticism of Roosevelt's policies...
...Chester's argument cannot be pursued here...
...Chester urges that socialists commit themselves to an "independent politics . . . alongside . . . the militant rank and file of social movements...
...As the boom waned, and as blacks claimed full social and economic equality during the 1960s, a threat on the right arose: George Wallace received a much greater proportion of votes in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections than any socialist candidate ever had...
...But he disapproves of its movement from the support of worker militants (as in the early UAW) and wartime worker protests, to support of more or less progressive trade union leaders, and later (after Max Shachtman had led the Independent Socialist League [ISL] into the Socialist party in 1956) to working within the Democratic party, and, in the case of Shachtman and some former ISL members, to what objectively amounted to support of the Vietnam War...
...Chester refutes the notion that this had much to do with the CP's "effectiveness...
...These attacks were effected through parliamentary actions, hence they had to be resisted in Parliament...
...By contrast, the model envisioned by Marx and Engels (expressed in The Civil War in France) had been formed largely by the 1848 uprisings and the expectation that workers would seize power and transform society...
...What he fails to do is to situate his critique in the historical circumstances within which Harrington and his colleagues thought and acted...
...Thus, its principled attitude "continues to be of interest to socialists today because it provides us with the only case study in U.S...
...Chester's book has its flaws, as what work doesn't, but it remains a valuable contribution to the discussion...
...Their view of the Vietnam War was bound to be influenced by their characterization of Stalinism as a new type of tyranny...
...We cannot examine them here...
...Often, the erstwhile "revolutionary" radicals remained socialists in a moral, neo-Kantian sense, but their politics came to be "reformist" in method and objective...
...Many of the Labour party's founders were socialists, but its program did not commit it to socialist aims...
...THERE WAS A THIRD DEVELOPMENT that likewise shaped the thinking of socialists like Harrington, Shachtman, and Howe: the consolidation of Stalinism, first in the Soviet Union, then in Eastern Europe, finally in some Third-World countries...
...Benson, often referred to by Chester as a fighter for rank-and-file rights, comes out of the same tradition as Harrington (and Shachtman...
...CHESTER DIVIDES HIS DISCUSSION into three parts, reflecting three historical eras: the Marxist tradition, including a survey of the position of Marx and Engels on the independence of working-class parties, and of the electoral experience of the Socialist 266 party (SP) up to World War I; the Communist party (CP) and its electoral politics, including its Popular Front phase during the 1930s, exemplified by the relations between the CP and the early United Auto Workers...
...But there are others who are much more aggressive in this respect...
...In his critical presentation of Michael Harrington's politics over the past thirty years, Chester makes a number of telling points...
...He does not promise success for his "revolutionary" politics...
...At any rate, Chester does not give due weight to the views of experienced practitioners like Norman Thomas...
...open social struggle curbed...
...The rise of this work force diluted the conception of "working class," hence the politics tailored to it...
...Chester notes that "The economic boom came as a tremendous shock to the Shachtman tendency, as it did to most U.S...
...But what are the lessons that can be drawn from the experience...
...and the "Shachtmanite tendency" which, with the decline of the Communist party after the mid-1950s and the emergence of such major democratic socialist advocates as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, shaped socialist electoral politics...
...True, Chester didn't have that sort of book in mind...
...Rereading James Weinstein's Decline of American Socialism, I suspect that the SP's very stance as sole repository of a true socialist politics in the United States was a factor in later preventing it from an alliance with the FarmerLabor party of the early 1920s, which might have led to a mass third-party movement...
...Their critique of VietnamWar protesters necessarily proceeded from that view...
...Ensuring the legal foundations of labor's rights, as institutionalized in the trade unions, lay behind the creation of the British Labour party in 1902...
...In brief, those who, like Harrington, urge socialists to participate actively in the Democratic party have drawn the wrong inferences from the experience of radical parties during the New Deal period...
...268...
...Chester reproaches Harrington for his close links to the trade unions...
...IF NOT MUCH CAN BE LEARNED from the SP experience during the first decades of this century, Chester for his part questions the meaning Michael Harrington has imputed to the Communist party's move into the Democratic party during the 1930s, which, in Harrington's words (as quoted by Chester), "allowed the American Communists to play a much more effective role in the U.S...
...Should the Democratic party or part of it be taken over by sections of the labor movement, or should labor's progressive wing found its own party, Harrington and his following would surely respond accordingly...
...history of a socialist party with a mass electoral base"—even if its policy planks are no longer relevant...
...That the working class must have independent parties, or independent representation in the political bodies of its respective countries, has been in dispute at the least since the 1920s when a whitecollar work force arose as a major political factor...
...representative of the Soviet government, and this attraction overrode in importance the specifics of the party on domestic matters...
...That was surely a factor in leading Harrington and others like him to oppose the creation of a "third" party that might have weakened the traditional forces of the left, largely assembled in the Democratic party...
...Instead, the author favors networks of "movement activities" that rally working people and the oppressed through organizations of their own generating to "direct action" and the "deepening of class consciousness...
...Although it is intended to apply pressure from working people and minorities, such electoral (or "realignment") politics actually channels the pressure through such "bureaucratic" institutions as the trade unions...
...The author opposes the participation of socialists in the electoral politics of the Democratic party, arguing that such participation cannot advance socialist objectives since the Democratic party represents capitalist interests...
...Even the exceptions (e.g., Julius Jacobson) moved to versions of democratic radicalism, away from a perspective of revolutionary transformation...
...Three developments shaped it...
...In the spirit of orthodox Marxism, he stresses the "strategic necessity" of independent political action, regardless of shortterm popular support or prospect of success...
...True, Harrington may at times overstate his case, and DSA has muted its criticism of trade unions...
...Moreover, he affords the reader a thoroughly researched history of socialist politics in the United States and in doing so outlines an alternative vision...
...It is an evolution of which he approves, so long as it is away from Leon Trotsky's conception of "democratic centralism...
...Workers had previously voted mostly for the Liberal party, and continued to do so until World War I. The Labour party arose in response to employer attacks on the financial viability of the unions...
...The rise of the Labour party did indeed expand the power of British workers, and represented an extension of democracy...
...The commitment of American socialists to the labor movement is in principle determined by ideological factors (not at issue here...
...Who on the left would take exception...
...Yet, how is an independent politics or any politics sustained...
...The CP had earlier rejected any link with the Democrats, or support of Roosevelt...
...It reversed its position "in relation to the perceived needs of the Soviet state...
...He would mobilize the rank and file to attack corporate power, despite the risks of repression...
...First, there was the shattering defeat that the United States, in combination with the Soviet Union, inflicted upon European fascism...
...With few exceptions, the leading advocates of the American socialist left modified, then abandoned, their one-time "revolutionary" stance...
...However, Chester does not come to grips with this fact...
...Cautiously tailored to the framework of the country's political, juridical, and economic institutions, that rise was not a "revolutionary" development in the sense of 1848...
...Chester briefly traces the meteoric electoral rise and subsequent swift decline of the Socialist party in the United States between the turn of the century and World War I. It elected a large number of municipal and state representatives, and won up to 6 percent of the vote in presidential elections...
...Only the HitlerStalin pact in August 1939 caused a significant loss in the party's membership...
...Thomas repeatedly stressed that socialist proposals had been adopted 267 under the New Deal and later, and he eventually ceased to run for the presidency under the SP banner on that account...
...The party consistently maintained its independence from both major parties...
Vol. 34 • April 1987 • No. 2
