There Are Alternatives
Anderson, Jim McClellan and David
There Are Alternatives JIM McCLELLAN and DAVID E. ANDERSON Johnnie Mae Hackworthe of Brenham, Texas, Americus Liberator of Valentine, Nebraska, and Princess Fifi Rich-wildlyrunningwaters...
...Money has been in such short supply that the party's Vice Presidential candidate made one East Coast swing on a $150 Amtrak pass...
...AH'campaign activity should focus on producing the maximum number of favorable votes for your candidate...
...This year, a majority of the electorate, or close to it, is expected to register its feelings about the value of American politics by staying home on election day...
...Yet it has been under fire since its enactment...
...His "radical" welfare plan would have failed to upgrade the nation's welfare system to the level of even the most conservative program of any of the industrialized countries of Western Europe...
...It's an uphill fight," Brisben says...
...McCarthy says it amounts to "unconstitutional discrimination in favor of the two parties...
...The key to the SWP's campaign and the social vision articulated by the party is what it calls a "Bill of Rights for working people," which includes the right to a job, to an adequate income, to free education, free medical care and a secure retirement, to "know the truth about economic and political policies that affect our life," and to decide the nation's economic and political policy...
...So have some 160 other Americans...
...How many completely fruitless general elections could the Democratic or Republican Parties endure without going the way of the Whigs...
...Maddox's campaign has Jimmy Carter as its prime target...
...It proposes an "emergency public works program" to provide jobs by building homes, expanding mass transportation, constructing hospitals, parks, schools, and other social necessities such as day care centers, particularly in black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano communities...
...He bought space in The Wall-Street Journal'to give assurances of his faith in the free enterprise system...
...Other parts of the SWP economic plan call for worker control of working conditions, including the right to regulate the pace of work "in the safest and least dehumanizing way," and nationalization of all "major industries from oil to food...
...Broadcast executives feign panic at the thought of making air time available to all candidates...
...Isn't it time to reexamine the wisdom of the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and to discuss whether prohibition of drugs may have created those twin problems in the same sense that prohibition of alcohol brought about alcohol abuse and widespread criminal activity in the 1920s...
...Eugene Debs, as the Party's Presidential nominee, received 6 per cent of the vote in a race against such prominent politicians as Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt...
...That doesn't satisfy me," says McCarthy...
...General secretary of the Communist Party since 1959, he is once again carrying the red banner of the CP into the U.S...
...The realistic area is in the size and weight of automobiles...
...People should not feel guilty about voting their honest preference...
...The Equal Time Doctrine is a sound, democratic provision to avoid the abuse of the public airways for partisan benefit...
...They claim candidates other than Democratic and Republican are irrelevant...
...Over the past four years, much of the emphasis on decentralization has been dropped and the People's Party message is now more Old Left than New...
...But the value of the minor parties to the voter can be greater than the influence they ultimately bring to bear on the Democratic and Republican Parties and national policy...
...It will arrange a just distribution of the output, with each worker receiving the full social equivalent of the labor he has contributed...
...Eugene Debs stated this aspect of the Party philosophy quite well: "If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are...
...In line with this, the Libertarians recognize three basic rights: to life, to liberty of speech and action, and to property...
...Because of his name and record, McCarthy has been much more successful than other minority candidates in receiving attention from the mass media...
...He was roundly criticized and thoroughly defeated for his efforts...
...There Are Alternatives JIM McCLELLAN and DAVID E. ANDERSON Johnnie Mae Hackworthe of Brenham, Texas, Americus Liberator of Valentine, Nebraska, and Princess Fifi Rich-wildlyrunningwaters Rockefeller of parts unknown have filed as candidates for President of the United States...
...In addition," he adds, "we have to face specifically anti-Communist provisions in many state laws...
...If he makes it, he is a good bet to be the strongest of the minority candidates perhaps even strong enough to hurt Jimmy Carter...
...At the end of August, the Party had gained ballot status in only eleven states, was collecting petition signatures in eight more, and had filed but not yet been given status in seven others...
...That is what the system ought to be about...
...Populist agitator Mary Lease, famous for advising farmers "to raise less corn and more hell," described her party's radical Presidential nominee in 1892 as having been "made a regular walking omelet by the Southern chivalry of Georgia...
...The Democratic and Republican Parties are America's last line of defense against political parties "with a specific ideology or point of view...
...The issues are more likely to revolve around personality than principle...
...Though some independent Presidential candidacies may seem less than serious, it would be a mistake to dismiss as frivolous all candidates but Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter...
...Benjamin Spock, the 1972 Presidential candidate of the People's Party, was once questioned about the seriousness of his People's Party's efforts...
...For several years public opinion polls have shown dwindling support for the major parties...
...In 1972, primarily because of legal restrictions, Communist candidates achieved ballot status in only thirteen of the fifty states...
...America's minor parties are held together by a shared set of principles...
...we're the champions of causes not yet won...
...I just believe in the necessity of doing this...
...It also supports a reduction in work hours with no reduction in pay in order to spread out the available work and achieve full employment...
...It will draw up the necessary production plans...
...Everybody was something else before they became radical...
...Consistency across the board and the principle of nearly unrestrained individual rights characterize the Libertarian philosophy and platform...
...Richard Viguerie, the conservative theoretician and fundraiser, thought the AIP could be the vehicle for the destruction of the Republican Party and the establishment of a truly conservative party on the right...
...In this regard, the People's Party has organized campaigns against the construction of nuclear power plants in several parts of the country...
...Johnson had won and won big...
...Though 1912 was the Socialists' high-water mark for office holding, its national ticket continued to attract attention, and the Socialist Party remained politically influential in many areas for several more decades...
...We have to go back to what we did in 1938 [when the workweek was shortened to forty hours] and not try to create jobs...
...The platform states that "no conceivable balance of power can achieve permanent peace while glaring inequalities exist between developed and underdeveloped countries and while legitimate aspirations to self-determination, democracy, and economic justice are suppressed anywhere in the world...
...This blow would fall heaviest on black, Puerto Rican, and other minority women who have gained the most by making abortion legal...
...It merely requires that when time is granted to one candidate for an office, it must be offered to all other candidates for that office on equal terms hardly a subversive concept...
...If casting a ballot for Jimmy Carter is the ADA's idea of responsible voting, heaven help the ADA...
...The SLP has a relatively small, but committed following...
...It didn't work that way...
...To skeptics who find American pluralism at odds with the theory of a class structure, Camejo says: "If you look in the daily newspaper and turn to the society page, you can see pictures of people dancing...
...But these are not the criteria by which a major party campaign is judged successful...
...This class benefits from unemployment and inflation...
...More than other minority candidates or parties, McCarthy's campaign is aimed directly at the institution of the two-party system...
...Both major parties have accepted the social programs and economic policies of the New Deal...
...The head of the party used to be the postmaster general, and it was better then...
...The Socialist Party believes democratic socialism must come through education...
...In 1932," he wrote, "Communist votes were recorded in thirty-eight of the forty-eight states...
...It has seen much of its "subversive" program adopted and implemented by the major parties once public pressure became great enough...
...His running mate is J. Quinn Brisben, a Chicago teacher...
...They wrote "The Bipartisan Ballot Monopoly" in the March 1975 issue of The Progressive...
...Eugene McCarthy Eugene McCarthy is running a different kind of minority campaign as an independent, without the pretense of the organizational structure of a party behind him...
...And that, of course, is precisely what the new Federal election laws do in practice, if not in theory...
...People like Otis and Adams would have been for the Revolution even if they felt they were being well governed...
...You ask a voter who classifies himself as a liberal what he thinks I am and he says 'a liberal.' You ask a voter who calls himself a conservative what I am and he says 'a conservative.' You ask a voter who calls himself a middle-roader, and that is what he calls me...
...Formed in a living room in Westminster, Colorado, in 1971, it managed to get on the ballot in only two states in 1972...
...He has been arrested a number of times for antiwar activities, but never convicted of any crime...
...The ticket is on the ballot of nine states this fall: Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota (Industrial Government Party), New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin...
...Of the two, the AIP has made the most dramatic move to become the electoral vehicle for the large and often unwieldy group of American conservatives who find the GOP too liberal...
...He had not succeeded in raising public awareness of pressing problems, nor could he claim that the voters had been assisted by the political campaign in understanding policy options and making rational judgments among them...
...The concept of the Presidency has to be talked about," he says, but adds that "I don't see it as an issue getting through to people in print...
...The shift has strengthened the party in some parts of the country, but weakened it in others...
...For at least thirty years, the overall policies of the two major parties have been essentially the same...
...Politics were kept in the Post Office and not in the Justice Department...
...The cornerstone of this platform, of course, is the right to a job...
...Under the first, the right to life, the Libertarians sound almost like classic pacifists, supporting the "prohibition of the initiation of physical force against others," while under the rubric of the right to property, they oppose "all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain...
...Gus Hall and the Communist Party Gus Hall, along with Angela Davis, is probably the nation's best known Communist...
...No matter what a voter's political orientation may be, it seems there is an independent or minor party candidate who more closely speaks for it than either the Democratic or Republican Parties are able or willing to do...
...Wright views the campaign as an attempt to inform the American people about the issues and move them Left...
...He proposes abolition of the Federal Reserve Bank system and a return to the gold standard, recalling Andrew Jackson's successful fight to abolish the Bank of the United States...
...While the FBI may still believe that it kept sixty-six paid informers in the ranks of the 2,500-member SWP it has not, despite thirty years of investigation, ever been able to find that the party has committed an illegal act...
...On the latter issue, the party's position is sharply distinct from Ford's and Carter's...
...The platform advocates worker control of the workplace, with workers democratically making the decisions now made by management...
...The Socialist Labor Party "The Socialist Labor Party rejects capitalism in its entirety, [and] proposes a new form of society, Socialism, that can serve the needs of all people in this industrial age...
...There is a feeling of satisfaction that comes from using that vote to register an unmistakable political statement...
...As with the Revolutionary figures, McCarthy believes that "even if the parties were governing well, it would be dangerous if the two-party system became legalized, systematized...
...he asks...
...Both liberals and conservatives would be dismayed at MacBride's foreign policy...
...Margaret Wright has not waged an active campaign, and the party's organization has proved ineffectual in promoting the ticket...
...Have they ever come to your party to take a picture of it...
...This year the party "shied away from the star system," as one member put it, and nominated a fifty-six-year-old black community organizer from Los Angeles, Margaret Wright, for President...
...He dismisses the liberals' pet Humphrey-Hawkins full employment proposal and calls for redistribution of work...
...Independents receive no financial support from Government funds...
...Independent candidates are largely ignored by both television and the print media...
...It may not be clear what a vote for Lyndon Johnson meant...
...But the campaign is expected to begin the process of reviving the Party and to foster the eventual realization of democratic socialism in America...
...This denial of a forum to independent and minor party candidates does a disservice to the people and to the electoral process...
...Spock was nominated in 1972 by a narrow three-vote margin because of a fear that many voters would support the People's Party because of its well-known candidate rather than its platform...
...The statements of Kissinger incited the death and the violence and the anarchy they're experiencing there now," Maddox says...
...They are, to use the People's Party slogan, "more committed to the next generation than to the next election...
...We want to change the country...
...As one supporter observed, "A once potentially potent force on the Left has degenerated into discredited old-line radical rhetoric...
...It is possible, of course, to discern differences between individual candidates George McGovern and Richard Nixon, for example...
...All a break-up of the industry would accomplish, he says, is to create a half dozen more inefficient producers...
...We believe in a humanistic, nonviolent revolution," writes Kenrick Kissell, Wisconsin Party secretary, "revolution achieved constitutionally by the masses of the people, which maximizes democracy, produces a classless society, ends war, poverty, and exploitation, and satisfies the basic needs of every person...
...A poll cited by Thomas Dye and L. Harmon Zeiglar in The Irony of Democracy found that 63 per cent of those who favored withdrawal from Vietnam cast their ballots for Johnson in 1964, and so did 52 per cent of those who favored "a stronger stand even if it means invading North Vietnam...
...For eighty years thereafter (except for the Civil War greenback era) the United States prospered both without a central bank and without monetary inflation," he notes...
...Those who feel it important to perpetuate this kind of politics should pull the straight Democratic or Republican Party lever...
...For example, McCarthy points to Carter's statement that he would take "personal control" of the CIA...
...Among them are Charles N. Averilj, who claims to be "the only member of the American People's Freedom Party," Loyce Lowe Browne of Mobeetie, Texas, who has "given my permission for those who are directed by God's Holy Spirit to vote for me to do so through a new party called 'Theo-Dem'," and Accountability Burns, the candidate of something intriguingly called the "MARS-Ears Project...
...It is not being talked about and liberals ought to be talking about it...
...Camejo believes the SWP has a real and radical solution, but he is not naive enough to imagine that the disillusionment will be turned into millions of socialist votes in 1976...
...The AIP is controlled by William K. Shearer of Lemon Grove, California, while the splinter from that group, the American Party, is under the direction of Tom Anderson of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee...
...The worker would also have a vote in the selection of representatives to a local grocery store council, a nationwide grocery store council, and a central assembly representing all the services and industries of the nation the All-Industry Congress...
...Both are composed of odd assortments of liberals, moderates, conservatives, and reactionaries who always seem able to support one another before election day, but are unable to support a common program once the election has passed...
...Roger MacBride and the Libertarian Party The Libertarian Party is one of the most interesting and fastest growingnew parties on the American political spectrum...
...The arms race, they contend, does not touch the problem...
...Now the people have to depend on the mass media...
...The only issue that Carter has raised is to say that he will get the fat out of the Defense Department...
...We have a ruling class...
...as it is now, the capitalists use your heads and your hands...
...The All-Industry Congress will ascertain what goods and services we the people want and the resources needed to supply them," the SLP maintains...
...Ford, says McCarthy, "supported every action to increase the power of the Presidency" while Carter, "giving lip service to the abuse of Presidential power," would nonetheless be "inclined to personalize" the position much in the manner of Richard Nixon...
...Few elections in recent history have offered the voters major party candidates of such similar records...
...There is a process of disillusionment and protest taking place...
...Americans for Democratic Action has issued a statement advising that "it would be irresponsible indeed for liberals to cast their votes for McCarthy and thus make possible the election of Ford and Dole...
...A segregationist is a man who cares enough about his own race to want to defend and protect it...
...But the minor candidates do provide an option for those who cannot vote with clear conscience for Carter or Ford...
...It supports "all struggles to preserve the ecological life-cycle from profit-motivated destruction by capitalist bosses...
...While the American Party held its convention in July, nominating Anderson, the AIP waited for the final defeat of Ronald Reagan at Kansas City...
...Domestically, McCarthy professes faith in capitalism, though he qualifies his support by noting it is not operating to his liking...
...The Party's socialist theory is the work of Daniel De Leon, a Columbia professor turned labor philosopher, who was the dominant personality in the SLP from 1892 until his death in 1914...
...instead, they try to follow a safe distance behind it...
...Because of the system's biases, it will be difficult for any of the independent or minor party candidates to mount a serious challenge this year...
...It attracts anarchists and "conservative" economists as well as former members of both the Students for a Democratic Society and Young Americans for Freedom...
...An SWP member for seventeen years, Camejo has been an activist in all the social causes of the era, beginning with the efforts to desegregate Wool-worth lunch counters in the South...
...it aggravates it by adding to the waste of resources...
...When the bosses close down plants, they should be reopened by the government under worker control," the Party advocates...
...Republican candidates...
...in others, Dick Gregory...
...There will be no disillusionment from a loss at the polls in November...
...As six-time Socialist Party Presidential candidate Norman Thomas once explained, "We're not the champions of lost causes...
...It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the major parties are so cautious...
...The People's Party opposes all "oppressive power relationships," such as "male domination, white skin privilege, privilege of adults over the young and elderly, the privilege of heterosexuals over gay males and lesbians...
...Under De Leon's plan, the Government of the United States as it now exists would be replaced by a Socialist Industrial Government democratically elected by the workers where they work in the plant, / school, hospital...
...His "drastic" cuts in Pentagon spending would still have left America with the largest military budget in the world...
...Seldom have its platforms over the past eighty-four years digressed into the specific issues of the time, which the Socialist Labor Party regards as mere symptoms...
...Voting is the only official channel for the people to make their wishes known to the Government...
...But the Party is no stranger to electoral politics...
...There is a note of irony in the fact that those most committed to the notion of using electoral politics to foster an open dialogue are not to be found among the leadership of America's major parties...
...Nor has it elected a governor or a single member of Congress...
...There is no vanguard of liberalism," he says, and he cites militarism as a major area which neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to discuss in any substance...
...On other issues Hall and Tyner call for independence for Puerto Rico, the making of "racism" a crime with prison penalties, outlawing the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, the restoration and implementation of open admission and free tuition policies at the nation's colleges and universities, equal pay for equal work for women, increased social security benefits with built-in cost-of-living escalators, free national health care, and an end to "the disruption of people's organizations by the FBI and CIA...
...In his campaign manifesto, A New Dawn for America, he cites the Congressional vote on going to war with Germany in 1917, and says: "We Libertarians propose to reverse that vote and return to a strict policy of neutrality in other countries' affairs, of non-intervention in other people's wars, of free trade and travel throughout the world...
...It's much more satisfying than pulling a cold metal lever anyway...
...Though many perceived McGovern to be radical, he stoutly denied it...
...Humphrey-Hawkins is a rerun of the full employment act of 1946," says McCarthy...
...In most states, they will have to write in the names of their candidates...
...Some 60 per cent depend on television as their primary news source...
...Certainly not forty-two...
...Eugene Debs conducted his last Socialist Party Presidential campaign from behind the bars of the Atlanta Penitentiary, having learned, to paraphrase his words, that it is dangerous to exercise the right to free speech in a country fighting to make the world safe for democracy...
...Wallace's 1968 organization, known as the American Independent Party, split before the 1972 campaign, and with Wallace's firm return to the Democratic fold, the conservative movement has reverted to the same kind of factionalism that so often plagues the Left...
...It opposes the Federal income tax, busing as a means of school desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, U.S...
...Maddox says Carter, who succeeded him as governor in Georgia, "is someone who personifies everything I despise" and that the Democrat is bent on "world conquest...
...Try calling up a photographer from one of these papers and tell him, 'I'm going to have a terrific party, come and take some shots of it.' Do you think they would come...
...Both have held the White House for about equal amounts of time since the end of World War II, and the three transferrals of power have not significantly altered the course of government...
...The truth is that these photographers know more about the class structure of America than the professors do...
...DavidE...
...Lyndon Johnson stuck to the politics of vagueness and expediency and won in a landslide...
...But even here there may be a tendency to exaggerate differences and overlook similarities...
...Still, the Socialist Party workers remain committed...
...Simon W. Gerson, Hall's manager, writing in The New York Times, noted that at least twelve states have such anti-Communist provisions...
...Proof is found in the numerous "safe" districts from municipal to Congressional level where the slim prospects of victory perennially prompt one party to allow the other to win unopposed...
...The People's Party platform calls on the American people to work toward the "creation of an authentic, classless Socialist democracy with elected and recallable working people's assemblies...
...Benjamin Spock for President and Julius Hobson, a black activist in Washington, D.C., for Vice President...
...George Wallace was fond of noting in 1968 that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties...
...Achieving a spot on the general election ballot becomes harder year by year...
...But its outlook in the election is strong for a minor party, and it should do much better than the 100,000 votes it received in 1972, when it was on the ballot in only twenty-three states...
...Now he is the Party's Presidential candidate...
...As of Labor Day, McCarthy was hoping for ballot status in thirty to forty states...
...So states the literature of the Socialist Labor Party, and with justification...
...In particular, he wants to look at the automobile industry not with a view toward breaking it up, but to find ways to establish quality controls in production, as well as weight and fuel consumption controls...
...The Zeidler-Brisben campaign has faced some stiff obstacles...
...If there ever was a time in the nation's history when candidates could appeal directly to the people, it passed long ago...
...Here are some of the alternatives: The Socialist Party, U.S.A...
...Norman Thomas observed the beginnings of the trend in 1941 toward what he called "a two-party monopoly" of the ballot...
...We're more serious than the Democrats and Republicans...
...Spock responded with feigned impatience, "Damn right we're serious...
...In most respects, the CP platform and campaign are traditional...
...In some states, Eldridge Cleaver was the Presidential candidate...
...Hall, sixty-six, from Iron, Minnesota, comes from a Communist family and he has been a long-time labor and Communist organizer...
...A country that takes pride in the claim that its government rests on the consent of the governed should not countenance such politics...
...Within that framework McCarthy says he wants a "constitutional Presidency," that seeks neither to enhance nor diminish the powers of the office within the constraints laid down by the Constitution...
...Each worker, for example, in a grocery store, would vote on the membership of a management committee, which would supervise the store's operation...
...The Party held out for the possibility that a big name "mainstream" conservative like Reagan or Senator Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican, might be its nominee...
...All of America's social problems, according to the SLP analysis, are the outgrowth of capitalism...
...We must expose the anti-detente lies of the reactionary forces...
...On the other hand, those interested in making their vote consistent with their ideals are in luck...
...It is winning, or the likelihood of it, that holds a major party together, not a desire to stand on principles and engage in public dialogue...
...For many voters, the Libertarian Party does not fit neatly into the scheme of American politics...
...Right here is the reason I'm going to win this thing so big," Johnson explained to a friend before the election...
...The Socialist Party platform of 1976 calls for socialized medicine and dental care, free and integrated education through the college level, unconditional amnesty for war resisters, a large program of public housing, financial encouragement for cooperatives, the abolition of agri-corporations, support for cooperative farming, and social control of energy and transportation, "as in any public utility...
...Shouldn't the Trident submarine be challenged...
...They all think I'm on their side...
...The People's Party Presidential campaign this year has been something of a disappointment...
...The still unfolding revelations of the Federal Government's program to infiltrate and sabotage the Socialist Workers Party should give heart to cold warriors: America may be falling behind the Soviets in naval might, but we have closed the secret police gap...
...Democracy, the Socialists believe, should be applied to the workplace as well as to the political arena...
...Johnson's strategy was to depict Goldwater as a dangerous right-wing extremist, while reserving for hisiownconstitUT ency everything to the left of Neanderthalism...
...In fact, many independents consider frivolity in politics to be the exclusive domain of Democratic and Jim McClellan is an instructor in history at Northern Virginia Community College...
...Fortunately, third parties have traditionally been willing to stand for convictions regardless of the electoral, or even physical, consequences...
...Instead of naming a distinguished "mainstream" conservative who could appeal to both Republican and independent voters, the AIP chose segregationist Lester Maddox and left the Party's November prospects in shambles...
...Capitalism has also "engendered a social climate that breeds corruption, crime, drug abuse, and mental illness...
...Both have been strong defenders of capitalism...
...Camejo and his running mate, Willie Mae Reid (a black woman who has also run against Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley), have been among the most outspoken defenders of the use of busing to achieve public school desegregation...
...But it probably is the best thing in there it doesn't do anyone any harm...
...As things are going now," the former Democratic Senator from Minnesota said, "the people, the independents, all of us will have no choice excepting that which is offered to us by those two parties...
...He would transfer the functions of the Defense Department from a "mixed aggressive-defensive mode" to that of "porcupine status," designed only to respond to foreign aggression aimed at the geographical territory of the United States...
...After all, to undertake a campaign designed to draw the support of less than a majority of the voters is not "practical" politics...
...In 1968, there were spontaneous efforts in many states to offer an alternative to Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon...
...But only a handful of the 800 delegates attending the convention heard the plea...
...So, those who want to cast a ballot outside the two-party framework will probably have to expend some extra energy...
...Twenty years have passed since the Socialist Party last offered a Presidential ticket...
...The People's Party has always felt strongly about conducting its campaigns purely on the issues...
...It called for decentralized socialism, worker control of industry at the local level, women's and gay liberation, the creation of alternative institutions such as free clinics, food co-ops, and legal aid centers, and the repeal of laws that create crimes without victims...
...We just can't afford [the big cars] anymore...
...Inflation, says MacBride, is caused by the expansion of the money supply through the Federal Reserve's moneti-zation of the national debt...
...The campaign finance law in operation for the first time this year virtually institutionalizes the two major parties...
...Early in September, McCarthy bought five minutes of prime time to talk to the American people about a matter that has disturbed minor parties for some time...
...More than any candidate in recent history his opponent, Barry Goldwater, did try within the context of< the two-party system to offer a "choice, not an echo...
...You must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourself out of your present condition...
...The SLP stands alone in the clarity of its idea of how Socialism must be constituted...
...This year it has set a target of thirty-one states...
...Soon it will probably surpass the number of Democrats...
...The People's Party emerged out of the activism of the late 1960s...
...Zeidler and Brisben do not expect to find themselves in the White House next January...
...Instead, they are found among those "subversives" and "spoilers" who make up the minor parties...
...He has also been a leading defender of the Cuban revolution, and lived in that country for three months...
...I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, somebody else could lead you out...
...We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose," says the Party's statement of principles...
...Aiming for ballot status in some forty states and seeking to double its $300,000 1972 campaign chest, the SWP bids fair to continue to be the most successful of the traditional Left parties...
...The Pentagon Papers revealed, however, that while he was giving such public assurances, he was privately making preparations to do the opposite...
...The safest course is to be vague or, when pressure is irresistible, to move only far enough to provide nominal appeasement while keeping backlash to a minimum...
...The product of the process is the determination only of who will rule, not how...
...He marks 1917 and Woodrow Wilson's crusade to "make the world safe for democracy" as a disastrous turning point for the United States...
...At the same time, he would withdraw U.S...
...Restrictive ballot laws and an organization rusty after its twenty-year abstinence from national politics have combined to prevent the Party's candidates from appearing on the ballot of all but about eight states New Jersey, Wisconsin, Iowa, North Dakota, New Mexico, Minnesota, Washington, and, pending official certification, New York...
...In many respects, the McCarthy campaign is like that: a campaign about process, about procedures, about conceptions of government as well as issues...
...This year, the broadcasters and major parties came up with a scheme to circumvent the Doctrine and allow free time for Carter-Ford debates to the exclusion of other Presidential candidates...
...At the convention, both Maddox and his running mate, former Mayor William Dyke of Madison, Wisconsin, pleaded for unity within the conservative movement...
...MacBride takes a similar approach to such issues as crime and drugs, arguing that the major part of those problems could be solved by throwing out most of the anti-drug use laws...
...The Vice Presidential nominee is Connie Blomen of Ipswich, Massachusetts...
...Maddox and the American Independent Party George Wallace has been one of the most charismatic and successful non-major party candidates in the last twenty-five years...
...There is also the problem of getting the message to the people...
...overturning the 1973 Supreme Court decision, says Camejo, "would mean returning women to the hands of back-alley butchers, to needless misery, and, in some cases, even death...
...In 1971, these autonomous state parties established ties and nominated a common slate composed of Dr...
...The number of independents already surpasses Republican Party membership...
...This does not promise to be the conservatives' year...
...Both have supported interventions abroad, the Cold War, the arms race, the Korean war, the war in Indochina, enormous military budgets...
...In addition, the campaign calls for reduction of the workweek to thirty hours while maintaining forty-hour pay levels, and an end to all sales taxes and income taxes on families earning less than $25,000...
...Since the problems stem from a common source, it would be folly to treat them separately...
...The extra effort is worth the trouble...
...and allocate these to the various industries...
...It will not be clear what a vote for Jimmy Carter means...
...But the drive to maximize votes spoils this textbook vision of the electoral process...
...I'm a segregationist," Maddox told reporters when he arrived at the convention...
...It does not view itself as an elite destined to take charge of the bewildered masses and lead them to victory...
...The Camejo campaign, which has been going on since December 1974, stresses traditional socialist themes: the decline of capitalism as demonstrated by the twin crises of inflation and unemployment, and the root cause of those crises as the class structure of American society...
...Seventy-nine cities in twenty-four states had Socialist Party mayors...
...The corporate candidates act as if detente is some kind of parlor game like charades or scrabble," he says...
...They have also been outspoken on the issues of women's rights (the party is a strong supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment) and abortion rights...
...With that theme, stressed in a hundred different ways, the Socialist Workers Party has been running one of its most ambitious and successful campaigns since Leon Trotsky's American followers founded the revolutionary party in 1938...
...electoral fray...
...Peter Camejo and the Socialist Workers Party "Capitalism won't even work on paper," says Peter Camejo...
...Historically," observes Frank Zeidler, the 1976 Presidential nominee of the Socialist Party, "the minor parties have always furnished the lead in ideas, and when popular movements started going toward those ideas, the major parties took them over...
...Anderson is on the Washington staff of United Press International...
...It is an elementary obligation of society to guarantee steady work for everyone," the Party believes...
...It may be a major part of the minor party spectrum for some time...
...Then he adds: "Ask your economics professor how the newspaper photographers all over this country know which parties to go to, if there is no ruling class...
...The SLP Presidential candidate is Jules Levin, a Marine Corps veteran, former store clerk and bartender, and now an apartment building manager in Haddonfield, New Jersey...
...Carter is for the Trident, everyone is for the Trident...
...Honesty, trust, strong leadership, faith in America, beautiful children, charming spouse, charismatic smile these are more prdfrtable campaign issues than the urgent problems of the day: 1 Lyndon Johnson's successful 1964 Presidential campaign offers a good example of the rewards.and consequences for obscuring issues in a political campaign...
...intelligence community has been infiltrated by Soviet KGB agents, and for a review of the loyalty of State Department employes...
...Both parties work to attract diverse and even conflicting interests...
...Prejudice against minorities has its roots in the efforts of capitalists to divide workers and create a cheap pool of labor...
...They like to picture the two great parties as the champions of opposing viewpoints, vying for public support by verbally slugging it out over the issues...
...Margaret Wright and Benjamin Spock People's Party is the name used collectively by a confederation of state and local minor parties which includes such political groupings as the Peace and Freedom Party, Michigan Human Rights Party, New Party, Working People's Party, and sometimes the Vermont Liberty Union...
...But Thomas Bailey, who financed his entire Presidential campaign on his American Express, Diner's Club, BankAmericard, and Gulf credit cards, has withdrawn and declared bankruptcy...
...It calls for an investigation to see if the U.S...
...In particular, he singles out the notion of a "weapons gap," and claims it is as mythical now as it was in the 1950s and 1960s...
...What the party believes in is democratic socialism...
...She told a Detroit audience, "Nobody was born into this world wearing a red diaper...
...The Socialist Workers Party would finance the program by ending Defense Department expenditures Camejo calls it the "war budget" and raising taxes on big industry and placing a 100 per cent tax on all incomes over $25,000...
...A candidate not mentioned before Walter Cronkite proclaims, "And that's the way it is," doesn't exist...
...And in Camejo, a thirty-six-year-old New Yorker born of Venezuelan parents, the "Trots," as they are known on the Left, have fielded one of their most articulate and attractive candidates...
...Spock is the Party's Vice Presidential candidate...
...With regard to pollution, capitalists, driven by "a hunger for profits and by the pressure of competition," willfully destroy the environment...
...When you have a crisis, people seek radical solutions...
...In 1972, the People's Party received a larger vote than any of the other Left parties...
...People don't seem to regard us as wild-eyed fanatics anymore," said Camejo after one of his visits to an unemployment line...
...The class analysis of American society is not limited to economic issues, however...
...This is a good year for people to free themselves from politics as usual and use their vote to express their convictions...
...The Democratic and Republican Parties do not attempt to shape public opinion...
...Some of the minor candidates might also do well enough to send the country a message...
...The fact that the Democratic and Republican Parties compete for the same constituency the entire voting public explains in part why their policies are so similar...
...political organizations, and has put the party's and Camejo's names on the front pages of newspapers across the country...
...But instead the liberals are saying break up the big auto companies, which just doesn't have any relevance...
...But a vote for the Libertarian Party or the Socialist Party carries a clear message...
...Party energies have been directed more toward local campaigns and projects than toward building on a national level...
...That is what Nixon did...
...As Eugene Debs once said, "I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want and get it...
...To dispel any doubt about the seriousness of minor parties, one need only ponder the fact that the Socialist Labor Party has resolutely fielded a Presidential slate in every election since 1892 and has yet to receive its first electoral vote...
...For example, wars "grow out of the economic competition between rival ruling classes for world markets, sources of raw materials and spheres of influence...
...The central issue is capitalism, and the SLP prescription has been remarkably consistent through the years...
...A vote for the Socialist Labor Party is a clear vote for this system of industrial government...
...And that was enough for some delegates to refuse to back the former Georgia governor...
...membership in the United Nations, decriminalization of marijuana, and amnesty for draft resisters...
...It was only recently that you began to have the idea of the President as the titular head of the party...
...The Maddox platform is a catalogue of conservative complaints and discontents...
...The Socialists proclaim that "no human being is foreign" in their eyes...
...The American Revolution," he says, "was concerned about rules and process as well as issues...
...He faults both Ford and Carter on the issue...
...It has also been helped immeasurably by its $40 million law suit against the Government charging illegal disruption, harassment, and spying on the party...
...A country that prides itself on fair elections should be appalled to learn its incumbent parties have legislated more than $40 million to underwrite their own campaigns while excluding such assistance to those who would oppose them...
...They only want to win elections...
...Socialist Labor Party's program is noteworthy for its clarity...
...We wanted to stress the point of an independent Presidency," he says...
...Yet, the manner of Johnson's victory was perfectly acceptable by the standards of politics in the two-party system...
...Discriminatory election laws, public funding of major parties, and scant media attention have the effect of rigging the elections against independent candidates...
...J. Edgar Hoover once proclaimed Trotskyism "revolutionary communism working for the destruction of this nation...
...The Democratic and Republican Parties have reacted to this collapse of support by legislating props to hold them in their positions of influence...
...Johnson assured the voters that he, unlike the "insane" Gold-water, would not "send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves...
...The wealth of the country should be redistributed and industrial production should be motivated by a desire to meet human needs rather than to maximize profits...
...On issues apart from process and concept, McCarthy believes liberals "have surrendered to Carter" and retreated to a defensive posture protecting old programs and ideas...
...It's our duty now to unify our party and to unify the country," Dyke said...
...Its Presidential candidate this year, forty-six-year-old lawyer and television producer Roger MacBride, put the party on the map, or at least in the mind of the media, when as a Virginia elector in 1972, he refused to cast his electoral college ballot for the Nixon-Agnew ticket and instead voted for Libertarian John Hospers...
...Ford and Carter have received $21.8 million each in Federal campaign subsidies...
...Because of their tenacity in raising issues the major parties would prefer to ignore, the minor parties have served the nation well...
...By the closing days of the campaign, McGovern's running mate was assuring the voters that the ticket's positions on the controversial issues of amnesty for war resisters, abortion, and drugs were identical to those of the incumbent...
...Instead, it favors a decentralized socialism that gives ownership and control to the people as a whole...
...Most had already left Chicago, and many vowed to do all they could to keep Maddox's name off the ballot in their states...
...The suit has resulted in a series of sensational disclosures of the extent of FBI and CIA infiltration and disruption of U.S...
...Are we serious...
...Like water seeking its own level, they adapt to what they perceive to be a winning position...
...Perhaps because of the Party's handmaiden status toward the Soviet Union, detente is the real cornerstone of Hall's campaign...
...Election day, the final vote tally is ultimately what the campaign is all about," the Democratic Party Campaign Manual of 1974 explains...
...McCarthy's other major domestic concern is what he labels "waste in the American economy...
...The desire to win induces the Democratic and Republican Parties to seek to represent what Gerald Ford somewhat redundantly calls a "broad based wide spectrum...
...Senator Howard Baker summed up this aversion to a politics based on something other than expediency with a warning to the 1975 Republican Leadership Conference about the dangers of polarizing "our country into a conservative party, a liberal party, or any other party with a specific ideology or point of view...
...Americans like to think that elections give them the opportunity to express a mandate to the government which acts in their name...
...In its electoral heyday of 1912, party members held 1,200 offices in 340 American cities...
...Even allowing for inflation, the difference can't amount to more than about seventeen cents' worth today...
...One of the big issues of this campaign is the fight against anti-democratic and restrictive electoral laws designed to keep independent parties off the ballot," says Terence Cannon, the campaign committee's information officer...
...It is difficult, for example, to pin either a Right or Left label on a group that opposes gun control and anti-marijuana laws, that preaches a non-interventionist foreign policy along with a reduction in the size and power of the Federal Government...
...Nevertheless, Hall and running mate Jarvis Tyner are plunging ahead, armed with the confidence that there is a new "remarkable openness" on the part of voters and that much of the Cold War anti-communism of American workers is disappearing...
...Carter has stood on the wrong side of many issues about which Americans for Democratic Action once felt strongly...
...Though the Socialist Party advocates socialism as a cure for the inequities inherent in capitalism, it finds state socialism centralized government control of industry as abhorrent as monopoly capitalism...
...But like so many candidates, both Left and Right, whose appeal has been essentially charismatic, he did not build an organization that could successfully stand outside the major parties election after election...
...literature, supplies, and party records many of historical value were lost...
...Most of the minor parties are on the ballots of fewer states in 1976 than in 1972...
...The major parties have no deeply felt values that would bring them back to the polls year after year in a losing cause...
...he personally felt the sting of American anti-communism in the form of an eight-year prison term under provisions of the Smith Act...
...For them, the news is what the television commentators say it is...
...it called its convention one week following the Republicans and hoped to capitalize on dissatisfaction among the Reagan supporters...
...They call for easing international tensions by tackling the inequitable distribution of the world's wealth...
...More particularly, in the view of the SLP, the cure is a brand that might be called Marxist-De Leonism...
...What kind of mandate can come from a politics that values winning above candor, that rewards candidates for clouding the issues, and that places personality before principle...
...But he has faced the same difficulties in getting on the ballot, and has been in court, fighting restrictive ballot laws, almost as much as on the stump...
...The MacBride campaign has generally received good coverage for a minor party effort, and there are indications that the party is growing in strength...
...The SWP extends it and applies it to the issues of racism and sexism as well, and the Camejo campaign has been especially active in those two areas...
...The major parties exist to elect candidates, not implement platforms...
...The last big-city Socialist Party mayor was Frank Zeidler, who served in Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960...
...the United States is a class society," says Camejo...
...Maddox is also critical of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, particularly Kissinger's call for some movement toward black majority rule in southern Africa...
...But the Communists do not appear to have the same chances for success as their old foes in the Socialist Workers Party, and one of the main reasons is that they have not been as successful in the battle for ballot status...
...participation in the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and other international agencies, and abolish the Export-Import Bank...
...Jefferson T. Baker has succeeded quite well so far in his campaign goal of demonstrating "how effectively and how summarily a poor candidate" can be ignored under the prevailing political system...
...Surely thirty minutes of Peter Camejo or Roger MacBride would have as much relevance as the normal diet of "S.W.A.T.," "Let's Make a Deal," or reruns of "I Love Lucy...
...Neither can claim to hold the allegiance of a majority of the people...
...Two-party politics is more prone to straddle or altogether sidestep controversial issues than promote a frank and thorough debate...
...It didn't work then and it won't work now...
...He even went to the Chicago convention of the AIP ready to run for Vice President...
...And just as the campaign was getting under way, fire destroyed the building that housed the national office...
...The cure is socialism...
...moving in any direction arouses hostility from some part of their constituency...
...Jimmy Carter has raised this style of politics to an art form...
...Hall and Tyner call for an 80 per cent reduction of the military budget and use of that money "for a different kind of war a war on poverty and slums...
...The Wright-Spock ticket will be on the ballot in California, Michigan, New Jersey, Hawaii, Wisconsin, and Minnesota...
...Instead, McCarthy believes that questions need to be raised about strategic and tactical issues: Should the United States stop producing nuclear bombs...
...He also labels as a myth the notion, expressed by both Republican and Democratic candidates, that detente has been a one-way street with all the benefits going to the Soviets...
...McCarthy told the national television audience or at least that portion of it that survived the preceding hour of Hugh O'Brien and "Police Story" that the prospects of conducting an independent challenge to the Democratic and Republican Parties grows dimmer every year...
...And the Socialist Party should know...
...The problem, of course, is Maddox's image as a clown and one-issue segregation candidate...
Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11
