4years wrote:Neither of the two should be the Democratic candidate. Rather of either of them runs he or she should break with the Democratic Party entirely, run as Labor candidate, and appeal to the unions, existing left organizations (WIL, SA, SPUSA, CPUSA, the Justice Party, the Green Party, ISO, ICL, etc.), and to working people generally for support. The campaign should be conduct along clear class lines and additional support should be drawn from the civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women's rights, environmental and other such organizations. The masses who marched in the People's Climate March, in Flood Wall Street, and in the protests over events in Ferguson should be mobilized to the cause of labor. The Occupiers should be called back out onto the streets in labor marches and demonstrations and to the voting both to try and elect a labor candidate.
What is needed is not fussing with the Democratic Party by breaking with it altogether. Naturally I urge everyone to join the International Marxist Tendency (the Workers International League in the US) and to struggle for the socialist transformation of society. Failing that, we need a mass party of Labor based on the working people and sharply to the left of the Democrats. This is the perspective any left candidate should be running on, not one of capitulating to the Democrats (not that the Democrats will ever nominate a left candidate anyway) and thereby betraying the movement by encouraging illusions in a bourgeois and anti-worker party.
In the absence of a serious left alternative, the Democrats will likely win the next election with Hillary Clinton as the candidate. In the presence of such an alternative, it is possible that a Republican might win due to the spoiler effect, but it should be noted that the Republican candidate will be a 'moderate' rather than a Tea Party supporter and that the Democrats and the Republicans are not terribly different anyway- so we should not at all be deterred by that perspective as the Democratic leadership would like us to be. However, it is very likely that the official Democratic candidate will win the next presidential election in any case. The real task is not to worry about the next round of elections, but to strengthen the labor movement in the US and to capitalize on the shift to the left in the American (and the world) working class in the recent period to build up left parties and organizations to carry on the fight in the long term. The task is not to win the elections in 2016, but to fundamentally transform society.
The building of a Labor Party as a workers' party to the left of the Democrats ultimately pull the rug out from under the Democrats and would smash the Democrat-Republican dichotomy. The American proletariat is shapely to the left of either of the two major parties and would be drawn to a Labor Party which sought to mobilize it for the struggle in enormous numbers. This would be the political awakening of large segments of the proletariat and would enable the current capitalist system to be challenged on many points. It would also contribute immensely to the development of revolutionary Marxist and other such organizations working within and in a united front with this broader Labor Party.
I imagine only a handful of people have heard of the IMT. In contrast, the CWI-linked Socialist Alternative won a famous victory with the election of Kshama Sawant in Seattle, and is spearheading the campaign for $15 an hour minimum wage nationally. As I understand it, she won her victory as a socialist, not as a Labor candidate. I think SA is prepared to back Sanders as a left candidate but not as a Democrat. Otherwise, I'm inclined to agree with you. Maybe unions will change political allegiance local by local. Whatever the level of consciousness, the high hopes people had in Obama, and his complete failure to satisfy those hopes, must have an effect. However, I'm not, from here in England, going to make a prediction about the pace of events in the US.
