Movements and Elections — You Can Ignore Politics, but Politics Won’t Ignore You

Movements and Elections — You Can Ignore Politics, but Politics Won’t Ignore You
By Brandon Madsen | SocialistAlternative.org

Given how the corporate media presents elections as one big personality contest, and corrupt politicians lie and cheat to get ahead, it’s not surprising that many working-class people have become fed up with elections.

Many argue correctly that real change never originates from Republican or Democratic politicians, but rather from mass movements in the streets. Radical historian Howard Zinn described this beautifully: “There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.”

However, many anarchists and people on the left, including Zinn, extend this to argue that we should basically ignore the 2008 elections altogether. Zinn claims we should spend only “two minutes” on the presidential election – “the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth. But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools.”

At the same time, Zinn is supporting Obama, revealing how radical sounding “anti-electoral” arguments are often used to justify supporting a big business party, the Democrats, as the “lesser evil.” Zinn argues that “Obama will be better than the alternative, so we must support him at the polling booth. But before and after Election Day, he should be subject to sharp, bold criticism to move him forward.”

However, all our criticisms of Obama will have little effect if the Democrats can take our votes for granted. As Lawrence O’Donnell, former Democratic Chief of Staff on the Senate Finance Committee, put it: “If you don’t show them that you are capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen or have to listen to anything on the left… because the left had nowhere to go.”

The fact is a majority of workers and young people do have illusions that the elections, and Obama in particular, will change things. Rather than ceding the electoral terrain to the two ruling-class parties, our task is to politically explain how Obama and the Democratic Party will not bring change, and that instead of looking to corporate-backed politicians to help us, we need to build a movement in the streets and the political arena based on the power of workers and the oppressed.

We are campaigning for Ralph Nader, the strongest antiwar, pro-worker left-wing challenger, as the best way to combat these illusions. The Nader campaign is a concrete vehicle to engage in debate and tell the truth about Obama’s real politics and the need to build a left-wing political alternative to the two parties of Corporate America.

Rather than allowing us to focus on building movements, ignoring the elections ultimately weakens our movements by leaving the electoral field clear for the Republicans and Democrats to tame, confuse, and destroy our movements as they keep public debate and people’s expectations within boundaries that are acceptable to big business.

A good example of this was when the antiwar movement threw its support behind John Kerry in 2004, even amid his shouts for “40,000 more troops.” The leaders of antiwar organizations failed to warn their followers of Kerry’s hawkish positions, and they put protests on hold to avoid “embarrassing” him, promising of course to put pressure on him if he was elected.

When Kerry lost the election despite voters’ massive desire to elect “anybody but Bush,” many in the antiwar movement became completely demoralized.

This trend continued after the 2006 elections when the Democrats were swept into power in Congress with a strong public mandate to end the Iraq War. Antiwar voters and activists were heartened by the election, but when the Democratic Congress voted to hand Bush hundreds of billions of dollars to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the antiwar movement sank into demoralization again – even as opposition to the war reached record highs of nearly 70% (CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll).

No matter how couched in radical phraseology it might be, the reality is that supporting the Democrats confuses, disorients, and fundamentally undermines grassroots movements. It puts activists in a contradictory position where they end up publicly defending candidates that do not support the demands of our movements. Union leaders, for example, paint Obama as pro-labor even though he supports anti-labor “free trade” policies.

This contradiction is not sustainable forever. Either our social movements will continue watering down our demands and methods of struggle to what the Democrats and their corporate sponsors deem acceptable, or we will break from the Democrats.

Rather than trying to ignore the election, or counter-posing struggle on-the-ground to electoral activity, we should see the two as vitally linked.

Take the example of Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq and came to fame protesting the war outside of Bush’s Texas ranch in the summer of 2005. Following repeated betrayals by the Democrats, Sheehan is now running as an independent, antiwar candidate in California against Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

She is using her campaign to spread the antiwar message as well as linking the war with other progressive economic and social issues like single-payer universal healthcare, immigrant rights, free quality higher education, and ending the war on drugs.

Instead of letting the Democrats and Republicans off the hook, Sheehan’s campaign, as well as Nader’s challenge in the presidential elections, can help pave the way for a real, mass, working-class alternative to the two parties. Such a development would enormously strengthen the movements against war and corporate control of our lives.