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The Lesser Evil or the Greater Evil?

By Walter Daum and Mark Turner

Every four years American citizens get to choose a new President and the capitalist ruling class guarantees that the choice is limited to two very wealthy men financed by hundreds of billions of dollars from the even wealthier industrial and financial corporations whose interests the US government really serves, both at home and abroad.

No wonder roughly half of the eligible voters don't vote. It's not that they lack civic virtue. Rather they understand pretty well that the politicians do not stand for them, that all the pro-business candidates lie brazenly to get votes-indeed, that their main purpose in campaigning is to delude the working-class electorate to stay passive another few years and put their hopes for a better life in an electoral system that serves only the rich and powerful.

Clinton, the Greater Evil

Yet half of the working class does vote, figuring that one candidate-usually the Democrat-is the "lesser evil." That was the case with Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. This line of thinking is a great mistake. Despite the US's vaunted economic prosperity these days, working-class living standards have been under assault for over two decades. Inflation-adjusted wage levels, for example, remain lower than they were in 1970.

Clinton carried the assault further than any Republican could. He approved the "welfare reform" that has canceled benefits for hundreds of thousands and set up slave-labor "workfare" programs like New York's "WEP." He (and Hillary) undermined the fight for universal health coverage and triggered the so-called reform of health care that has promoted managed care in the interest of the HMO's and insurance companies, resulting in a 25 percent increase in the number of people without health insurance. His "anti-terrorism," anti-immigrant, and "effective death penalty" bills have weakened civil rights for millions.

If a Republican president had signed any of these bills, the labor unions and Black and Latino organizations would have taken to the streets in massive protests. But the Democrats get away with it because Black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and all the top union officials are irrevocably committed to the Democratic Party. Activists have long known that the Democratic Party is the graveyard of mass struggles. The Clinton years proved it because he accomplished for the ruling class what no Republican could. For the working class Clinton was the greater evil.

Clinton has kept military spending at Reagan-like levels instead of delivering the promised post-Cold War "peace dividend." He continued Bush's genocidal war of sanctions against Iraq, allegedly to oust Saddam Hussein. And added a three-month bombing campaign against the Serbian population to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic. 

Hussein and Milosevic were both regional strongmen defending US interests before they got too ambitious and tried defying Washington.Neither Hussein's invasion of Kuwait nor Milosevic's oppression of Kosovo bothered Clinton-he has applauded and armed Turkey's vicious war against the Kurds and barely commented on Russia's brutal destruction of Chechnya. The real reason for victimizing the Iraqi and Serbian civilians was to show the people of the world that they risk life and livelihood if their governments cross the United States.

Now Clinton is arming the Colombian drug lords, using the "war on drugs" to bring the US military into a Vietnam-style civil war. In wielding imperialism's big stick across the world, the Democrats are no less evil than the Republicans.

Whom the Ruling Class Prefers

Both candidates represent capitalist interests, but sometimes the wiser heads of the ruling class make their preferences known and the major media follow through. For example, the 1992 election took place in the aftermath of the Los Angeles "riot," where thousands of Latinos, Blacks and working-class whites took vengeance for the exoneration of the L.A. cops who had savagely beaten Rodney King. Then-President Bush was incapable of expressing any sympathy for the massive outrage, so media opinion turned quickly against him. Clinton, who had been running third in the polls behind Bush and Ross Perot (remember him?), quickly vaulted into the lead.

This year, the big media has been more or less neutral, most preferring Bush because the rich generally feel more kinship for Republicans. But, after the conventions, Gore launched into a populist campaign mode-no doubt pressured by the third-party campaign of Ralph Nader-and pretended to attack the drug and oil companies.

Gore's fake populism endeared him to the pundits, who all of a sudden declared him non-boring for the first time in his political career. They saw that his appeal to popular issues had struck a chord, and found him more useful to the ruling class than the ever-bumbling Bush.

Debate over Nader

The Nader campaign ignited a fierce debate among liberals. One side says that a vote for Nader was in effect a vote for Bush, since it might have cost Gore victories in key states. Nader and his supporters argued that a large vote for Nader would force the Democrats to the left and establish a progressive Green Party as a future electoral force generally against capitalist "globalization"-the increasingly blatant and direct control of other countries' economies by a handful of financiers.

For working people, Nader is no alternative to the pro-capitalist Democrats. A genuine working-class campaign would be based either on the mass organizations and workers struggle or on a socialist program that stands for workers' interests against the capitalists.

There has been an upturn in labor activism this year-this summer's Verizon strike and Los Angeles' recent transit and municipal strikes, for example. But Nader does not champion these struggles, despite his appeals for union support.

Nader, however, reaches beyond his usual middle-class audience only to a narrow layer of mostly white workers. At the start of his campaign, he made no appeal and offered no support to the struggles of key importance for racial minorities: struggles against police brutality and the death penalty. His candidacy announcement said nothing about current issues of racial oppression. Lately he has learned that he has to address such issues.

Although Nader hates capitalism's big corporations and wants to curtail their power, he doesn't see that the capitalist state's machinery of repression-cops, courts, prisons-are an instrument for suppressing not only crime but working-class struggles. They victimize Blacks and Latinos above all, not only to suppress battles against oppression but also to persuade white workers that the system works for them.

Nader champions "democracy" under the illusion that with a few reforms, the US electoral system can be freed from the billionaires' domination without a revolution. He praises the "non- governmental organizations" he sponsors and the trade unions for being among the "countervailing forces that have saved American corporate capitalism from itself."

The international issue that Nader takes the firmest stand on is "globalization," from the point of view of US nationalism. He denounced the World Trade Organization for violating US sovereignty, as if American interests are not dominant in the WTO. He joined the protectionist-minded labor officials in demanding China's exclusion from the WTO because of its violations of workers' rights. Indeed, the Chinese ruling class encourages the super-exploitation of Chinese workers, both for their own benefit as well as that of foreign investors.

Those who supported Gore to keep the Republicans out of the White House voted for an imperialist and capitalist champion who endorsed and would add to all the Clinton presidency's crimes against the working class.

The debate among working-class people should not be Nader vs. Gore but whether electing more and better liberals is a solution at all. The only way to win lasting gains is massive action, and in the past couple of years there have been inspiring examples. This year there was the ouster of the IMF-controlled Ecuadorian president by an unprecedented mobilization of indigenous peasants, a general strike in Bolivia against an IMF-ordered takeover of a state-owned water company by US and British corporations, and a general strike by South African unionists against the austerity program accepted by their government from the imperialist bankers. When the US working class mobilizes itself against the ruling class scheme of prosperity above and austerity below, then we will begin to achieve the demands we have been fighting for.

Walter Daum is a lecurer in the Math dept. Mark Turner is a staff member of the Math dept. Both are supporters of the League for the Revolutionary Party.

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