www.howiehawkins.us - The Case for an Independent Left Party

The Case for an Independent left Party

From the bottom up

Howie Hawkins

2020 Howie Hawkins

Originally published in slightly different form in International Socialist Review no. 107 (Winter 20172018), ISReview.org/issue/107/case-independent-left-party, and reprinted in Black Agenda Report , May 10, 2018, www.blackagendareport.com/case-independent-left-party-bottom.

This edition published in 2020 and distributed by Howie Hawkins 2020.

Some rights reserved. The copyright holder grants the freedom to copy or redistribute this work for noncommercial use in any format with attribution to the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.

Consider supporting our work with a donation at
www.howiehawkins.us.

Cover design by Jamie Kerry, Belle toile Studios.

Cover photo Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0.

I n loving memory of Bruce A. Dixon (19502019). Rest in power.

PREFACE

This article was written with two audiences in mind. The first are the supporters of the Green Party of the United States. I hope to persuade them to (1) transform the Green Party structure into a dues-paying, mass-membership party and (2) to prioritize local organizing and elections to build its popular base and political power from the bottom up.

The second audience is the new socialist movement, many but not all of whom are orienting politically to the Democratic Party. I hope to persuade them of the necessity of an independent working-class political party for effective socialist politics. The independent working-class party we need will be much bigger than the Green Party and the new socialist movement combined are now. We need to come together to fuse the Green Party, the new socialist movement, and other working-class and progressive social movements into a major party in American politics.

Why am I running for president in 2020 if I advocate a strategy of building the party from the bottom up? The very practical reality that makes a presidential campaign relevant to building from the bottom up is that we need ballot lines to run local candidates. Qualifying ballot lines for the next election cycle is determined by the petition signatures, votes, and political coattails of our presidential ticket in forty states. Our campaign is also supporting local candidates and grassroots party organizations as we barnstorm around the country, advocating ecosocialist solutions. The more we advance these objectivesballot lines, local candidates, grassroots party organizations, and ecosocialist solutionsthe more we win in 2020.

Howie Hawkins, 2019

Introduction

I f the 13.2 million votes received by self-styled democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries accomplished nothing else positive, it put the questions of socialism and independent working-class politics up for public discussion. I have been critical of Sanderss socialism because his policy platform was New Deal liberalism, not socialism. More importantly, by entering the Democratic Party, Sanders broke with the socialist principle of independent working-class political action. Nevertheless, the broad liberal to radical American left is now discussing what socialism is and debating whether the left should be inside or outside the Democratic Partyor both inside and outside. These are good discussions to have.

As we enter the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Trumpism is weakening under its own self-inflicted wounds, the ambivalent legitimacy of Trumps election by a popular minority due to the eccentricities of the Electoral College, and a spreading realization that behind the economic populism of his campaign rhetoric is the most reactionary Republican economic and social policy agenda since the late nineteenth-century era of Social Darwinism and Jim Crow. A massive resistance against Trump and his administration has emerged, and it is in the main counting on a Democratic restoration to save us. The Democrats may replace the irrationalities and racist revanchism of Trump, but they wont replace the austerity capitalism and militaristic imperialism to which the Democratic Party is committed. It is a key institution upholding the broad policy consensus of Americas ruling class and its political representatives in the two-party system of corporate rule.

To avoid the political cul-de-sac of choosing between a greater and lesser evil, the left must commit itself to building an independent, membership-based working-class party. Such a third-party insurgency in the United States must be built from the bottom up in two complementary ways. First, it must organize the working-class majority at the bottom of the social structure into a political party that speaks and acts independently for itself. Second, it must mobilize that base to participate in social movement and electoral activities to win and consolidate power and reforms first in cities, then states, and finally in the nation.

Will Seth Ackermans party-within-the-party work?

T he Sanders wing of the resistance is debating whether to take over and reform the Democratic Party or lead reform Democrats out and into a new progressive party. Many in this camp advocate a so-called inside-outside strategy of supporting progressive Democrats or independents, depending on the dynamics of the particular race. The Working Families Party has pursued this approach since the 1990s, using the fusion tactic of running Democrats on their own ballot line as well as the Democratic line in the seven states where cross-endorsement is permitted.

Seth Ackermans Blueprint for a New Party, featured in the postelection issue of the socialist journal Jacobin , advocates a party-within-the-party model where a democratic, mass-membership organization would function as a political partyonly without its own ballot line due to the obstacles thrown up by Americas close state regulation of parties, which serves to protect the two-party system. In Ackermans blueprint, the new working-class party would run its own candidates on Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot lines, depending on the race.

The inside-outside and party-within-the-party approaches are nothing new. The failures of fusion go back to the political suicide of the Peoples Party in 1896, when it cross
endorsed Democrat William Jennings Bryant for president. A succession of parties over eighty years in fusion-friendly New Yorkthe American Labor Party, the Liberal Party, and the Working Families Partyhave been co-opted into being adjuncts to the Democratic Party, not alternatives to it. The initially independent Vermont Progressive Party has embraced fusion with Democrats in recent elections and appears to be headed toward the same destination.

The party-within-the-party approach has been tried in a variety of forms since the late 1930s by labors PACs (political action committees), waves of reform Democratic club networks, McGoverns new politics, Michael Harringtons Democratic Socialists of America, Jesse Jacksons Rainbow Coalition, Howard Deans Democracy for America, Dennis Kucinichs Progressive Democrats of America, Obamas Organizing for America, and now Sanderss Our Revolution. Over the course of these many efforts over many decades, the reformers have been defeated and co-opted, with the corporate New Democrats steadily displacing liberal New Deal Democrats.

The political dynamic of all inside-outside approaches leads increasingly inside in the Democratic Party. One must disavow outside options in order to be allowed inside Democratic committees, campaigns, primary ballots, and debates. Instead of changing the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party changes inside-outside activists. Careerism sets in. Many of the veterans of these inside-outside organizations who at one time talked of realignment of the parties to create an American Labor Party or Rainbow Party became Democratic operatives and politicians whose careers depend on loyalty to corporate Democrats.