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From Socialist Worker, No. 97, 16 November 1968, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
NEW YORK:– The most expensive horse race in history is over. The leading three contestants alone admit to having spent over £50 million in the contest. The television, airplane and balloon industries made a mint.
But the election of Richard Nixon will make no noticeable change in US policy. The old problems remain of racialism, inflation, unemployment, urban decay, war in Vietnam.
Nixon will apply the same ‘solutions’ which Johnson used – repression spiced with social rhetoric.
While it may be said that the dullness of the elections show that ‘nothing has changed’ in America, it shows rather the inability of the ruling class to find solutions to the problems it has created.
A year ago, Senator McCarthy announced he would run for the presidency. He wished to contain the growing unrest in America, particularly against the war, within the Democratic Party, where it would remain powerless.
The answer of the Democratic Party to the massive support he had obtained was police raids on his headquarters, repression on the convention floor and brutality in the streets. The old machine was not even willing to hide behind a new face.
With the nomination of Humphrey, millions strained agonisingly to find the differences between him and Nixon. While Nixon did succeed in identifying himself with the generally reactionary direction of the country, it still seemed as though the people never really made up their mind. The even split seemed to say that people had simply walked into the booth and pulled the first lever their hand came across.
George Wallace became, tragically, the ‘protest’ candidate. While his support had a huge racialist content, the other parties, particularly the Republicans, made no bones about their view of Black unrest.
Wallace, the representative of the anti-working class South, got mass support from workers. His reactionary anti-labour attitude could not stem rank-and-file support because the labour bureaucracy fights against militant struggles for workers needs and rights and supports the Democrats, who pursue reactionary anti-working-class solutions to the problems of the country.
Wallace, the reactionary, called his American Independent Party the ‘real representative of the American (read white) working man’. He appealed to workers’ disgust with Democrats and labour bureaucrats; attacked the tax-free foundations, giant corporations and banks, and government bureaucrats.
In return he received immense working-class support and a large working-class vote, from 5 to 20 per cent in industrial union strongholds in the mid-West and East and up to 30 per cent in the border states of the South. This, though less than expected, is a significant indication of the American workers’ disgust with the old parties.
In the Wallace form, this protest can be only a means for repressing the aspirations of the workers who voted for him. But these workers largely conceived that vote as a protest. In the next four years, the left will have a tremendous opportunity, if it wishes to try, to build a political movement really capable of addressing itself to the needs of workers.
This job is of course much harder than Wallace’s. Wallace’s empty demagoguery, his racialism, his call on workers to rely on him, is much more ‘politically acceptable’ in the US than the demand that workers rely on themselves, that black and white fight together for their common needs.
The racialist content of the Wallace vote cannot be discounted either. The attempt to build a movement in which workers participate actively and control is much harder than the attempt to win passive support for a hard core of thugs and reactionaries, the Wallace base.
Unfortunately, the possibilities stand revealed more clearly in the Wallace movement than in anything the Left has done. What is needed now is a mass political movement which can actively defend the interests of US workers fighting for their real needs, on the job, in the community, against the corporations and state and union bureaucracy. A movement which can form links with rank-and-file worker organisations.
Wallace has also shown in a reactionary way, that electoral action can be an effective way of reaching workers.
The small Left parties concentrated entirely upon the anti-war issue and the Black movements. Rather than dealing with these questions concretely, insofar as they directly harm the needs and lives of white workers, they were dealt with abstractly.
But the real possibilities for building a political movement of workers remains. Wallace has nothing to offer but more of the same old policies in more reactionary ways.
Unless the Left turns actively, politically, towards the working class, Wallace will grow in popularity by default as workers and radicals are increasingly polarised. Only through political and social struggle can black-white links be forged. Indeed, this understanding is beginning to grow in large sections of the student, anti-war and Black movements.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020