Presidential Circus (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where mindless buffoonery is another name for statesmanship, just about anybody could qualify as President of the USA; or as top political henchman anywhere in the world.

It must throw serious doubt upon the sanity of anyone who is prepared to be a candidate for one of the dirtiest jobs on earth. A job which involves being ready to command the use of H-bombs and other nuclear weapons, and to preside over the annihilation of countless millions of people. American Presidents have already either used nuclear weapons or considered using them. Every post-war President has pursued policies for testing and stockpiling H-bombs. Wars involving so-called conventional weapons are commonplace throughout the world. The influence and interest of American capitalism are concerned more often than not.

The job also means having a string of glib excuses ever ready to trot out as to why poverty, unemployment, slumdom, and crime continue to blight the lives of most Americans in one form or another. During the Primaries, and indeed right up to election day, evasion and cynicism are essential to survival. Of course, whoever wins will have to be doubly evasive and cynical once in office. It is as though under the influence of mass-hypnosis a primitive ritual were taking place, and serious adult discussion of major social problems was a taboo to be breached only on pain of extinction. Never mind what it’s all about, win the nomination. The object is to get elected. If that means wearing a gormless grin and a Stetson hat for months on end, so be it. The art is to be as sensitively tuned as possible to the rumbling of band-wagons, and not to be caught on the wrong one at the wrong time.

Anything in the way of fundamental principles would be a gross liability. Popular prejudice and mass political ignorance must never be offended. Candidates must strike the proper balance between being patriotic, religious and anti-Communist. Vagueness is vital, so that no-one can ever quote you as saying anything for sure.

Ideally, candidates need to personify as many of the myths associated with capitalism as possible. Be enterprising, successful, rugged, ultra-American, strong yet flexible. Insofar as behind those myths lie the realities of capitalism, “enterprising” means wheeling and dealing. “Success” means climbing on the backs of others. “Rugged” means knowing how to survive in the rat-race. “Ultra-American” means appealing to nationalism to achieve political ambition. Being "strong” means standing up to the recurrent crises of capitalism and not appearing to be too confused by the conflicting advice of your aides. To be “flexible” means hypocrisy, bending with prevailing winds and pandering to popular opinion, to lie and deal and double deal. On the basis of those criteria, Richard Nixon was a first-rate President. Perhaps the real reason why he was pushed out was because too much of capitalism was too clearly reflected in him.

A great deal of reverence is vested in the office of the Presidency. The President is regarded as a kind of national father-figure. Image-building of this kind is important to the capitalist class as a whole, for while the office and the person of the President are highly respected by the working class a useful camouflage is provided for the “normal operation” of the system.

They could, no doubt fill the post by placing a simple notice in the want-ads, but then some joker may apply who does not support war, or who won’t agree to play ball with the wheeler-dealers. So the circus and the sickening ballyhoo are indispensable to the final outcome. Even the also-rans play their part in stoking up the drama in what might otherwise become the non-event of the year. The whole thing is astutely stage-managed so that only personalities are seen. The miserable continuity of capitalism slips by unnoticed. We are expected to respond with breathless anticipation to the world-wide commentary, as they jockey for position round the three-ring circus donated by courtesy of Rent, Interest and Profit.

In the realms of personality, mediocrity is the order of the day. What the votes on polling-day really declare is not who shall be the next President of the USA; that is of little importance. They spell out loud and clear the readiness of American workers to go on accepting capitalism and their willingness to swallow the small-talk while the major social problems remain as glaring as ever. To reaffirm this fact and to take a sounding of any latent unrest is worth all the clowning and the expense to the ruling class. It assures them of the continuing “safety” of their system.

Anyone who thinks that Ford and Reagan (or any of the others) are not interchangeable should remember Johnson and Goldwater. Johnson campaigned as the man of peace who would pull out of Vietnam. Goldwater was for staying in and fighting it out. The American working class voted Johnson a landslide, but they got Goldwater anyway. It was not long before they were chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids you killed today?” When Reagan says he would send American troops to Rhodesia and Ford calls this “irresponsible” it does not mean Ford would not send troops to Rhodesia. It means that it is irresponsible to say such things during an election. Reagan said the troops would be for peace-keeping. Would they then leave their guns at home? What would-be President talks of sending soldiers anywhere to make war these days?

The whole situation has its parallel in every country throughout the world. Rival politicians jostle and manoeuvre to gain or hold on to power for the running of capitalism. The working class is taken in by a privileged minority who wield political power to preserve their domination of the means of wealth production and distribution. It is not that the American workers are more ignorant than their fellows elsewhere, just that their circus lasts longer.

Are we saying that elections are like circuses and should therefore not be taken seriously by the workers? On the contrary, it is because the real issue is not treated seriously that elections have all the farcical features of a circus. This does not discredit the democratic process of voting, it indicates the urgent need for workers to back their votes with class-consciousness. When they understand what is involved in changing society to the classless world of common-ownership, they will use their votes to sweep away the puppet politicians of capitalism.

Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as saying: “It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.” Whoever is elected the next us President certainly will not be deterred from trying.

Harry Baldwin

Dispatch from America (1977)

From the March 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has become pretty much of a cliché among Socialists in America — as is the case wherever there are members of the World Socialist movement — to declare that there is little, if any, difference among the parties of capitalism. When you get right down to bedrock, how can there be any difference? Capitalism is, essentially, the wages, prices, profits system and whatever designation the candidates in the 1976 Presidential Elections ran under — Republican, Democratic, Independent . . . yes, even Socialist Workers (Trotskyist) and the US Labor Party (“Marcus”-ists) — none advocated the immediate, or even the future, abandonment of the relationships of wage labor and capital. All argued for a better operation of the present social structure.

And yet there are superficial differences that bear examination if only that they indicate the bankruptcy of capitalist and pseudo-socialist ideologists. For example, there was that different approach between President Ford and Jimmy Carter on the question of jobs for the unemployed. Carter took the stand that American working people want work, not welfare checks, and promised a huge Government program — or implied it, at any rate — to create jobs. Ford, on the other hand, argued that such jobs are dead-end affairs without a future, that meaningful jobs must come from the “private sector” and that, if elected, he would concentrate upon stimulating the private sector.

Interestingly: Camejo, SWP, took a stand similar to that of Carter only with even more emphasis on Government-created jobs, a sort of revived Works Project Administration (WPA) while LaRouche (US Labor Party) spent his time (and a lot more than the $90,000 his party raised to purchase a half-hour of prime time on the NBC Network the night before the election) arguing that a vote for Ford would save us from a major depression by Christmas 1976, and an all-out nuclear war by June of 1977. The election of Carter, he contended, would surely bring these twin catastrophes to the world. Such were the positions of America’s two major self-styled Marxist parties.

Now, what was the difference between the Ford and Carter approach in the campaign? Ford, of course, was being more pragmatic than Carter because it has long since become obvious in America that it is cheaper to keep unemployed on welfare than to create unproductive Government jobs. The wages from such work must come from tax money and it costs more to keep workers on jobs than it does to mail them a check. (One needs more food, better clothing, transportation, etc., on a job). A program such as Carter implied would bring a huge increase in taxes (if not sharply increased inflation) and it remains to be seen how much of such a program will be instituted by the new régime.
But the problem with the Ford philosophy is that, basically productive industry does not exist for the purpose of providing jobs. The motive is production for profit not the provision of “dignity” for unemployed workers.

As Socialists, we must look at the question from a different angle. Why, in the face of the stupendous achievements of capitalism (in whatever form) must jobs be considered a be-all and end-all? It is more than just a case of needing a job to exist. Today that is a sad fact. The depressing aspect of the matter is that liberals and radicals, generally, ascribe a therapeutic value to spending 8-hours per day, plus travel time, at a machine or whatever, in return for the money needed to function properly and raise families to carry on! And despite industrial disease, accidents and even deaths that are part of the warp and woof of capitalism!

Come off it, you self-styled progressive-minded humanists, or whatever. Is it so difficult to picture a society in which the work needed to produce enough for all will be minimized and the end result a maximum of freedom to live one’s life according to one’s natural desires? Not that mere picturing is enough! It will take organization and action to bring about such a society. But visualizing it would be a beginning. There has not been a solitary instance, in American politics, of a candidate entering the arena to advocate such a society — world socialism. It is truly time for a change!

Harry Morrison (Boston)

World Socialist Party of the United States

For Carter and Ford—Read Capitalism (continued) (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arch-reactionary Barry Goldwater, who was for all-out war in Vietnam in 1964 when Johnson was still regarded as a “dove”, is supporting Ford. This is taken as an indication of how far to the “right” Republican sentiments have moved. The lines of demarcation between so-called “liberal” and “conservative” are entirely imaginary. Those who fondly regard themselves as liberal regard Carter as a liberal, and the conservatives think he is one of them. The balancing trick of appearing to be all things to all men is the essence of the capitalist politician.

All the polls indicate that people vote on the candidate’s personality rather than his policies. They want to know how steady his finger would be on the button. . . .
(Sunday Times 22nd August 1976)

Since differences in their policies need to be searched for with a large magnifying glass, “personality” becomes the only means of telling t’other from the which. There is no conception as yet in the minds of the American working class, of a world without “the button”. This lack of any penetration beyond the reformist spectrum is something they share with their fellow sufferers throughout the world.

Running Walter

Carter’s running mate, Senator Walter Mondale, is reported as saying:

in the whole range of human problems I’ve dealt with in my 12 years in the Senate — hunger, housing, labour, Indian education, migrant workers, children, ageing — I keep getting back to one thing; the strength of the family.

A nice piece of side-stepping, but what about the problems? The choice of running mate is a shabby bit of expediency aimed at “balancing the ticket” (vote-catching). Mondale is rated a liberal, and this has focussed attention on spending. Are people opposed to spending as such or only to wasteful government spending? Do people want less government or better government? “The opinion polls show total ideological confusion”. (Guardian, 17th July 1976.) The opinion pollsters ask only a limited range of questions, designed to sound out what is popularly expected of capitalism. Workers are not asked to consider and discuss the nature and extent of waste under capitalism, or the desirability of a world run democratically, without government.

In 1967 Mondale made a speech supporting Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Four years later, he told an interviewer that it was

a painful speech . . .  I think the worst mistake I’ve made in public life is to be a slow learner on Vietnam. This has been the most tragic mistake this country has ever made . . .  and I share part of that blame, and the record is there, I’m not proud of it.

(Guardian, 17th July 1976)

Mondale supports capitalism but pukes at its most brutal outcome. Here is no condemnation of war, but a slow learner realizing a tragic mistake. Any capitalist politician in power, who refused to endorse a war involving “national interests” would be forced out. The Labour Party in Britain has spawned many “slow learners” about war, who have rallied to the flag when the time came.

The Black vote

Carter is wooing the votes of America’s black workers with promises to put “more than one” black in the cabinet. There are the traditional “black jobs” in the echelons of administration, and black Congressmen, but there has yet to be a black man in the government. The Democratic convention of 1964 in Atlantic City, which nominated Johnson, had an all-white segregationist delegation from Mississippi. This year a new image is being put over. Andrew Young, an influential black Congressman, is working to get Carter the black vote. If it were a solution of problems for people to be the same colour as those in power, then white workers would have had all their problems solved long ago. So would the black workers living under black dictatorships in Africa. Incidentally, it is fear of Russian “infiltration” in Africa that prompts Ford to send Kissinger to put pressure on the South African government to help bring about majority rule in Rhodesia. Kissinger is obviously thick-skinned enough to ignore America’s own brutal record of racism. America has its own style of apartheid and ghetto living. Though not backed by legislation, the effect is the same.

Issue

Senator Moss of Utah, who is chairman of the Senate Committee investigating alleged fraud and abuse in the Medicaid programme for the poor, sent out a team of snoopers who made more than two hundred visits during four months in eight cities. (Investigating fraud is a form of waste peculiar to capitalism.) They found that patients usually get substandard care whether they need attention or not. Cases were reported of patients in need of care going untreated and X-rays being taken without film in the machines. In Los Angeles a woman who handed in a mixture of a soapy water was told her “urine sample” was normal.

Medicaid was started in 1965 to provide medical facilities for 20,000,000 poor Americans. Eligibility varies from place to place. In New York, you need a family of four and an income of less than $5,000 a year. Some doctors are making more than $100,000 out of fiddles. More than half the delegates at the Republican convention were in the $30,000 income bracket.

Ford and Carter and (if capitalism remains) those who succeed them, will be promoting more reforms to sort out the mess produced by past reforms in the vain attempt to reduce the running expenses of capitalism. The poor and their problems will still be here.

Issue — What Issue?

The governor of California, Edmund (Jerry) Brown Junior, who was a rival candidate to Carter for the nomination, is to give Carter all the help he can. Governor Brown, a former Jesuit Seminarian, says that Catholic misgivings about Carter are “overblown and inaccurate”. Asked if he would run again in 1980 Brown said:

I’m not even sure I’ll run for Governor again. I may even retire to the monastery to figure out what this is all about.

As both Carter and Ford are bible-belters, God is put in a difficult position rather like that of wartime, with both sides praying for victory. In his “infinite wisdom”, he has the consolation of knowing it will make no difference either way. Farcical though the whole thing is, it is too tragic to be funny.

As Socialists, we often observe when an election takes place in the UK that the “manifestos” of all parties other than the SPGB are so closely similar that if the names were blanked out they would be virtually indistinguishable. Although we have been dealing with the American Presidential election, capitalism and its absurdities are so similar all over the world, we could change the names and be dealing with almost any other country.

How much longer we will have to live in the suffocating atmosphere produced by a politically ignorant working class is the real question of our times. Socialists, however, have good grounds for optimism. Nothing demonstrates the bankruptcy of our opponents better than an election, and we have the only workable answer to their system of chaos and misery.

Socialism will be a classless world community, democratically administered without leaders, Presidents, or governments. Production will be geared to meeting human need, on the basis of free access. The privileged private or state property institutions of capitalism will make way for communal interest and cooperation. Money, wages and profits will be no more. Thus, every “issue” being bandied about during the Presidential election campaign will disappear, never to be seen again.

Harry Baldwin

For Carter and Ford—Read Capitalism (1976)

From the October 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before commenting upon some of the things being presented as issues in the American Presidential election, it is important to clarify a few basic questions which will never be asked by the contending parties. For Ford and Carter the objective is power, but why such power exists and whether its continuation serves the welfare of the majority of society are other matters.

Why the need for the Presidency? What is the Presidency? It is a particular form of political power structure, resting upon a private property foundation. The military, legislative and coercive superstructure is based upon the dominance of one class and the subjugation of another. The President is the head of State. The ultimate political authority over the armed forces. The number one national leader in a hierarchy of wealth and privilege. He is the top Political Executive of the capitalist class as a whole. The state represents the interests of the national capital. The Presidency is a political cloak for the operations of big business capitalism. Politics in general and government activity in particular, provides the capitalist class with the shield of anonymity. The capitalist is removed from direct responsibility for his system. The state can be regarded as above the fray.

The turmoil of capitalism, economic crisis, unemployment, poverty, bad housing and wars can thus be blamed on the ineptitude of the President or erroneous government policies. When dissatisfaction boils over, the President and the government can be changed, posing no threat to the system. The falsehood that capitalism can work without creating social problems is kept going by the appearance of making a fresh start. A new President? A new government? Now things will change! Socialists reject these assumptions which are promoted by the mass media and accepted by the majority of the working class. We reject the political trickery of capitalism because we see behind the façade of “a fresh start” the ownership of the means of production by a profit-motivated minority, whose commercial operations engulf the entire world. No solutions to basic problems can result from changing leaders, since they are products of the system, who advocate its continuation and therefore necessarily serve its ends.

To make judgements and form opinions on the basis of personality—the alleged attributes of Carter against those of Ford—is totally futile and irrelevant. To think in terms of “liberal” versus “conservative” is really not to think at all, but to swallow the cut-and-dried concepts of the pundits. Capitalism sets the limits within which they can move.

Issue

Two US officers killed in Korea. The north claims previous weeks of provocations. Ford sends in the fleet. Demonstrates military power. Show of force is good for prestige in this mad society.

It turns out that 41,000 us troops have been in Korea since 1953 when the war “ended”. Korea is mineral-rich and strategically important in relation to both China and Japan. The Guardian headline of 23 August read: “Korean flare-up stops rot in metal prices”. The prospect of a new war in Korea could add one hundred pounds a tonne to the price of copper and three hundred pounds to a tonne of tin.

Is Ford saving face by showing no weakness with the election coming, or can we expect renewed warfare in Korea when the election is over? Certainly, war sometime, somewhere, while capitalism lasts.

Carter Foreign Policy

Asked about his lack of experience in international affairs, Carter said:

I’ve been a student of foreign policy, and I understand it. There’s no mystery about it—its simply a matter of decency, judgement, common-sense, and intelligence.

He has been briefed by dozens of “experts” (we are left to wonder who briefed the experts.) He would insist that Russia refrain from irresponsible intervention in other countries such as Angola, or he would consider an economic embargo of Russia, including the “total with-holding of trade”. This, no doubt, in his common-sense and intelligent judgement, would be the “decent” thing to do. And if the Russian capitalist class took counter-measures that led to a major war, we assume it would be a “decent” war! Carter like Ford would increase the US defence (read war) budget, but not by so much. He would negotiate with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and insist on overall parity. With a firepower capable of wiping out all life on earth several times over, talk of “reduction” is meaningless. He would withdraw us troops from Asia—except those necessary to fulfil us commitments to Japan and, yes, Korea.

Under Ford and Kissinger, last year America sold more than eleven thousand million dollars’ worth of war-making hardware around the world. Carter wants a ceiling on the yearly amount sold, and a case-by- case review to see whether sales further American objectives.

The Guardian, 23rd August, ventures the comment that if elected Carter “would be forced to bend to the realities of congressional opinion and of other nation’s needs and demands.” In other words, capitalism would run him while he went through the motions of running capitalism.

Carter in New York

In his nomination speech, Carter said:

It’s now a time for healing. We want to have faith again. We want to be proud again. We just want the truth again.

This platitudinous drivel can mean anything or nothing. “Healing” is taken to mean recovery from Watergate; Bad-guy, Republican Nixon, let everybody down. Inference? The American workers should rally to good-guy Carter. “Faith again”? Faith in Nixon made Watergate possible. Faith and leadership mean continuing jingoism and ignorance. “Proud again”? The working class have nothing to be proud of in the performance of the ruling class. It is implied that Watergate shamed America. This is of no concern to workers. A far greater shame is continuing poverty and millions unemployed in the world’s richest country. “Truth again”? Truth has never been the strong point of capitalist politicians. The last Democrat President was Johnson. He told so many lies, particularly about Vietnam, that they coined the phrase “credulity gap” to cover the distance between what was really happening and the White House handouts.

On TV Carter (briefly) spoke the truth. His first words were:

Hello, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m running for President.

A sad reflection on working-class awareness, rivalled only by Gerald Ford running for President.

Harry Baldwin

To be continued