Biden fails at first test
Eric Lee ( Solidarity 568) is so annoyed with my article in the previous issue (Democrats: no space for radicals) that he does not even manage to acknowledge my name while writing a polemic against me.
Lee even manages to defend Biden against my charge that Biden is a “creep”, which, apparently, is an allegation made only in “Trump’s world”. That is interesting, because my understanding is that “creep” is a charge that Trump has generally avoided using against Biden, susceptible as Trump is to cries of hypocrisy.
I could even imagine advocating a vote for Biden, knowing he was a creep. But even if I was in that unfortunate position, I would not stop saying he was a creep (or even worse, as Lee does, deny it).
Anyway, Lee’s article is titled, “Why American unions back Biden”. I would have thought this was obvious; it is because the unions are largely run by timid bureaucrats without a radical political perspective.
My complaint is that the union leaderships — in the main — do not work for an independent political voice for US workers. Not in this election, not ever.
That the US union leaders work for the Democrats is not because of something especially obnoxious about Trump. This is something they normally do.
Of course it is true that Biden promises some mild reforms of health and other Trump era legislation. Maybe he will act on those promises, maybe he will not.
For sure Biden’s actions will not depend on the union pressure through Democrat structures. Such structures do not exist to allow that to happen (something stated in my original article, and not contested by Lee).
Lee believes, “The passage of [the PRO Act] will do much to revitalise the American labour movement, by recruiting millions of new members in a way that hasn’t happened since the 1930s. At that time, with the Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, the National Labor Relations Act was passed and union membership exploded.” That seems like an enormously exaggerated claim.
Of course Biden is less bad than Trump. It would be difficult not to be. But the idea that this is an adequate reason to advocate a vote for Biden is wrong. Socialists should stand for more than the lesser evil, more than my enemy’s enemy is my friend. We have a positive agenda.
We measure Biden against our own expectations. Biden, candidate of the mainstream, bourgeois Democrats fails at the first test: does he represent a voice of the working class?
Since Trump is about to lose I do not see even a mild case for backing Biden. We should back the socialist who makes socialist propaganda: Hawkins. It is unfortunate the independent, socialist left is not stronger in the US, but that’s where we are.
Mark Osborn, Lewisham
Risk of helping Trump
I cannot see how advocating a vote for Biden, while simultaneously arguing that a Biden win is no more than a prelude to organising and fighting for working class interests, fits the spirit of the formula “lesser evil politics”, especially given that Trump is proto-fascist.
On the one hand there is the argument that advocating a vote for Biden appears as some form of endorsement of him, his platform, the Democrats. On the other there is the argument that by advocating a vote for Howie, we helped Trump to win. The latter seems a much greater blot on our record than the former. Voting for Biden does not in any way undermine or hinder organising against him as President. A Trump victory means that the left, labour movement, black people, women will face an unleashed and unrestrained violent mob with impunity from the law, plus the state apparatus, incited by Trump, all repressing and physically attacking them.
The AWL tradition has always assessed what is needed to build an independent working-class movement. But in this case AWL has arrived at an unrealistic assessment of the prospect of building a socialist force from a call to vote for Hawkins as the Greens candidate. If Hawkins and supporters are worth much to an independent working-class movement, then they’ll work with others for that regardless of who they campaigned for in the election.
The AWL has placed that unlikely prospect of a Greens/Hawkins initiated socialist force ahead of the very real damage that a Trump victory would do to the variety of working-class organisations and struggles in the USA. This is arid sectarianism in my view, and I hope that it will be corrected, even if in retrospect, and will turn out to be recognised as a mistake made because of too shallow an understanding of US politics, through British eyes (as Martin Thomas elucidates in his article Debate: Marxists and Democrats).
By the time this is published, we may know the result of the US election, and if it is not a clear win for Biden, and Trump might hold on, we’ll all be very worried. That in itself should be cause to question the call for a Hawkins Green vote.
Janet Burstall, Sydney, Australia
