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A Labor Party
From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 34, 23 August 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
THE Constitution of the United States, of course, makes no mention of political parties.
When this nation was organized in the heat of revolutionary struggle against the British, there were no political parties as we know them today. Nor were there in the early days of the republic. It was only as opposition developed among the Southern plantation owners to the steps taken by Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, on behalf of Eastern business interests that the people of the new nation gradually divided into two parties.
These parties, solidly grounded in class economic interest, grew steadily in coherence and definiteness of program. They were known as the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Southern Anti-Federalists later took the name of Republicans and still later the name of Democrats, the present party of that name. The Federalists, during the regime of Andrew Jackson, took the name “National Republicans,” then “Whigs.” The party was more and more torn by class issues, by trying unsuccessfully to represent more than one class. One splitoff was the Know-Nothing or American Party, a sort of forerunner of today’s anti-labor, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro movements like Gerald L.K. Smith’s.
In February 1854 a number of Whigs and Northern Democrats assembled at Ripon, Wisconsin, and oganized the new Republican Party – to fight, not against slavery, but against the extension of slavery into new territories.
In the 1856 elections, the Republicans ran John C. Fremont for president, against Whig candidate Millard Fillmore and Democratic candidate James Buchanan. Fremont split the anti-Democrat vote and Buchanan won. (The Philip Murrays and A.F. Whitneys of that day uttered agonized cries against the Republicans for “splitting the progressive vote.”)
But the Republicans had hold of the red-hot issue of the day – anti-slavery – and it made its own way, as a good idea does and will.
In 1860 it was the turn of the Democratic Party to split wide open, one faction nominating Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois to oppose the domination of the Southern planters, and the Southern Democrats nominating John S. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The candidate of the young Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, won, though receiving less than the combined votes of the Democratic factions. The election of Lincoln represented a basic class shift in American political life. The national government ceased being an instrument of the slaveholding South and instead became the pliant tool of the capitalist North.
Ruling classes, however, do not give up power without a struggle. A civil war followed which established the supremacy of capitalism in the nation. The slave system was destroyed. The all-powerful Republicans permitted the Democratic Party to survive. Capitalism bent both parties to its will.
The story of politics in the United States since the Civil War, as related by Beard, Parrington, Lundberg, Josephson and other historians, is the story of the gradual erasing of distinctions between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the North, the subordination of both to big business, and the early attempts by enraged farmers and workers to oppose the bankers and industrialists with Populist, labor, farmer-labor and socialist parties.
At certain stages in history there have been differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties, and one or the other of the parties has served a progressive purpose. But for decades now there have been no vital issues between the two parties.
The only political issues permitted in American life have been those involving the interests of one section of big business as against another section. Great social issues affecting the lives of the people – such as the issue of war or peace in 1917 and in 1941, or the issue of monopoly control, or of socialism versus capitalism – these have never separated the two parties under the system of political monopoly obtaining in the United States. Or rather, such issues make their appearance only as vague campaign promises, which those in the know understand perfectly well will never be redeemed.
Political patronage, public plunder and robbery on a colossal scale, debauchery of municipal, state and federal government, corruption of the law, courts and the regulatory commissions have become widespread in American politics. From time to time in various communities, liberal “do-gooders” and disappointed politicians organize “reform” movements to “throw out the rascals.” If the reformers succeed, they very often take over all the scandalous practices of the rascals whom they follow into office.
If the American people had all the facts before them, the facts would convince them that this nation is run by the monopolists, and that the monopolists dominate both the Republican and Democratic Parties.
“The men placed in the highest public offices from McKinley through Hoover were all the political creatures of the wealthy,” wrote Lundberg in his America’s Sixty Families.
The monopolists contribute impartially to the treasuries of both old parties. “Families that contributed both to the Republicans and the Democrats,” recorded Lundberg, “included the duPonts, Harknesses, Vanderbilts, Fleischmanns, McCormicks, Goelets, Whitneys, Strausses, Guggenheims and Bradys. Where identical estates did not contribute to both parties on a family basis they often did so on a corporate basis. Many corporation officers in the lower brackets of contributors gave funds to the party formally opposed by the head of a particular [financial] clan. In this way the avenue of approach was kept open to the key men, the financial managers, in each party.
“The Wall Street banks, incidentally, while Republican in politics, make a regular practice of keeping a few outstanding Democrats among their chief officers,” said Lundberg.
The Democratic and Republican Parties are themselves only factions of Wall Street’s party, maintained by the wealthy to oppose labor’s interests and to advance the interests of the wealthy, at home and abroad.
The maintenance of the capitalist two-party system and its ability to mislead the people depend in large measure upon deception, upon the fiction that there are major and decisive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. During the recent war and in the postwar period the differences between the two parties and their candidates have tended to dwindle to a narrow margin, if not to vanish altogether.
Both parties had common war programs, both supported Wall Street’s plans for maintaining monopolist control during reconversion. Both agreed on handing over billions in government-owned plants and equipment to private ownership at fire-sale prices. Both are united in support of the aggressive foreign policy which gives support to the most reactionary government in the world, just so the latter be anti-Russian. Both parties unite in keeping the Negro down, in upholding Jim Crow in the armed forces, in preventing passage of a fair employment practices law. Both parties unite in shackling the union movement, in placing the costs of government on the workers’ backs.
What more could the rich have received and the poor have suffered in recent years had a Republican rather than a Democrat been in office?
Today the political parties of big business are united on one program: to place squarely upon the backs of the workers the burden of the recent war and of postwar militarism, expenditures for atomic weapons, the disorganization of the world’s monetary systems, and aid to reactionary governments throughout the world.
“If we don’t elect Tweedledee, then Tweedledum will be in the White House,” the shills of the old parties scream. As though that would make any important difference in the policies of the national government!
Candidates and campaign platforms are not especially important to the monopolists today. The current needs of big business always comes first with both old parties.
That the personality of a president is unimportant to the capitalists may be easily indicated by the briefest look at some of our recent presidents – the amiable reprobate, Harding; silent Calvin Coolidge, the sour pickle; the pompous mining millionaire, Hoover, he of the stiff collar; and that unhappy little man in the White House, Truman.
Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most talented politicians the capitalists of this or any other country have ever used, sticks out like a sore thumb amid the political nonentities who preceded and succeeded him on the political scene. The New Deal government of Roosevelt was called into being in 1933 to save the capitalist system and to buy off the growing mass sentiment for revolutionary change. Roosevelt succeeded eminently in his task.
He swerved the masses from a radical road and, with the help of conservative labor leaders, convinced good numbers of workers that he was their friend, while starving them on and off WPA and handing over more and more of the wealth of the country to the rich. Finally, when the policies of his administration utterly failed to revive the capitalist system to anything approaching health, Roosevelt took the country into the imperialist war.
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Last updated: 6 October 2018