US Presidential race: a choice of Tweedledum - or Tweedle-Dumber
Nader's challenge
Click for an alternative view of the Nader campaign
As we go to press, the outcome of the Presidential race still hangs in the balance. With the recount in just over half of Florida's 67 counties completed, Bush's lead over Gore has been cut by about 600 votes - around a third of the 1,700 votes that separated him and Bush on the first count.
Both candidates need to win Florida to win the presidential election and have sent teams of lawyers to the southern state to investigate a series of alleged irregularities in the voting.
A number of Democrat voters have filed a lawsuit demanding a new election in Florida because they say a confusing ballot paper led them to vote for the wrong candidate. Legal challenges or the counting of postal votes could delay the process further and the votes of an estimated 2,300 people living abroad are still awaited.
None of this has stopped the vitriol against Ralph Nader's candidacy from leading Democrat supporters - strengthened by the fact that in a number of key states Nader's vote was greater than the difference between Bush's success and Gore's showing.
While there are many justified criticisms that can be made of Nader, as his supporter Michael Moore points out, Nader and his supporters cannot be blamed for the right-wing policies of President Clinton and Vice-President Gore.
It is this neo-liberal trajectory that has led more and more American voters to recognise what has always been the case - the difference between the two parties of American capitalism have always been cosmetic.
The United States is now approaching the culmination of a contest for the most powerful elected position on earth. Yet, if previous elections are anything to go by, barely half of the electorate will even bother to vote.
It is not hard to see why: the election is between two rich white men, each representing a party that has consistently promoted the exploitation of working people, the exclusion of women and ethnic minorities and the pursuit of corporate interests abroad through imperialist wars.
The Clinton-Gore administration, in its eight years in power, has continued the neo-liberal project initiated by Reagan and Bush, with its 'reform' of the welfare system, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the deregulation of the communications industry.
While allowing the gap between rich and poor to widen, the administration has pursued tough 'law and order' policies and supported the expansion of the death penalty.
Yet despite this , the leadership of the labour movement in the United States continues to support the Democratic Party, pouring money and volunteers into Al Gore's election campaign and mobilising its members to turn out the vote.
At national level, almost every union has endorsed Gore, seeing him as the lesser of two evils, a safeguard against a Republican Party characterised at its worst by union-busting bosses, white-supremacists, anti-abortionists and religious fanatics.
Yet, while Gore will gratefully accept the unions' support and pay lip service to their concerns during his campaign, if elected he will assuredly continue with the same anti-working class policies that he has supported for the last eight years.
Unions under Democrat thumb
And as long as there is felt to be no alternative to the left of the Democrats, this will continue to be the case. As the American Marxist, George Breitman, put it more than forty years ago:
"The Democrats have much more influence in the labor movement than the labor movement has in the Democratic Party. The Democrats can take the unions for granted because they feel they have them in their pocket; because the unions, having sworn not to create their own party, have nowhere else to go.
"The union leaders not only have become dependent on the Democratic Party. They have become its captives. And this is one of the reasons why the Democratic Party has been moving steadily to the right year after year."
Attempts to create a viable working-class or socialist alternative to the two big parties have always faltered, since the time when a strong Socialist Party, which had won nearly a million votes in the 1912 presidential election, was smashed by the state for its opposition to the First World War.
A Labor Party was established in 1996, at the behest of activists in a number of unions who were determined to fight for working-class independence of the Democrats. It now has the support of nine unions at national level, and numerous local branches.
But, as a compromise to maximise its union support, it has agreed that it will neither stand its own candidates against the Democrats, nor endorse candidates of any party (including the Democrats).
In this year's election , however, many trade unionists (including Labor Party activists) and others on the left are supporting the candidacy of Ralph Nader, a veteran consumer rights campaigner who is standing as the candidate of the Green Party.
While Nader makes no claim to be a socialist, his campaign includes pledges to restrain corporate power, to boost the minimum wage, to introduce a universal system of healthcare and to repeal anti-union laws.
He would fight racism and sexism at every level, cut back military spending, abolish the death penalty and phase out nuclear power in favour of renewable energy sources. And he would open up the political system by regulating campaign financing and introducing PR.
Predictably, there have been attempts to frighten would-be Nader voters by claiming that "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" in those marginal states that Gore hopes to win. This argument is countered by the writer and filmmaker, Michael Moore:
"A vote for Gore, who supports the death penalty, and NAFTA, and WTO, and won't support universal healthcare immediately, that is a vote for Bush. A vote for Gore is a vote for Bush; that is the new equation.
"A vote for Nader is a political Molotov that we need to throw into a corrupt and bankrupt system filled with its dirty money."
Throughout the United States , trade unionists and left activists who agree with this sentiment have been organising for Nader. He has won the endorsement of one small national union, the United Electrical Workers, one statewide union and a few local branches.
In Detroit, a "Labor for Nader" group has been set up, including six local branch presidents and organised a 350-strong Labor Day rally at which Nader spoke. A similar group has been set up in New York.
Nader's union supporters hope to help him reach the target of five per cent of the vote, which will entitle him to state funding for a further campaign in 2004. But he is also, by his presence in the presidential race, raising issues on the national political agenda that would otherwise go unheard, and most importantly, encouraging class-conscious workers, feminists, environmentalists, black, Latino and native American peoples and 'progressives', to break the stranglehold of the two-party system.
Socialists can , of course, have no illusions in any political campaign that, like Nader's, remains within the constraints of the bourgeois political system and fails to challenge capitalism as such. But Nader's campaign presents the best opportunity in decades for a break with the political duopoly of the 'Republocrats'.
It helps to give expression to the demands of the Seattle demonstration against the WTO and like that demonstration, it unites greens and radical campaigners of all kinds with the most progressive wing of the organised labour movement. And in this way, it helps to create the conditions for the construction of a genuine working-class socialist party in the future.