9/23/20: A socialist voice in difficult times – Workers’ Liberty

The following is an excerpt:

Workers’ Liberty backs the Green Party US campaign of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, as the only campaign in the US presidential election to raise explicit socialist demands and have a labour movement orientation.

There are other socialists of some stripes running, but on a purely sect-building basis. Hawkins is a member of the revolutionary socialist group Solidarity, and has been a long term activist in the third camp socialist tradition. In some ways, his is the best socialist Presidential campaign for many years.

But it also faces great difficulties.

Many Green activists consider themselves to be socialists, and Hawkins won the Green primaries with a manifesto in favour of an “eco-socialist Green New Deal”. Walker is also a prominent rank and file trade unionist and socialist campaigner.

Their campaign video is explicit that workers generate a surplus that goes to the owners of capital, and that capitalism is an unsustainable system that will destroy the planet. Possibly because of the explicit socialist turn, some local Green Parties have chosen to ignore his nomination and instead campaign for other candidates. Some have even denounced Hawkins for his “third-camp” opposition to imperialisms which clash with the US.

The issue of ballot access dominates third party campaigns in the US. As Hawkins said in an interview with The Atlantic (19 September), if the Democrats were really serious about democracy they would challenge the electoral college system and would make ballot access much easier. In no other “western democracy” does the governing party control election procedures in the way they do in the US.

Hawkins lost access in Wisconsin, for example, the state that Angela Walker is from, just because she changed address (in South Carolina, where she now lives) during the signature-gathering process. All signatures collected for her at her previous address were deemed invalid.

Hawkins has said he believes this campaign is the most devoid of policies any he has experienced. All the constitutional wranglings distract from the issues Hawkins and Walker raise. The death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is likely to make the Presidential campaigns even more focused on these wrangles. If Trump rushes in a right-wing judge to replace Ginsburg with his preferred right-wing candidate before the election, that will help him in court rulings over election disputes.

Hawkins has the endorsement of the Socialist Party USA, Socialist Alternative, [three] branches of the Democratic Socialist Alliance, the Independent Socialist Group, and the Legal Marijuana Now Party of Minnesota.

 

Link: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-09-23/socialist-voice-difficult-times

Workers’ Liberty

Skills

Posted on

September 23, 2020

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