Problems with Camejo
(part two of my election year struggle)

Last year, in the midst of the California recall vote, the World Socialist Web Site published Peter Daniels's firm and dogmatic criticism of Peter Camejo; he's a capitalist, an ex-quasi-anti-trostkyist-stalinist, didn't criticize the invasion of Iraq OR Bush ENOUGH in the Gubernatorial debates, weak on economic policy, and doesn't shower (just kidding about the last one).

This does not change the fact that he is the hardest left candidate of national prominence. It just makes that fact a bit more depressing for people on the left. Yeah, Camejo deals in money. He decided that was something he could do well, and responsibly, and there is no evidence to suggest he hasn't. Clearly, he no longer considers himself a Marxist.

On face, I don't believe that should be some kind of litmus test for the socialist left. A commitment to a political method, or even a world view, doesn't preclude an honest search for like-mindedness in a pluralist political world. We can't afford to be drawing those kinds of lines. We have to extend a trust unfamiliar to traditional political life--especially for radicals.

However, the WSWS, in its typical precision, goes much further. Analyzing Camejo's plan for California, Peter Daniels points out that Camejo answers vast inequalities in income and taxation with an obscenely incremental tax increase for the wealthy. He calls for "responsible" budget cuts. His agenda is no different from any left-Democrat. And they have some things to say about how earlier positions and sides he took as a member of the Socialist Workers Party reveal a kind of political opportunism that makes his current alignment with the Greens as predictable as it is disappointing.

I share the WSWS lack of enthusiasm for the Green Party agenda, when compared to a genuine anti-capitalist agenda. Still, I am not ready to say that a socialist agenda would not need a Peter Camejo. Capital exists now as an ingenuine and destructive substitute for the collective energy of a healthy society. Nothing in my reading of Camejo suggests he would be anything but a faithful, innovative and engaging organizer in such a society.

Here is a curious line in the article:

Camejo has taken pains to display his credentials as a defender of the profit system and allay any fears that might be aroused by his socialist past, including his campaign for the presidency in 1976 as the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party. His rival candidates and the media, for their part, have maintained a studied silence on his past identification with socialist politics.

As for Camejo's willingness to allow for progressives to vote for Cruz Bustamante in the Gubernatorial race:

Camejo all but dropped his stance of independence from the two major parties, openly encouraging Green supporters to vote for Bustamante on October 7 by saying he would “understand” if they did so to stave off a Republican victory.

It seems to me that the WSWS lacks it own "understanding gland" -- but only when it chooses to. Their writers' treatment of cultural issues, their acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the American democratic experiment, even little things like holding up John Kennedy as an example of the eloquence of an earlier period of bourgeois politics, all set them apart from the glazed-eyed Sparts and company whose style and mannerisms have put off so many potential allies. Their editorial staff has managed to produce a consistent flavor of writing, both elegant and accessible, and politically inviting. So why dismiss Camejo's acknowledgment that some Californians who found the prospect of Governor Kindergarten Cop particularly unpalatable might have voted, however ignorantly, for the person they thought most likely to stave off that groping disaster?

Perhaps the reason the electoral stance of the WSWS is so different from the subtlety of other sections of its political analysis is the Fourth International's insistence that class matters. The working class needs working class candidates, with class-centric policy proposals and a commitment to spend more time in the streets and workplaces than boardrooms and the beltway. For Daniels, Camejo's campaign in California

serves the basic aim of the Greens: to utilize the recall drive to secure a place within the political establishment in California and the US as a whole.

Now, many on the left would be extremely happy if the Greens did just that, and my motivation for wanting to vote for Nader and Camejo is to "establish" the Greens--a decidedly imperfect party whose national prominence would nevertheless constitute a paradigm shift in contemporary political life. But Daniels actually turns that argument on its head, concluding:

The Green Party is a bourgeois party. It has no genuine independence from the major parties of the capitalist ruling elite, nor could it, given its programmatic basis. The party is defined by its reformist perspective, which is rooted in and reflects the outlook of dissident elements within the middle classes. It can, in the end, play only a reactionary role, serving as a political lightning rod to divert social discontent along channels that are harmless to the essential interests of the ruling elite, while helping to keep the working class politically subordinated to the parties and politicians of big business.

According to this logic, a prominent Green Party would make this worse for those who wanted to open up spaces for more revolutionary parties. I'm not sure I agree with this argument. It seems the analogous argument that refutes that one is the notion that the existence of politicians like David Duke and Pat Buchanan open up space for mainstream rightists to move further to the right--an argument I've frequently heard Trotskyists make. I don't know if the "release valve" objection to reformism trumps the importance of a progressive break in the two-party system and the promotion of a strong anti-corporate agenda, especially in the absence of the kind of working class leadership necessary for the struggle against capitalism to take hold in general political consciousness.

But I doth protest too much. The WSWS is 100% right about one thing: Camejo has himself abandoned class as an explanatory postulate, rallying point, identifying marker, in his politics, making him an appropriate candidate for an upper middle class political party like the Greens. Similarly, Nader's reformism has long suffered from the same sin of omission. If I vote for Nader and Camejo, I am certainly not voting my class or my class perspective, nor am I necessarily advancing fundamental breakdown of economic hierarchy in America. And of course, I am doubly cursed by those who insist I am helping George W. Bush in his quest for another 4-year ransacking.

(to be continued)