The rainbow politics of Jesse
USA their constituencies are largely ignored. Using Jackson's impressive showing, they hope to deliver a message to the Atlanta convention that the loyalty of their constituencies cannot be taken for granted, but must be repaid. Now that the Black machine is backing Jackson, his campaign has embraced their narrowly focused objectives of internal party realignment. In his speeches, Jackson is forever counseling "our" party to expand its base as a key to success and urges defining the "new economic ground as a key to a new coalition and a new Democratic Party!"
THE IMPRESSIVE scores achieved by Jesse Jackson in a long series of Democratic Party primaries have attracted considerable attention, not only in the United States but internationally. Undoubtedly, the fact that a Black leader associated with radical social movements could win a substantial vote among white industrial workers points to big social and political shifts in the United States.
Jackson's campaign is one of the more prominent attempts to offer a political focus for a variety of new social movements via the Rainbow Coalition. The California Democratic Party primary, which will be held just after we go to press, will be a turning point for the Jackson campaign one way or another.
The following is an analysis of the Rainbow Coalition from the pamphlet The Rainbow and the Democratic Party - New
Politics or Old? edited by Joanna Misnik.
N REALITY, there are two Rainbow
Coalitions, each with its own idea of the
Rainbow's purpose. The "pragmatic"
Jackson supporters are primarily interested in strengthening their faction inside the Democratic Party. The "radical"
Rainbow forces are attempting to advance movements through progressive social
Jackson's
Jesse campaign, with
JOBSAND many hoping to provoke a fun-
JUSTICE damental realignment in
US politics.
NOT
One wing of the Rainbow is made
WAR up of those who focus
END
EXISM exclusively on jockeying inside the Democratic Party, trying to block its headlong rush to the right. This group is composed primarily of the Black machine and a handful of trade-union officials, almost none of whose national unions have endorsed Jackson.
The Black elected officials are the main force within the sector of the Rainbow that is trying to push the Democratic Party back to its undeserved image as the party of "the common people," the image crafted in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal coalition. They are alarmed by how readily a Democratic-controlled House went along with Reagan's supply-side game plan, forsaking the party's championship of big government and the welfare state. They wish to reassert their presence in the party at a time when
CENTEN FOUA!.
The two wings of the Rainbow Coalition
But the Black machine is practically on its own. The bulk of organized labor, whose influence has waned in tandem with a shrinking membership and an inability to mobilize votes, is standing aloof from the fracas. The 1987 AFL-CIO [trade-union federation] convention made no presidential endorsement and asked individual unions to refrain from endorsements while the search for a "consensus" continued. This call for a consensus was in part devised to discourage Jackson endorsements from within the trade-union ranks.
It is not accidental that only the Jackson campaign is emphasizing massive voter registration among Blacks and working people. The mainstream of the party does not see its national hegemony secured by "reaching down," as they term it. Instead they prefer to compete with the Republicans for the "yuppie" vote in urban areas and white votes in the South. Bringing in large numbers of urban workers and people of color contradicts that strategy. To target that population would require a wholly different programmatic approach.
Also included in the wing of the Rainbow trying to stem the Democratic Party's rightward tide are the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). For some time now, DSA has pursued a policy of pragmatic realignment inside the Democratic Party, in alliance with those in the AFL-CIO bureaucracy who are unhappy with labor's decreasing leverage on party policy-making. The group has long ago abandoned the perspective of a working class breakaway from the capitalist two-party framework FOP: and is content to de40 clare that the Demo13 June 13, 1988 • #143 International Viewpoint
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USA crats are, in DSA leader Michael Harrington's phrase, an "invisible labor party."
When the AFL-CIO gave Walter Mondale an unprecedented early endorsement, the DSA followed along and jumped on the Mondale bandwagon. The DSA agreed with its conservative labor allies, who saw Jackson as an unnecessary and disruptive rock to the boat.
A strident and unorthodox detour?
But some DSA members were uncomfortable in 1984 about giving Jackson's populism a thumbs down. In 1988 there is no Walter Mondale, no frontrunner from the center of the party, where DSA makes its home. So the 1987 DSA convention decided to endorse Jackson and join the Rainbow. Yet only a minority of DSA members saw the Rainbow as a new way to build a left inside the party. Most, though endorsing Jackson, urged the group to continue with its traditional-style coalition building
For the DSA, the Rainbow is an embarrassingly strident and unorthodox detour. Jackson's popularity is with rank-and-file workers, and not the top echelons of organized labor with which the DSA tradition-
To all the forces in its realigning wing, the Rainbow Coalition is a logo, something that flashes on the screen during television debates to identify Jackson and his general objective of representing all the locked-out. The real apparatus, in their minds, is the Jackson Campaign Committee, a much more traditional electoral structure that gets out the votes, raises money and piles up sufficient delegates to force a brokered convention where no candidate can win on the first ballot.
These delegates will then be horsetraded to the inevitable white nominee for concessions. The point will have been made to the "new outlook" Democrats that the "safe" constituencies are still a force to be reckoned with. This perspective has little in common with the one that conceives of the Rainbow as a hell-raising populist movement from below. The two wings of the Rainbow are not likely to agree on what to give and what to take at the Atlanta convention. Drawing up a list of negotiating points just might tear the Rainbow apart.
Because Jackson's 1984 campaign was an unwanted protest in influential party circles, leftists filled the vacuum in his apparatus. These included socialists and leaders of the issues movements. Assuming key posts, they helped push the campaign's general direction to the left. Their experience led to the idea of making the Rainbow Coalition a reality instead of a catch-
In part, the impetus for such a permanent organization came from the demoralization after the 1984 convention. The 465 Jackson 14 votes, had seen all their platform demands delegates, backed by 3.2 million primary International Viewpoint #143 • June 13, 1988 but one steamrolled into oblivion by the convention machine. Those whose polargely outside two-party betrayals. Many left the convention and sat out the elections, refusing to work for Mondale as Jackson had promised in his nationally televised convention
These veteran social activists were not so naive as to have a purely electoral strategy. Most had concentrated their energies on building independent protest movements that are non-electoral exactly because the Democratic Party and its profestheir advocacies.
Jackson had begun his
1988 campaign just as soon as the 1984 elections were over, keeping himself in the national limelight and maintaining a visible presence at peace and anti- apartheid protest actions.
The convening of the April
1986 Rainbow Coalition convention was seen as a way to protect the momentum of the second campaign through an organizational form outside - or rather alongside — the Democratic Party as a first step to some kind of progres-
The Rainbow is attractive to so many activists for some understandable reasons.
Jesse Jackson's anti-corporate, peace-andjustice program is far to the left of what the
Democratic Party has had to offer or is willing to accept. More importantly, this program is striking a responsive chord among Blacks and increasing numbers of
A new anti-capitalist
The breadth of the October 1987 National Rainbow Coalition Convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, attended by 1,200 people, was impressive and unprecedented on the US political scene. There has never been a time in which Black, Latino, Native
American and Asian-American groups have succeeded in forging a common organization with progressive trade unionists
The Rainbow attracts strong representation from the gamut of today's protests:
anti-intervention in Central America; the anti-apartheid movement; justice for the
Palestinian people; liberation for women, gays and lesbians; relief for the family farmers; a safe, nuclear-free environment; rights for the disabled; as well as tenant, senior citizen and civil liberties advocacy. Nearly 50 per cent of the participants were
The Rainbow appears to be the longsought unification of all the isolated efforts to bring about social change. Jackson's solid base in the Black community seems to offer a way to overcome the limitations experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. A new unity of all progressive forces rooted in the social power of an aroused Black America would be able to wield a great deal more power than each of the movements has been able to muster separately.
The Rainbow includes a number of socialist and left organizations that hope the Coalition can ultimately precipitate a break from the Democrats in favor of a new anticapitalist political party. Groups such as the National Committee for Independent Political Action (NCIPA) typify the "insideoutside" strategy of the not-really Democrats in the Rainbow. They hold the position that the way to break the Democratic Party apart is — to join it. They are urging people to register and vote Democrat!
"Inside-outside" Rainbow activists are concerned about the decline of the movements for change during the past decade. They mistakenly identified the shift to the
right of establishment politics as a rightward drift in the population at large. Sectors of the movement, buying into the idea that Reagan had a mandate, became fearful and hesitant. This timidity was fed by the collapse of the Black movement into the Democratic Party and the failure of the labor movement to mount a defence against concessions, plant closings, unemployment and the general effects of the recessionary
The difficult political climate led to conclusions of the type offered by Rainbow leader Sheila Collins in her recently published The Rainbow challenge: the Jackson campaign and the future of US politics. Collins explains:
"The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 shocked many left activists into discovering the dialectical relationship between social movements and electoral institutions....Electoral politics was no longer seen as a substitute for movement-building, but as a necessary complement. Although it was difficult to do both simultaneously, there was a growing realization that the two forms of political activity were dialectically related." (pp.105-8)
This new "dialectic" for the 1980s is a high-toned way of sounding a retreat from what history has already taught. There isn't a shred of evidence to support the idea that the Democratic Party, in or out of power, offers fundamental concessions to the locked-out when they loyally lock-in their votes in massive numbers. All successes in shifting the social relation of forces — from the rise of the CIO to the
Vietnam war victories - have been the direct results of unruly mass movements playing outside the acceptable channels of US twoparty politics.
In the case of both labor in the 1930s and the social movements of the 1960s, it was precisely at the point when major sectors of these movements decided it was time to move "from protest to politics" and act as a pressure group within and around the Democratic
Party that reforms began to slack off and eventually disappear. In fact, the brevity of these two periods of major change is due to this very co-option. Unable to defeat capitalist control of the party from the inside and claim it as their own, the reformers were themselves beaten and became the reformed.
Left Rainbow advocates may argue that all this does not apply. After all, they have an organization separate and apart from the Democratic Party that enables them to resist absorption while they use the
"tactic" of Jackson's candidacy to build a new, integral progressive force. Unfortunately this is not the case.
Electoralism versus campaigning
The Rainbow has only one tactic, one focus that glues all its components together:
Jackson's race for the Democratic Party nomination. No other goals were established at the Raleigh convention. By definition, this subsumes the Rainbow into the
Democratic Party and hands it over to those who want it to be nothing more than an army of foot soldiers for the Jackson Campaign Committee.
This problem is not something only those outside the Rainbow can perceive. The powerful New Jersey delegation to the
Rainbow Convention led a well-received fight to democratize the notoriously top- down Rainbow structure. They were motivated by the fear that the Rainbow will be dictated to by official campaign structures, stunting its growth and threatening its ability to exist beyond 1988. Some structural changes were made, such as adding state chairs to the all-powerful Board of Directors and halving the minimum number of
USA members required to receive a local charter.
However, the Rainbow chartering system still requires a minimum membership in a third of a state's congressional districts. Using the districts as its basic unit shapes the Rainbow as a voter-registration, votegetting operation. It is a foreign and unwieldy organizational structure for activists accustomed to city-wide mobilizing.
Eclipsing the Rainbow
Since the convention, Rainbow militants have seen unmistakable signs that running a "winning" Democratic campaign is at cross purposes with the broader progressive objectives assigned to their coalition. The Rainbow national office is in financial crisis and has a difficult time finding the barebones $12,000 a month for its operation, headed up by only two full-time staffers.
Ron Daniels, Rainbow executive director, who was instrumental in pulling off the October 1987 convention, has been transferred to the Campaign Committee over the objections of some Rainbow leaders. Daniels had been a prominent leader of attempts at independent Black political action, most recently as co-chair of the now-defunct National Black Independent Political Party.
The Raleigh convention, recognizing that the national Rainbow is still mostly a letterhead of prestigious movement leaders, set sights on a vigorous membership drive. Prior to the convention, only four states and Washington, DC, had succeeded in meeting the membership level required to be chartered as a chapter. Provisional charters were hastily given out so that 25 more states could be officially delegated. Building a real rank-and-file organization was viewed as a key to any kind of permanence for the Rainbow. But the membership drive bogged down, sacrificed to the Jackson machinery and the monumental goal of registering two million new Democratic voters by March 8, Super Tuesday.
Forces like those in NCIPA have begun to oppose the eclipsing of Rainbow-building priorities in favor of straight-up eleotioneering. In a November/December 1987 Newsletter report of its national steering committee meeting, NCIPA complained:
"There were other criticisms....A major one is the concern expressed by a number of people about the influence of the Democratic Party over the Jackson campaign. Another was the fact that in at least some of his speeches, Jackson is not talking about the Rainbow Coalition, or even a rainbow coalition."
The Rainbow Convention was the most authoritative gathering of "the movement" in memory. It had the legitimacy to issue not one, but several, calls to action.
Just one example. If a call had gone out as Raleigh for a national mo and tonice 15 Washington for peace, jobs and justice June 13, 1988 • #143 International Viewpoint
USA around the time of the contra aid voting, it could have resulted in a show of strength that would have greatly aided the besieged Nicaraguan people. The singular focus on Jackson's candidacy prevented ideas like this from even cropping up. There is growing awareness among those who joined the Rainbow hoping it would evolve into a new progressive movement that their vision will not be realized if they allow their energies to be swallowed by the imperatives of Jacksoneering. Writing in the February 1988 issue of Zeta magazine, longtime peace activist Dave Dellinger, now a leader of the Vermont Rainbow Coalition, addressed this concern:
"If the campaign does not...contribute to a wider and more unified activism, it will have been a distraction. That is why the national and most of the state and local Rainbows are involved in serious non-electoral work as well as electoral work. At a recent National Board meeting, some voices were raised in opposition to this dual policy. They suggested that non-electoral activities should be postponed because of the unprecedented possibility of electing an unusually insightful and progressive person of color to the nation's highest office. But in the end the consensus was to organize and participate in both.
"The philosophy behind this has been expressed frequently at Rainbow meetings: 'If Jesse Jackson is elected president and there is no strong and active progressive coalition, at grassroots and national levels, we can kiss him goodbye. No matter how exalted his intention and determined his efforts, without a groundswell of activism, he will be helpless to do more than jockey around the edges of power'."
While some local rainbows may be preciously guarding a non-electoral dimension to their work, this is largely invisible on a national scale and is generally boycotted by more conservative Campaign Committee forces. Whatever initiatives of this type 16 from the Rainbow as such. They arise out exist, the impetus for them is not coming International Viewpoint #143 • June 13, 1988 sive movement. It will be back to square one. The unfolding Jackson campaign is straddling the contradictory aspirations of the two wings of the Rainbow. Jackson can ill-afford, and does not want, to shelve his history and image as a fighter outside traditional party politics. Too much of his organized base has been drawn in by that uniqueness. The support he has won from inside the party, however, pulls the campaign in another direction. And overall, the tug of looking presidential has made itself felt to the dismay of the left
The holy war that Jackson waged in 1984 against party rules governing delegate selection and the Southern duel primary system has been completely dropped. His protesting did much to expose how easily the established machine can thwart an insurgent. Though Jackson polled 20 per cent of the primary vote, he was accorded only 11 per cent of the convention delegates. His efforts resulted in lowering the minimum threshold for being accorded delegates in primary states from 20 to 15 per Jackson downplays Black oppression
This time around there isn't a whimper about how undemocratic the rules are, even though they have been revised to further guard against any upsets. The number of super-delegates (that is, party leaders and elected officials getting an automatic convention vote) has been increased to 15 per cent, from 568 in 1984 to 650 this year. No one watching the media-hyped Iowa caucus shenanigans would have recognized the Jesse Jackson who in 1984 wrote an angry letter to the Democratic leadership denouncing the caucus system of delegate selection as thoroughly undemocratic and open to manipulation.
The contradiction that is the Jackson campaign is symbolized by his 11 per cent showing in Iowa, a state that is less than two per cent Black. This result is the fruit of years of fighting alongside beleaguered family farmers, 600,000 of whom have been driven off the land since 1980. The devastation of the family farm created a social crisis that has permitted some alarming inroads by extreme right-wing and fundamentalist ideologies. Jackson's one-of-akind populist appeal has helped the more radical wing of the farm-protest movement to block these developments and stem the rise of such groups as the Posse Comitatus.
It is this dimension of his campaigning that attracts the left wing of the Rainbow. Leading this protest movement into the tangle of the Iowa Democratic caucuses to get delegates is what satisfies the Campaign Committee variety of the Rainbow.
One central facet of the Jackson campaign should be highlighted. At the October 1987 convention, gasps were heard during Jackson's announcement speech when he declared that racial violence was the issue 25 years ago but had now been resolved. Many correctly viewed Jackson's new theme of race-blind "economic violence as the critical issue of the day" and "finding a new economic common ground" as an attempt to answer the so-called electability problem by underplaying the fight against
Jackson's intent may well have been to reassure whites that he could represent their interests and let the party mainstream know that he is not a Black militant firebrand. In fact, his campaign has downplayed the special oppression faced by Blacks.
"Serious" candidates cannot be colored
When the selection of two mainstream Democrats to the top positions in his campaign was announced, both stressed "a new pragmatism" to the press. New campaign manager Gerald Austin, manager of two winning campaigns for Ohio Governor Richard Celeste, explained that "people from all walks of life are supporting the guy, and that's a centrist campaign." Willie Brown, former speaker of the California Assembly, was named campaign chair. One of the Black Democratic leaders who didn't support Jackson in 1984, Brown told the media that "we will not appeal excessively to so-called Black concerns."
But Jesse Jackson is still Black. The media and the Democratic Party have not overlooked this fact. He is automatically discounted as a serious candidate no matter what double-digits he racks up in the primary voting. To some in high places, Jackson is an also-ran protester on the basis of
The other side of this coin is that Jackson is eliciting a genuine response from white workers and farmers, who embrace his defence of the ordinary worker against corporate greed and the bloated military budget. His populism has brought to the surface a genuine potential for overcoming racial diand uniting the working class
SHAFT STEWARO around its common interests.
This has to be a cause for great optimism, particularly since it is taking place against the advice of the leadership of organized labor. A significant portion of white workers — many of whom voted for Reagan last time around - have decided to join the ballot-box protest launched by the Black voters in 1984 and "waste" their vote on a candidate with no "electability."
Jackson's actual economic program is a vague call for reducing the military budget to pay for a public-works program, making the corporations pay "their fair share" of government intervention to "re-industrialization, retraining, research and reconversion." The concrete proposals Jackson makes are to cut the military budget by at least 10 per cent while maintaining "a strong defence," and to return corporate taxation to pre-Reagan 1980
Muddled economic and foreign policy
Jackson denounces "greedy" corporations and demands that they "reinvest in America." He has hung tough against he temptation to play into protectionist fever, a theme that has given a boost to Richard Gephardt's campaign. Jackson explains that US corporations - not the Koreans or the Japanese — are stealing jobs by moving production to the third world, where labor is cheaper. Jackson sounds a call for nouncements the ring of a "responsible"
This clashes with the strong anti-imperialism of many Rainbow members, who solidarize with freedom struggles from Nicaragua to South Africa. They find hypocrisy in Jackson's espousal of "the values of the free world and Western
The Jackson Doctrine rests on "support for international law, respect for the principle of self-determination and human rights, and international economic justice." On all three counts, the imperialist US government is the chief obstacle to these goals in the underdeveloped world, where US intervention has propped up dictatorial policestate regimes and pillaged national
Jackson opposes aid to the Nicaraguan contras, supports the Arias peace plan for Central America, and advises cancellation of the mammoth Latin American debts to US banks. He urges a Marshall Plan for the Third World to raise the standard of living so that "they can buy what we produce."
During NBC's nationally televised candidates' debate in December 1987, Jackson explained that with such a policy "we" can win Nicaragua. He went on to warn this nation, now fighting for its life because of US policy, that "if they choose to relate to the Soviets, they must know the alternative. If they are with us, there are tremendous benefits. If they are not with us. there are tremendous consequences." For the Nicaraguans, the "benefit of being with us"
USA was the forty-year dictatorship of the Somoza family, which thousands of Nicaraguans sacrificed their lives to overthrow.
Taken as a whole, these utterances, along with Jackson's refusal to oppose US brinkmanship in the Persian Gulf, are no small matter. They are reminiscent of the Kennedy-era Alliance for Progress schemes, which in the name of "containing communism" sought to keep the heel of the US boot on our hemispheric neighbors. The idea that massive infusions of US aid and capital investment could build up these economies and "promote" democracy brought tragedy and poverty to the Latin American peoples. Within the first eighteen months of the Alliance, there were five coups against constitutional governments. The greed for profit of the US multinationals is antithetical to progress and democracy.
It is more than unfortunate that Jackson is so intently fixed on legitimating his candidacy for president of the world's mightiest imperialist power that he adopts the language that legitimates its counter-
This contradicts the language used when he joins the movement to stop US intervention in Central America, demonstrating outside the White House gates. The two cannot • 'The Rainbow and the Democratic Party — new politics or old?" can be ordered for $1.50 plus postage from Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Avenue, Detroit, MI 48210, international workers' solidarity — "Slave INTERNAMONAL
La threat to organized labor
His gut-level anti-corporate program is something of an empty vessel. It is increasingly being filled by advisers from the center of the party — such as those linked to the Democratic Socialists of America — who are tailoring him to look like a "responsible" leader. Jackson speaks of moving the corporations through incentives, but does not spell out what those would be. He has raised the "responsible" suggestion of a tripartite think-tank of business, labor and government leaders to thrash out some an-
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While Jackson supports the right to unionize and has aided striking workers, he global economy." Jay Naldoo, does not promote discussion of the kind of new directions needed if labor is to combat capital's assaults. He instead promotes his candidacy as the way to focus working-
The spirit of working-class revolt his campaign has tapped is channeled exclusively into Labor for Jackson committees.
This outlook was a disappointment to rank- and-file militants who participated in the
Rainbow convention. Their proposal — to utilize Jackson's campaign as a springboard to a conference on union organizing underway in the South — was seen as a
Packaging Jackson as a presidential possible has given his foreign policy pro-
Chairman of
COSATU,
(Congress of South
African Trade Unions)
17