On Aug. 7, candidates contending for the Democratic Party presidential nomination faced the questions of the country’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO.
For the most part, the workers asked the right questions. The capitalist politicians had all the wrong answers.
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Seventeen thousand union members attended the debate, held at Chicago’s Soldier Field and aired on MSNBC.
Union members submitted many of the questions to the AFL-CIO via email. The moderator, news host Keith Olbermann, facilitated the debate.
The debate’s most interesting segment was when the audience directly asked questions. All of the questions expressed the most pressing issues facing the working class today: the war on Iraq, pensions, healthcare, worker protection and on-the-job safety, veterans’ benefits and rights, the rights of undocumented workers and the right to organize.
Deborah Hamner, whose husband was killed in the Sago mine accident last year, asked the first question. She asked Senator Biden about worker protection and on-the-job safety. When Biden launched into a reactionary speech on foreign policy, the audience booed and demanded that he answer the question.
While Biden’s response gave a glimpse of the utter falsity of the capitalist politicians’ claims of addressing workers’ needs, other candidates fared better.
The AFL-CIO-sponsored debate was a gift to the Democratic Party. The labor federation has consistently poured millions into backing Democratic campaigns—a strategy steeped in class collaboration.
Senators Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, former Senator John Edwards and others were given a national platform to posture as the real workers’ candidates—announcing they had sponsored bills in workers’ interests, walked picket lines and defended union organizing.
The candidates may have appeared on a picket line or sponsored a particular bill that never passed Congress. But they are all candidates of the capitalist class. Workers’ interests will never be represented by the Democrats. Their responses made this clear.
Every candidate, except Kucinich, refused to call for an immediate end to the war; for universal, free health care; and end to NAFTA and the WTO; and so on. Even their most seemingly progressive statements were tempered with compromises necessary to confirm their undying loyalty to the interests of corporate profit.
Kucinich made the most progressive statements, but even these revealed an inherent flaw. The audience applauded wildly when he called for an end to the war in Iraq now. As the applause died down, he called for an international “peacekeeping” force to replace the U.S. occupiers.
Any U.N. or other international military force would do the bidding of U.S. imperialism and represent the continued denial of the Iraqi people’s right to self-determination.
Kucinich repeatedly said he would be president in a “workers’ White House.” Aside from fact that Kucinich has no hope of becoming president or even the Democratic nominee in 2008, what he proposes is impossible under capitalism.
The working class needs and fights for many of the things Kucinich discussed: the right to organize, health care and pensions.
But these rights will never be won by making a liberal capitalist president. They can only be won by a militant workers’ movement engaged in every aspect of the working-class struggle.
No capitalist candidate that stands for the “right” of the capitalist class to exploit workers for ever-greater profits can also claim to stand with workers. These interests are diametrically opposed.
