The Wake

SWP Presidential candidate Róger Calero

Róger Calero, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. President, probably envisions a future of America not unlike this. The one-time Dakota country meat-packer, with his working class credentials, is knocking out his second presidential campaign for the Socialist Workers Party, one of the three socialist candidates vying for the U.S. presidential seat, (there are also two more well-known pseudo-socialist candidates running for President — the Green Party’s Cynthia McKinney and, of course, independent Ralph Nader. All five will be vastly ignored). Earlier this week, while visiting the University of Minnesota, Calero attempted to update the socialist message but still reiterated the basic message carried by Guevara, Castro, Trotsky, Lenin, Marx and Engels and all the rest of them.

August Nimtz, a Marxist historian and political science professor at the University of Minnesota, invited Calero to visit his Wednesday night lecture, which is a course comparing race and class relations in Cuba, South Africa, and the U.S.(in all terms of fairness, I am a student enrolled in this class). Calero, a native Nicaraguan and resident alien (he holds a green card) stepped to Nimtz’s podium wearing a dark suit and a cheap, working class tie and spoke to a crowd of about 60 students and socialist activists.

He started with the current Wall Street bailout crisis, arguing that the nature of the capitalist system caused the banks to make risky investing.

“Instead of returning their investments, [the bankers] have been investing in the stock market to get a quicker return,” he said. Nimtz asserts that Calero’s political party, the SWP, was first to predict the current Wall Street financial mess. In 2004, when Calero ran as the SWP candidate for president for the first time, he said he spoke of the coming financial disaster. “Everyone looked at me like I was crazy, and here we are. It’s only at the beginning right now. We’re only dealing with the mortgage side. Just wait until we get to student loans, Medicare, social security … “

Then, he trumped it all and said something radical: “The historical needs of society cannot be solved under capitalism. Sexism cannot be solved under capitalism in crisis. It took a massive war to get us out of the Great Depression, and that’s where [the capitalist’s] are taking us now, if we let them.”
And while many criticize Marxists for embracing an idea they believe was maybe relevant in the industrial age, tested out in the twentieth century, and ultimately realized as a miserable failure, Calero did his best to argue that the principals of revolutionary socialism still apply to today.

Calero at a demonstration talkin’ up the issues (He, like John Edwards, speaks of “two Americas”)

A socialist stance on free trade? “There is nothing free about it.” Hurricane Ike? “What you’re seeing there is not a natural disaster, it’s a social disaster.” Hurricanes in New Orleans (Professor Nimtz’s home town)? “Three years after Katrina, adequate levees have not been built because it infringes on capitalist profit.” Social security? “They want to do away with it. They say baby-boomers are the ones to blame because they are living too long.” Calero also cited the danger of the coal mining industry, which got a lot attention during the Nevada coal mining disaster last year when six workers who were trapped in a collapsed mine tunnel suffered to death (Remember? It happened a week after the 35W Bridge collapse). “Sixty-three miners died last year [in total], and they make it seem like it’s an act of God,” he said. “It’s really an act of the working conditions that bosses create to maximize their profits.”

Of course many students in the crowd were skeptical. Despite whatever the right-wing criticism of academia may be, hard-line socialism is not used as a theory in the mainstream college political science class. When one student said that capitalism motivates people to work, Calero quickly rejected her claim and argued that capitalism “detracts from development.” “I don’t buy the idea that you have to be special to become a doctor,” he said. “Imagine a society where everyone could get that chance.” Another student made the point that because everyone doesn’t work equally, communism can’t work. Calero agreed with the first point of it: “Some of us work really hard — I work like a devil! — and I get less in return than my boss!”

Calero made the case that a socialist bias skews toward working class interests and then attempted to redefine the layers of society. According to Calero, the working class is compromised of workers like teachers, mechanics and miners while the middle class contains a smaller amount of professionals like lawyers and small business owners. The third and smallest class (“So small that you can identify them by their last name!”) is the capitalist class, or the richest five percent, who control society. These are the Buffets, the Bushes, the Kennedys, the Clintons.

He also made a cold prediction for the college students: “The school encourages you to break the barrier and rise up in class. The truth is most of you will have to work in the working class.” And most of us will face exploitation.

But there is hope after all. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have a working class alternative. Or so the party line says.

But with the $700 billion bailout to Wall Street in the process, is it possible we’re already in a socialism of a different kind? Earlier this week, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, perhaps the leading socialist voice of the early 21st century, had this to say about the bailouts: “I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it’s OK. Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?”

Tags: August Nimtz, Hugo Chavez, Roger Calero, Socialist Workers Party, U.S. Presidential campaign