August Nimtz, Professor of Political Science and African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, spoke to Judy Cox
Saturday 02 November 2024
Saturday 02 November 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue
August Nimtz
What was your first experience of voting?
It was the 1964 presidential election was between Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat Lyndon B Johnson. It was my first opportunity to vote. I had just turned 21 which was the voting age then. I was at grad school in Washington DC, but I went back to New Orleans, where my family was.
I tried to register to vote. It was seen as so important because everyone said that if Goldwater became president, he would start a nuclear war. The Civil Rights movement suspended their protests.
Back in high school in 1955-56, I helped my teachers register black people to vote. I knew all about the ways they tried to stop people who look like me from voting. So I had attended workshops, I had registered, I filled in the long and arduous form and I turned it over to the “Good Old Boy”.
Well, he looked me up and down, and he looked at my form. And he said, “You didn’t fill this part in.” I said, “It’s not relevant to me,” and he said, “But you have to draw a line through it. Take it away, draw the line and come back in two weeks.”
I had to go back to college, so I never did get to vote. But that was the first “Vote for Lesser Evil” election I remember. Four years later, in 1968 I was able to vote. What was the difference between 1964 and 1968? The people had been out on the streets. I was able to vote because a mass mobilisation on the streets made it possible.
There’s an election coming next week. What are your thoughts on the choice of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
The most important vote taking place in the next few days is the vote of the Boeing strikers on whether to accept a new offer. That vote could have enormous consequences for the labour movement.
A prominent union like that winning a strike could have a domino effect. The labour movement has been on the move for the last few years, with more people trying to form unions and get organised.
On the presidential election, many of my students have lots of anxiety. There is the temptation, the constant enticement, to vote for the lesser of two evils. I understand that. I tell them, you are in good company. In 1849, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued for a vote for the lesser of two evils. They thought the workers’ movement wasn’t strong enough to stand its own candidates. They argued to vote for the liberals.
A year later they rethought their position. They had to go through the experience. They thought the liberals would bring in a republic, but they were too cowardly. In March 1850, Marx and Engels published an address in which they criticised their earlier position.
They said it was a mistake to suspend the Communist League and merge with the liberals. In elections, you have to stand your own candidates, even if you have no chance of winning. The advantages in standing are that you can put forward your ideas, educate people and recruit them. And you can test the strength of your support. The disadvantages are that you can split the vote. But the advantages are more important.
What I tell my liberal friends is that we can’t keep kicking the can down the road. That can’t be our legacy. It is not too late. Can we build a working class party that takes a stand on key issues like immigration?
What do you say to those who feel they have to vote for Harris?
Did the election of Barack Obama qualitatively advance the interests of the working class in all its skin colours?
The Democrat appeal is falling so they resort to scare stories about how horrible Trump is. But lesser evilism is all about what we don’t want, not what we do want.
The lesson of my life is that mass movements bring change—and that’s the lesson of history. Real change doesn’t come at the ballot box—it comes on the streets, on the picket lines, on the barricades and sometimes on the battlefields.
US activists debate whether to vote Democrat
In 1857, they tried to settle the slavery question with a court ruling. In 1860, the side that lost the election ceded from the US itself. In 1861, at his inauguration, president Abraham Lincoln tried a constitutional settlement. But the slave owners fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln even offered to compensate the slave owners. But the only way they settled slavery was on the battlefield.
Now we have to talk about ending that other form of slavery—wage slavery. And we will only end that on the streets, on the picket lines, on the barricades. Working class people will have to take political power to settle that question.
“We have more opportunities now than ever before. We are far more integrated now, in ways those who went before us could only have dreamed of. There is a deep crisis in capitalism coming. The Federal Reserve is just delaying that crisis. And crisis brings radicalisation in the working class.
But workers can radicalise to the right as well as the left. I am optimistic, but we need to get our act together.
What was your first experience of voting?
It was the 1964 presidential election was between Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrat Lyndon B Johnson. It was my first opportunity to vote. I had just turned 21 which was the voting age then. I was at grad school in Washington DC, but I went back to New Orleans, where my family was.
I tried to register to vote. It was seen as so important because everyone said that if Goldwater became president, he would start a nuclear war. The Civil Rights movement suspended their protests.
Back in high school in 1955-56, I helped my teachers register black people to vote. I knew all about the ways they tried to stop people who look like me from voting. So I had attended workshops, I had registered, I filled in the long and arduous form and I turned it over to the “Good Old Boy”.
Well, he looked me up and down, and he looked at my form. And he said, “You didn’t fill this part in.” I said, “It’s not relevant to me,” and he said, “But you have to draw a line through it. Take it away, draw the line and come back in two weeks.”
I had to go back to college, so I never did get to vote. But that was the first “Vote for Lesser Evil” election I remember. Four years later, in 1968 I was able to vote. What was the difference between 1964 and 1968? The people had been out on the streets. I was able to vote because a mass mobilisation on the streets made it possible.
There’s an election coming next week. What are your thoughts on the choice of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
The most important vote taking place in the next few days is the vote of the Boeing strikers on whether to accept a new offer. That vote could have enormous consequences for the labour movement.
A prominent union like that winning a strike could have a domino effect. The labour movement has been on the move for the last few years, with more people trying to form unions and get organised.
On the presidential election, many of my students have lots of anxiety. There is the temptation, the constant enticement, to vote for the lesser of two evils. I understand that. I tell them, you are in good company. In 1849, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued for a vote for the lesser of two evils. They thought the workers’ movement wasn’t strong enough to stand its own candidates. They argued to vote for the liberals.
A year later they rethought their position. They had to go through the experience. They thought the liberals would bring in a republic, but they were too cowardly. In March 1850, Marx and Engels published an address in which they criticised their earlier position.
They said it was a mistake to suspend the Communist League and merge with the liberals. In elections, you have to stand your own candidates, even if you have no chance of winning. The advantages in standing are that you can put forward your ideas, educate people and recruit them. And you can test the strength of your support. The disadvantages are that you can split the vote. But the advantages are more important.
What I tell my liberal friends is that we can’t keep kicking the can down the road. That can’t be our legacy. It is not too late. Can we build a working class party that takes a stand on key issues like immigration?
What do you say to those who feel they have to vote for Harris?
Did the election of Barack Obama qualitatively advance the interests of the working class in all its skin colours?
The Democrat appeal is falling so they resort to scare stories about how horrible Trump is. But lesser evilism is all about what we don’t want, not what we do want.
The lesson of my life is that mass movements bring change—and that’s the lesson of history. Real change doesn’t come at the ballot box—it comes on the streets, on the picket lines, on the barricades and sometimes on the battlefields.
US activists debate whether to vote Democrat
In 1857, they tried to settle the slavery question with a court ruling. In 1860, the side that lost the election ceded from the US itself. In 1861, at his inauguration, president Abraham Lincoln tried a constitutional settlement. But the slave owners fired on Fort Sumter. Lincoln even offered to compensate the slave owners. But the only way they settled slavery was on the battlefield.
Now we have to talk about ending that other form of slavery—wage slavery. And we will only end that on the streets, on the picket lines, on the barricades. Working class people will have to take political power to settle that question.
“We have more opportunities now than ever before. We are far more integrated now, in ways those who went before us could only have dreamed of. There is a deep crisis in capitalism coming. The Federal Reserve is just delaying that crisis. And crisis brings radicalisation in the working class.
But workers can radicalise to the right as well as the left. I am optimistic, but we need to get our act together.
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