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Introduction
Introducción
Calendar
Current Briefing Activities
Peace
and Freedom Party from 1967 to 1997
by
Casey Peters, South State Chair of the Peace and Freedom Party
of California
In response to the Democratic Party's war in Vietnam, over 100,000
Californians registered to vote in a new political party of
the Left in 1967.
The Peace and Freedom Party (P&F) is still
on the California ballot 30 years later and is reassessing its
role in building a viable national alternative.
During 1968 the Black Panther Party provided leadership with Huey Newton,
Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver all running for public office
on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.
The disjointed national efforts of Peace and Freedom, Dick Gregory on the New Party
line and Gene McCarthy's independent candidacy, collapsed after
Nixon's election as most state parties lost their ballot status.
California survived to run the century's first Mexican-American
candidate for Governor, Ricardo Romo, in 1970.
Marguerite Buckley, the party's nominee for state Attorney General, got more than
the difference between the losing right-wing Democrat and the
winning Republican.
Predictable criticism from liberals was
diffused by the fact that the Democratic Party had earlier supported
that same Republican in his election to District Attorney of
Los Angeles County in a 2-way race with P&F's Mike Hannon, a
maverick LAPD officer.
Throughout its history, Peace and Freedom Party has boldly taken
on even the most liberal Democrats, such as Ron Dellums, Tom
Hayden and Henry Waxman, in an unending struggle to move America's
political dialogue further to the Left.
P&F candidates expose
liberals as modest moderate reformers who defend the capitalist
status quo. The party's leadership developed from its grassroots
membership. Many of the party's candidates over the years have
been women and men of color, youth and aged, gays and lesbians,
working class people.
Gayle Justice became the nation's first
openly gay candidate for US Senate in 1974. Then in 1978 Marilyn
Seals was the first open lesbian to run for Governor of any
state. The slate Seals led was P&F's most successful, with Elizabeth
Cervantes Barron and David Wald each getting over 4% of the
vote for statewide office. Also in the mid-70s, Peace and Freedom
won a 9-0 victory in the US Supreme Court, overturning filing
fees for indigent candidates.
In 1971 the California-based party sought out like-minded groupings
to form a national People's Party which ran Dr. Benjamin Spock
for President in 1972 and Margaret Wright in 1976. Other participants
included the DC Statehood Party, the Human Rights Party of Michigan,
Vermont's Liberty Union, Good Neighbors Union of Arizona, New
Reform Party of Montana, the Bicentennial Reality Party of Washington
State and many more.
From the beginning, the party promoted democracy, ecology, feminism,
gay and lesbian rights, racial equality, and peace conversion
of the economy. Its working class perspective evolved into a
formal declaration in 1974 that P&F is a socialist party. At
that time, People's Party nearly merged with the New American
Movement (NAM) and Socialist Party USA. When that narrowly failed,
NAM joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and
was subsumed into the Democratic Party. People's Party joined
the People's Alliance which included such groups as American
Indian Movement, Black Panther Party, and the Mass Party Organizing
Committee.
By the end of the 1970s, People's Party had suffered a series
of takeover attempts, twice by an internal Maoist faction and
then by the Newmanoid psychotherapy spinoff of Lyndon LaRouche's
cryptofascist cult (best known later as New Alliance Party,
NAP). Those attempts failed but weakened the national organization.
Then the People's Party gave way to the Citizen's Party which
ran Barry Commoner in 1980 and Sonia Johnson in 1984.
As the only socialist party on California's ballot, Peace and
Freedom Party has played a dual role as an entity unto itself
with its own platform and as an umbrella for other groups. Among
the organizations to have run candidates on the P&F ticket are:
Communist Party USA, Freedom Socialist Party, Socialist Party
USA, Solidarity, and Workers World Party. Most P&F activists
don't belong to any of those groups and are primarily affiliated
with Peace and Freedom.
In 1982 the Search Committee for a United Left Presidential
Ticket (SCULPT) was initiated by P&F, leading to a series of
conferences which culminated in a joint platform being adopted
by delegates from several parties, leagues and other groups.
Hopes for such a national unity effort were dissolved by Jesse
Jackson's presidential primary campaign which sucked much of
the organized Left into the Democratic Party.
Peace and Freedom's 1988 state convention had a three-way split
resulting in no presidential ticket. One faction included members
of CPUSA and SPUSA as well as many independents. Another was
led by the now defunct Peronist-Trotskyist ("Morenoite") Internationalist
Workers Party (FI).
The third was another invasion of the Newmanoids, now sporting
cult psychologist Lenora Fulani for President. P&F finally drove
NAP out in 1992 with the nomination of former Rainbow Coalition
CEO Ron Daniels for President. Now the followers of Newman and
Fulani are happily ensconced in Ross Perot's Reform Party.
The enthusiasm for Ron Daniels' Campaign for a New Tomorrow
led to formation of a coalition now known as the Independent
Progressive Politics Network (IPPN). P&F officially participates
in IPPN's "National People's Pledge Campaign" as a possible
basis for a new national party. It includes some of the same
forces that comprised the People's Alliance plus labor union
activists, civil rights groups and many Greens.
Not yet in IPPN is the newly-formed Labor Party, to which many
Peace and Freedom people belong. Its bureaucratic, go-slow,
nonelectoral approach is frustrating to activists who have long
since unequivocally broken with the Democratic Party. Despite
its lack of a socialist perspective and its unwillingness to
take stands on "controversial" issues like defending women's
right to abortion, the Labor Party is seen by most progressive
people as an important development. Another recent development
to watch is a series of regional conferences initiated by Committees
of Correspondence. They have invited Democratic Socialists of
America, Socialist Party USA, Solidarity and other explicitly
socialist groups to begin serious discussions on the questions
of cooperation and regroupment. Also worth watching is the Alliance
for Democracy which formed in response to Ronnie Dugger's call
to activism in a summer 1995 issue of The Nation.
Some P&F activists, including current State Chair CT Weber,
feel that it is time to go it alone to build a national Peace
and Freedom Party.
They say that the series of national conferences in 1995-96,
including the Albuquerque and Los Angeles Green Gatherings,
the National Independent Politics Summits in Pittsburgh and
Atlanta, and two Third Parties '96 meetings in Washington DC,
failed to produce the desired result of a national ticket representative
a broad spectrum of people's movements. Proposals for putting
a united progressive party into the electoral arena wallowed
in a mire of apathetic and/or naïve delegates.
Some seemed to feel that local organizing works better without
having a national organization, while others didn't want to
interfere with President Clinton's re-election chances. For
the earlier conferences Peace and Freedom prepared a national
schedule of state ballot deadlines, but by the time Nader and
the Greens woke up, most of the deadlines had passed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
. . .the unwillingness of Nader to run a real campaign hampered
the efforts of Greens and other progressives to use the candidacy
as an effective organizing tool. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Ralph Nader candidacy, first proposed in the July 1995 issue
of the party's internal newsletter, PF Flyer, turned out to
be a great disappointment. Someone of his stature and public
respect should have been on the ballot in nearly every state,
could have organized active local chapters nationally, and if
running a serious campaign might have received many millions
of votes. While it was useful to have someone with a household
name run to the left of the incumbent Democrat, the unwillingness
of Nader to run a real campaign hampered the efforts of Greens
and other progressives to use the candidacy as an effective
organizing tool. In the aftermath of the election, the Green
Party is only on the ballot in nine states (one for President
only) and is reported to be torn into bitterly feuding national
factions.
In September 1995, Green Party's California co-convenor Walter
Contreras Sheasby and P&F activist Casey Peters wrote to Ralph
Nader asking him to consider a presidential run as a unity candidate
for progressive parties. In November, sectarian forces announced
that Nader would run only as a Green. Those Greens with a proprietary
attitude toward Nader foiled the hopes of others who worked
hard to promote Nader's simultaneous nomination by P&F. Go-it-alone
Greens proved themselves incapable of building a viable national
campaign without help from other progressive organizations.
What lingering effect their 1996 exclusivity may have on the
likelihood of future progressive coalition electoral action
remains to be seen. Some P&Fers would like to have a joint political
conference with the California Green Party but others feel that
would be a waste of time better spent on building Peace and
Freedom Party. One P&F (cont on p. 13) activist calls the Greens
"Junior Democrats" for their unwillingness to oppose the 1994
gubernatorial candidacy of pro-corporate Kathleen Brown, and
others take the Greens for lightweights since they fielded only
4 local candidates for partisan office compared to P&F's 20.
Those who propose that the two parties formally merge have a
lot of work cut out for them.
Peace and Freedom Party has traditionally advocated a multi-party
system with democratic elections though proportional representation.
Perhaps everyone would be better off with a New Zealand style
progressive coalition of separate parties emphasizing specific
constituencies. Campaign for a New Tomorrow, Green Party, Labor
Party, NOW's 21st Century Party, Partido de La Raza Unida, and
an alphabet soup of Left parties (CPUSA, CLP, FSP, RCP, SPUSA,
SLP, SWP, SL, WWP) all have valuable viewpoints to contribute
to the public's decision-making deliberations. Currently, P&F
tries in its own way to represent most of those constituencies.
Three decades of independent political action has made P&F something
of a living legend. Having weathered many storms yet maintaining
its essential integrity, the party is now enjoying an "era of
good feelings" with disparate factions and individuals working
together. Over Dead President's Weekend in February 1997, Peace
and Freedom Party will be holding a retreat to ponder its past
and consider its future. It is open to all party members and
those who would be if registered to vote in California. For
further information, you may write to PFP, PO Box 741270, Los
Angeles, CA 90004, or call (213) PFP-1998.
With over 75,000 registered members, Peace and Freedom Party
is bigger than at any time since qualifying for the ballot in
1968. Its 1992 US Senate nominee, author and Black Studies professor
Gerald Horne garnered over 300,000 votes (which is higher than
the number which elected over 20 sitting US Senators). Its low-key
1996 ticket of Marsha Feinland and Kate McClatchy outpolled
the previous two decades of P&F presidential nominees despite
Nader's presence on the ballot. P&F activists are engaged in
labor union organizing, international solidarity work, defending
women's health clinics, supporting the gang truce movement,
working for renters' rights, promoting electoral reform and
much more. Regardless of what happens on the national scene,
the Left in California will continue to find a strong voice
through the Peace and Freedom Party.
Casey Peters is South State Chair of the Peace and Freedom Party
of California and former National Secretary of the People's
Party.
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Peace
Rally
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| Peace
rally, took part to promote peace. |
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Peace
March
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| People
marching to promote peace |
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GIS
Maps
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| GIS
wharehouse, where you will find maps |
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