Word: slp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Gilfedder campaigns to represent the interests of the working class. An honest candidate, he admits there is presently no working class vote. His job as SLP candidate is to make Massachusetts workers aware of their class identity and of the class struggle. Given a society in which ditch-diggers consider themselves lower middle class and house painters claim status in the professions, Gilfedder will probably not top his 1960 total of 5,735 votes...
...SLP is dogmatically Marxist, but fiercely, and defensively, anti-Russian. The party offers only one plank, "unconditional surrender of capitalism." Unlike the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas ("a petty, bourgois reform party," says Gilfedder) the SLP refuses to compromise with capitalism in the quest for social reform. As a senator, Gilfedder would not vote for social security, unemployment compensation or Medicare. For to the SLP, social welfare is only a means of bolstering the capitalist order...
...SLP candidate the Democratic and Republican opponents are mere tools of the exploiting class. Since Marx never worried about political inexperience in Massachusetts, the problem is irrelevant to the SLP. Hughes, while not an implement of the Kennedy-Lodge variety, is termed a "dreamer with fatuous hopes" as well as a phony socialist. Gilfedder sees no threat from the independent. "Hughes will take the liberal vote from Kennedy, but the liberal vote is not one we get or seek...
...Gilfedder proceeds unswervingly down the Marxist SLP path, his prohibitionist opponent is a liberal who just cannot walk the straight conservative line of his party. The Prohibition Party platform is rather a parody of classic midwestern conservatism. The platform advocates a free market farm economy, states rights and racial equality, anti-trust laws covering labor and complete laissez-faire. It opposes, among other things, the legalized trade in alcoholic beverages. Shaw is anxious for a second prohibition but feels that "law is only ten per cent of the answer...