I think West is an honest man of good will, and I like the idea of a working-class alternative to the ruling parties, but I have serious reservations about his candidacy.
West is an avowed non-Marxist who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. His candidacy will have the primary effect of undermining independent working-class organizing by channeling the resistance blocs attracted to his campaign back into the DSA (which functions as an adjunct, via the Social Democrats, of the Democratic Party and the right-opportunist wing of the Socialist Party) and the other reactionary power centers around which his campaign functions, including the parties that have endorsed him:
The People's Party, a middle-class "radical" party of left-populists organized to give left cover to Bernie Sanders's capitulation to the Democrats, backed by Bonapartist leader Jesse Ventura and with a record of tolerating sexism in its upper ranks
The Aurora Party, a social-democratic party advocating some basic reformist positions that are implicitly counterposed with the alternative of Marxist revolution
The Green Mountain Peace & Justice Party, a middle-class, multi-tendency centrist party formerly chaired by Sanders and opportunistically hitching its fortunes to both social democratic opportunism and Stalinist centrism
Socialist Alternative, an opportunist revisionist "Trotskyist" party closely identified with the International Socialist Organization, Democratic Socialists of America, and their program of electoral reformism
The Oregon Progressive Party, a radical bourgeois party that formerly endorsed Ralph Nader
United Citizens Party (which only resembles in name the party that fought for Black voting rights), an opportunist social-democratic party that has led people into not only New Alliance (middle-class faux-Marxist radical) Party, Socialist Party, and Democratic Party politics, but that also sought to promote the Perot campaign for its ends
The Unity Party, a self-described "neither left nor right" middle-class party created as a vehicle for the war-hawk campaign of Wesley Clark
Legal Marijuana NOW Party, a middle-class one-issue party
Natural Law Party, a theocratic bourgeois party that also served to amplify the campaign of fascist leader Pat Buchanan
Although he did not get their nomination, West also sought the support of the Green Party, a radical bourgeois reformist party of anti-nuclear hysteria that forged alliances with rightist supporters of Roseanne Barr, Ross Perot, and Buchanan, and supported the opportunist campaigns on the left by Barr, Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney.
If West breaks, substantially if not formally, with the capitalist parties supporting him (Unity Party, Natural Law Party, Progressive Party, Legal Marijuana NOW Party) and leans hard into organizing a labor party using the existing social-democratic, Stalinist, centrist, and communist parties as a base ... which means splitting off from the right wing within those parties ... I will consider supporting him. But if he continues to pursue what appears to be his current strategy of pressuring the Democrats from the left so he and the labor aristocracy/bureaucracy supporting him can work out backroom deals with them, I will look for the working-class alternative that is building that labor party.
