The Green Party National Convention, June 23-28, 2004

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The Green Party National Convention, June 23-28, 2004

The Green Party National Convention will begin tomorrow -- the only
party convention where delegates will actually debate issues and make
political decisions -- most importantly, whether to endorse the Ralph
Nader/Peter Camejo campaign, to nominate David Cobb as the Green
Party presidential candidate, to endorse both the Nader/Camejo and
Cobb campaigns, or not to nominate/endorse anyone for the
presidential election. The Democratic and Republican Party
Conventions, in contrast, are merely photo opportunities for John
Kerry and George W. Bush.

If supporters for John Kerry had been smarter, they would have
deliberately joined the Green Party in droves and promoted the Cobb
candidacy, since Cobb's "safe states" strategy would reduce the Green
Party from a full-fledged political party intent on replacing the
Democratic Party and becoming the main mass political party for the
working class and our allies to just another liberal interest group
designed to lobby the Democratic Party from the left:

David Cobb of Texas, the leading Green Party candidate for president,
supports a "safe states" campaign. He argues the Green Party should
campaign aggressively in states where Bush or Kerry is likely to win
easily, but back Kerry in the battleground states that could decide
the election. (John Wildermuth, "By Adding Camejo as VP Choice, Nader
Could Boost Ballot Visibility," San Francisco Chronicle, June 22,
2004)

Today, the Green Party is nearly evenly divided between those who
think like Camejo and those who think like Cobb. As I mentioned in
the entry titled "Vote Nader/Camejo 2004!", I believe that the
announcement of the Nader/Camejo ticket yesterday will tip the
balance in favor of an all-out campaign for Nader/Camejo 2004, but we
shall see if Green delegates have the guts to refuse to bow to
political pressures from the Democrats and break the vicious cycle of
activist dependency on the Democratic Party -- the so-called politics
of protest, aka "activistism" (cf. Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood,
and Christian Parenti, "'Action Will Be Taken': Left
Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents"): three years of protests
against what Gore Vidal called "the property party, which essentially
is corporate America, which has two right wings"; the presidential
election year during which activists retreat, protest mainly the
Republicans, and apologize profusely for the Democratic Party in the
name of pragmatism (aka electing the "electable"); and then back to
protests again. Dependency on the Democratic Party made at least some
political sense until the late 1960s and early 1970s for workers
fortunate enough to have good union jobs, but since then, the
Democrats have ceased to deliver even in the narrowly economistic
calculations of crass business unionism (cf. Yoshie Furuhashi,
"Winning the Culture War, Losing the Class Struggle," Dissident
Voice, May 4, 2004). It is high time for activists to break the bad
habit of feeding the political animal that always bites us back. We
have to build our own political party, not another liberal interest
group. The choice for Greens at the convention is clear: support
Camejo.

[The full text with links:
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/green-party-national-convention-june.html>.]
--
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>