Camejo, José and the Greens

[David Walters <dwalters@xxxxxxx>]

The problem is that José is confusing Engels and Henry's George's 
movement on the one hand the the 'movement' behind the Greens on the 
other. There is no "movement" Jose, there is electoral interest in 
Camejo amounting to 5% of the population, maybe a little higher among 
voting Latinos. Henry George *won*, and paraded with 100,000 workers 
behind him. The GP would be lucky to get 300 people marching in the 
streets. During this years anti-war movement anti-war GP members were 
wondering, quite aloud, "Where the fuck is the GP?".  *That* was a 
movement...and the GP, as a party, was almost invisible. There are 
50,000 registrants, so that's nothing to sneeze at, but of course they 
are not a mobilized one.

José, in your goal to cast the GP as "proletarian" you stretch 
analogies to the breaking point. The movement that Engels was involved 
with was a mass proletarian movement fighting for democracy, often, as 
in the case with 1848, with guns...it was a *revolutionary* movement. 
The GP is purely based on immediate, mostly environmental issues and is 
basically an electoral machine in the making. At the end of the day, 
communists are for mobilizing the masses against the capitalist status 
quo...I haven't seen the Greens anywhere poise as such an alternative, 
and that includes Camejo. Camejo's appeals as a progressive-liberal 
alternative to the Dems and Repubs...and I don't condemn him for this. 
I think one of the problems is that he doesn't really address the heart 
of many of these issues and caters to liberals on others (such as gun 
control, which has about as  'proletarian' a view  as a SF Pacific 
Heights liberal might have...). He speaks for defending the 8 hour day 
(as you heard in the debate), but really failed, of you notice, how the 
GP might differentiate itself from the the rest of the pack of 
Democrats that also have the 'same position'. Additionally, the GP as a 
whole has failed to differentiate themselves in this manner. So, if I'm 
a labor activist, what does the GP offer me that the Democrats haven't 
already talked about or implemented?

I can't disagree on something you said and here's my take on it...if 
the Greens actually beat a Democrat, running under their own party 
labels, it would be important, not for the Greens, but in seeing the 
Democratic Party machine, which here in California is quite strong, 
begin to crumble from a relatively more progressive force...as opposed 
to crumbling under the weight of a right-wing campaign, which is what 
is behind the Recall Campaign here.

The problem that activists in and around the GP and Camejo campaign 
have is keeping the momentum.   IMO, if I were a Green, I'd throw ALL 
my weight into the Matt Gonzalez campaign in San Francisco...because he 
is not only a bonifide lefty (his credentials are actually better than 
that of Peter), but he's the highest ranking elected Green in the US 
right now (that I know of) and he has a slim, but real chance of 
actually becoming Mayor of of San Francisco.

David Walters


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