Leftists and Electoral Politics Re: California recall results

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 2:02 AM -0500 10/8/03, Lou Paulsen wrote:
> Everyone knew it was going to be Schwarzenegger or Davis or maybe 
> Bustamante.  It's the old story: a vote for the 'third party' is a 
> 'wasted vote' unless you know ahead of time who is going to win, in 
> which case you have the luxury of casting a 'protest vote'.  We 
> -really- can't fall into the trap of thinking that vote totals in a 
> bourgeois election are some kind of accurate measure of what you 
> have accomplished during the campaign.

A third party on the left in an electoral system like the United 
States' can never rise to power without a prior collapse of the 
political party controlled by the ruling class that had captured 
working-class votes (the Democratic Party, in the case of the United 
States).

In Venezuela, the rise of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian movement was 
made possible by the spectacular collapse of the two thitherto 
dominant political parties -- the social Democratic Action Party 
(Acción Democrática, AD) and the Christian democratic Social 
Christian Party (Comité de Organización Política Electoral 
Independiente, COPEI):

***** Venezuela: Popular Sovereignty versus Liberal Democracy
Michael Coppedge
April 2002
The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

...Increasing disaffection with the system became evident as 
abstention grew from a low of 3.5 percent in 1973 to 12 percent in 
1978 and 1983, 18 percent in 1988, and 39.8 percent in 1993. Many 
observers know that AD and COPEI, following the lead of their 
presidential candidates during the 1988 election year, passed an 
electoral reform that established the direct election of mayors and 
governors for the first time in 1989; this was seen as a move away 
from the hierarchical discipline typical of partyarchy. What fewer 
know is that few party leaders besides the presidential candidates 
were happy about this reform. They set about to nullify its effects 
immediately by reasserting tight cogollo control over nominations to 
these offices. AD was also primarily responsible for stalling and 
eventually shelving a constitutional reform bill that grass-roots 
organizations had succeeded in putting on the agenda in 1992. The two 
parties flirted with reform in 1993 by nominating for president a 
mayor and a governor who had genuine local grass-roots support and 
who advocated greater openness and participation and economic 
liberalism. But when both candidates lost in 1993 -- the first time 
neither AD nor COPEI had won the presidency in a fair election -- 
other party leaders systematically marginalized these candidates and 
purged hundreds of their supporters from the ranks. The AD candidate, 
Claudio Fermín, was eventually expelled by his party; President Pérez 
was impeached in 1993 and AD expelled him while he awaited trial. By 
1998, COPEI had no viable presidential candidate of its own and so 
backed one, then another, independent. AD's top boss, Luis Alfaro 
Ucero, forced the party machine to nominate him for president and ran 
a doomed race in 1998 even when his own party dumped him two weeks 
before the vote. AD and COPEI contributed only 9.05 and 2.15 percent 
of the valid votes, respectively, to the independent candidate they 
both backed in the end, Henrique Salas Römer.

The presidential election of 1998 that brought Hugo Chávez to the 
presidency was therefore the culmination of a fifteen-year process of 
traditional-party decline. Chávez did not destroy the old parties; 
rather, he filled a political vacuum. His promises were perfectly 
tailored to fill this particular void. His ultimate announced goal 
was to restore prosperity to the country -- to stop the waste and 
corruption that Venezuelans believe to have been siphoning off their 
wealth, and to distribute it fairly among all citizens. But his means 
to that goal squarely targeted the traditional parties, which he 
indicted for creating the mess and accused of standing in the way of 
the necessary reform. "We are being called to save Venezuela from 
this immense and putrid swamp in which we have been sunk during 40 
years of demagoguery and corruption," he proclaimed in his inaugural 
address. 16 Although AD's popular support had already diminished and 
COPEI was on the verge of extinction, their militants were believed 
to be entrenched still in the congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, 
the electoral council, and state and municipal governments. He 
promised to remove these corrupt politicians from power and replace 
them with honest, hard-working, patriotic -- and frequently, it 
turned out, military -- citizens. Rooting out the corrupt partisans 
would require a full-scale assault on the existing democratic 
institutions, and the tool Chávez proposed to carry out this 
political revolution was a constituent assembly.

<http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/com01/com01.pdf>   *****

Abstention has grown in the USA to an even greater extent than in 
Venezuela in the midst of the pre-Chavez and pre-Bolivarian crisis: 
"The typical voter today is relatively well off financially and over 
fifty years of age. Better educated, higher earning Americans vote at 
70-80 percent levels, while less than two-fifths of the working class 
bother to vote--a forty percent gap" ("Why Don't Americans Vote?" 
<http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/con_voting.cfm>)  And 
yet, the Democratic Party here is still far from collapsing in a 
fashion similar to AD's, though it may in the future.  In the 
meantime, the proportion of the total votes in any gubernatorial, 
congressional, or presidential election that a third party on the 
left can get will be limited to 5% (for a populist or left-liberal or 
"clean-government" party like the Green Party) or less than 1% (for 
any political party to the left of the Greens).  Leftists who spend 
time on third-party electoral campaigns should be clear-headed about 
this social fact.  My opinion is that third-party electoral campaigns 
are worth doing only if they are rooted in and controlled by 
working-class social movements that go far beyond the narrow confines 
of electoral politics and if everyone involved in the campaigns knows 
full well what is and isn't possible until the total collapse of the 
Democratic Party.
--
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* 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/>


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