RE: [Marxism] Michael Moore and Wesley Clark

["Jose G. Perez" <elgusanorojo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim presents a pretty straightforward lesser evil argument in defense of
Michael Moore's position.

His central contention is that Bush is the greatest evil ever: never,
ever, has there been a president as bad as repressive and fascist as
Bush II. 

Not Wilson who led us into the Great Patriotic Slaughter number one,
intervened against the October revolution, and carried out the Palmer
raids. 

Not Roosevelt II, who led us into WWII, interned the Japanese and had
the atom bomb built.

Not Truman who dropped the bomb and started the cold war and the
McCarthy witch-hunt. 

Not Kennedy who sent 15 kilotroops into Vietnam, invaded Cuba at the bay
of pigs, came within hours of blowing up the entire human race during
the Crisis of the Caribbean in October 1962, and sat back and did
nothing while mad dogs of both the human and canine variety ripped into
civil rights protesters in the south.

And not Lyndon Johnson, of "Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill
today" fame.

These were GOOD bourgeois presidents, or at least less bad ones,
compared to nasty George Bush II. 

And, of course, Kennedy is considered a saint, solely on the basis of
having been assassinated.

The contention won't stand the giggle test. Let's be frank, despite all
the Patriot Act and other things, nothing that has been done in the past
three years compares in scope or intensity to the McCarthy witch-hunt.
There's been no Rosenberg execution. They cracked some heads in Miami
during the FTAA meeting but didn't kill demonstrators like they used to
in the 1960's and 1970's. 

What we really have is a hysteria among some leftists, who think things
depend on the style, inclinations or personalities of specific members
of the ruling class when in fact they depend a lot more on a whole
series of other factors which, to tremendously oversimplify matters,
I'll just call the relationship of class forces.

Then there's the charge that Bush stole the elections. I'm shocked, just
shocked. But back when St. Jack the Good Martyr stole them (and Kennedy
did) they didn't even let n******* vote in the old confederacy. There
wasn't a single Black congressman or mayor of any significant city,
there weren't any governors, schools featured courses with names like
"Americanism versus communism," and water fountains at the Atlanta
Greyhound bus station has "white" and "colored" signs on them.

The other problem with Jim's argument is that independent politics it is
ineffective politics. He argues the left is too WEAK to do anything
else. But granting for argument's sake that it is weak, the question
would be, how did it get so weak? Doing precisely what he proposes. This
is precisely what the bulk of those who consider themselves socialists,
communists or radicals of one sort or another have been doing since Earl
Browder invented the tactic of running in support of your opponent in
the 1936 elections.

The truth is that from where most working people sit, there really isn't
that much of a difference between a Bush and a Gore and a Clark and a
Dean. That's why, election after election, given the opportunity to
determine nothing less than the fate of the entire human race --or so we
are told by our mendacious media--, the majority of working people DO
NOT VOTE.

What determines upsets and "big" changes in bourgeois politics is NOT
who "the people" vote for, but WHICH PEOPLE VOTE. Spend some time
communing with the exit polls of the last few national elections and
congressional elections, look up racial composition and income levels of
districts and states and compare it to what the polls reveal about the
35-50% who actually voted nationwide. And then look at things that were
considered unusual, for example, the Republican failure to pick up many
seats in Congress in 1998. And if you look at the 20 or 30 most
contested races, you'll see what made the difference is simply turnout,
in some cases around 2/3rds of the voters or more in an election that
overall attracted less than 40% to the polls. Then look at the
demographics of that turnout, and you'll see it is a lot more working
class, a lot more union, a lot poorer, a lot less "educated" and a lot
Blacker than the electorate nationwide.

>From that point of view, and quite contrary to conventional wisdom, the
strategy of backing the "hold your nose and vote" candidate is suicidal.
Because you have to wind up trying to convince people to vote for a Gore
or a Dean or a Clark DESPITE the candidate, and what really happens is
that people simply won't come out for those kinds of candidates, not the
big majority of working people. Crass as it sounds, they vote pretty
much out of immediate self-interest and class/national instinct. And I
don't believe there's a snowball's chance in hell you're going to get a
massive Black or Latino vote for the likes of Dean, Clark, Kerry or
Edwards. 

The argument of voting for someone who you absolutely distrust in order
to block the one you passionately despise may work with a relative
handful of ideologically motivated people, but it doesn't work with the
big majority of working people. That's what six decades plus of
experience shows. 

And what is worse, this "realistic" strategy only succeeds in helping to
shift the political spectrum to the right. On the right, those forces
are always trying to pull people in their direction. What is being
proposed is, in effect, that from the left, we push people towards the
right, instead of trying to pull them to the left.

José


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