Re: [Marxism] The Teixeira thesis

["Marvin Gandall" <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
"Judis is one of the most disgusting people around. He spent much of the
1980s arguing for contra funding in the pages of The New Republic and In
These Times. Teixeira is a senior official of the The Century
Foundation, a Democratic Party think-tank with all sorts of evil people
on the board, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Hodding Carter III. I have
no idea whether the Republicans or the Democrats will be the majority
party 5 or 10 years from now. The issue before this forum is capitalism
or socialism, however."
----------------------------------------------------
This is an interesting observation, Louis. If you truly believe that the
issue which is on the agenda today is a stark choice between “capitalism
or socialism” – and that working class support for capitalist parties is
simply an irrelevant distraction – do you mind my asking why are you not
now in a revolutionary organization? Doesn’t one logically follow from
the other? It certainly did in the political tradition we both come
from, and nothing has changed my understanding of the connection between
the two.

Instead, you plump for the Green Party which, last time I looked, was
not committed to social ownership of the means of production, but to
reforming capitalism. So far as I can tell, it differs from the
Democrats only insofar as it is not a serious contender for power and
therefore not subject to the pressures which cause all reformist parties
to trim their sails and tack towards the centre the closer they get to
political office. Let me correct that. It also differs from the
Democrats in another respect: it has no working class base  or support
in the labour movement.

I remember asking you some time back, “Are you quite certain that if the
Greens should somehow take power in the US within the framework of the
current system, they will govern very differently than the two
established parties?”, but I never did receive an answer – only a very
defensive diatribe.

I can appreciate that you find the discipline of the revolutionary left
organizations demanding – what you describe as “Zinovievism” – and their
political approaches wanting, but is there no organization out there to
which you could accommodate and attempt to reform along the lines you
favour? I know the SWP is a no-no, but you have spoken sympathetically
in the past of Workers’ World, although I expect, if you were to make a
commitment, you would probably find a more loosely-organized formation
of the kind we used to call “centrist” more to your liking.

I raise this only because I would find your contempt for “reformists”
such as myself more understandable and, in its own way, more worthy of
respect, if you came at it as a revolutionary militant acting in
accordance with his principles rather than as a politically inactive
supporter of an aspiring liberal-democratic party like the Greens. From
your Green standpoint, your disgust with your Democratic party rival and
other left intellectuals sounds to me like just so much political “sound
and fury, signifying nothing”, to cite one of your favourite poets.

Marv Gandall




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