[Marxism] PRD: What Price Failure?

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 00:06:46 -0600
> From: "Tony Abdo" <gojack10@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Marxism] Re: Electorialism Has Been the Kiss of Death for
>       TheMexicanPRD (in Sp
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Message-ID: <Sea2-F37GJ2TUSzbAUf00013e57@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
>
> That was an excellent and informative post by Julio Huato about the PRD
> 'scandals'. Too bad he is not a 'PRD leader', because there really is no
> current PRD leader with the political savvy to deal with the Mexican
> elites'
> intentions of making the 2006 Presidential election a purely managed
> affair,
> that will soon put the PRI back into office.
>
> In 2000 during the campaign, the PRD could not visualize and didn't
> realize
> that the dedazo of Zedillo was to put Fox into office, and it appears that
> they still do not fully comprehend that the coming dedazo of Fox in 2006
> will be to return the PRI into the presidency. This is somewhat akin to
> the
> 'innocence' of US liberals pushing for a Kerry over a Bush, all the whille
> thinking that the election is not really ultimately controlled by the US
> elites and US press, but rather by the popular decision making and will of
> the American masses.
>
> Lopez Obrador is still fighting the publicity wars of yesterday, and has
> meekly responded to the new corrption scandals effecting the PRD, by
> purely
> trying to turn the fingers pointed at the PRD and repoint them at Fox and
> Salinas de Gortari! For the PRD leadership, they have no game plan beyond
> trying to manage their image as candidates before the Mexican capitalist
> press. This is a strategy guaranteed to lead to defeat. The Mexican press
> and their owners do not want the PRD in office, any more than the American
> press wants a Ralph Nader heading up power in the US.
>
> Tony Abdo

Mr. Abdo, this is not fair to the PRD, for reasons you outline in the
preceding
paragraph.  Nader is not a member of "left opposition" in any very
meaningful sense;
he is basically an establishment figure who has spent his entire life
building Ungeresque
"counter-institutions", perhaps without giving up his key to the Princeton
library.
Does this make him like Cardenas?  It makes him very much unlike a viable
electoral
candidate, and therein lies a question concerning whether "electoralist"
abstentionism,
bad publicity, or a crushing systemic blow is at the roots of these
(rather recently
developing) problems for the PRD.  And as an admirer of the PRD's rather
singularly
syncretic approach, I can only suggest that a slightly more informed
attitude on the part of
the US left (i.e., an understanding that left-wing politics in other
countries really still
does take place within the ambit of the SI, and that now as then this
permits of
gradations as fine as you can swing) actually might "knock out" some
"illusory agency"
on the part of activists currently unconcerned with the "fine structure"
of sociopolitical
and socioeconomic "interfaces".  Such that the real problems facing the
PRD are slightly
more visible in terms of their "tractability" -- and although this may
seem parochial,
I will say that here in Portland Metro we're having jokes in a paper about
"Green Parties"
and it's not quite.

Rubard


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