[Marxism] re:Cubans Believe Kerry Victory Would Benefit Island Nation

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

"My

more political friends simply say that neither of
the two is good, but Kerry is simply less worse.
I realize that this offends some of the posters to
the Marxmail list, but Marxists should base their
activity on the facts, and these are the fact on
the ground here in Havana, and unmistakeably so.)"
===

This is a decidedly shaky statement. Marxists should base their activity
on facts - that sounds obvious enough - who the hell shouldn't? But what "fact"
is at play here? Only that the Cubans you meet think Kerry is better than Bush.
That is also the opinion of most liberals in the United States. So what of it? 
I don't
think anyone, actually, disagrees with this assessment.

The question has nothing to do with who is worse on the issues. It has to do 
with
the overall dynamic in which one party being slightly less worse on the issues 
than
the other moves the parameters of debate over the issues to the right. That is 
the
crux of the matter. A man can walk into a train two ways: moving one foot in 
front
of the other, or moving one foot forward with the other one dragging limpingly
from slightly behind. The American body politic today is like this suicidal 
cripple.

One often hears that the result of voting Nader will be the election of Bush. 
This
is a one-sided statement. People who reject the two-party system and who work 
for a
leftist movement unshackled to the Democrats are working for a world in which 
the very
existence, not to mention the possible election, of a Bush - or Kerry- will 
never occur.

I think that is something worth fighting for. The long-term consequences of not 
waging
this fight are far worse than the short-term consequences of abandoning it. 
Some of your Cuban
friends  may say this is a hopelessly idealistic and impossible view. But I 
would ask them if
their M-26 movement, which was once nothing more than a handful of disoriented, 
ambushed,
shipwrecked men, did not also at one point look hopelessly idealistic and 
impossible.

Today no doubt they are aware that that which can be dreamed, can be done.


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