[Marxism] Re: Reply to Carl Davidson

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

What I don't understand is why Julio just couldn't answer the questions
I posed three times. Leaving the list is really just an excuse and
pretty babyish.

I asked in three separate posts: how, in what way, and to what end
should socialists work with the DP, beyond small-fry levels? The DP
doesn't want to work with socialists or for socialism, and the radical
movement that socialists need to be a part of is so weak numerically,
politically, and morale-wise, that it would just dissipate or get
liquidated through infiltration, co-optation, and corruption by working
with the DP. We are not in any position to force the DP to do anything
we might want it to. What we need to do is to orient ourselves toward
the growing layers of Americans who constantly find themselves on the
receiving end of attacks, betrayals and deceptions undertaken *by* the
DP. To the extent we are not doing this we are part of the problem in
this country that is creating a growing right-wing atmosphere.

To cite just one example, I wince every time I think of the robbery the
SEIU perpertrated upon itself in handing over over $65 million to John
Kerry. $65 million! Can you just imagine, what kind of amazingly
powerful, creative, and inspirational purposes such money could have
been put to, in cultivating progressive ideas, in creating a structural
backbone for leftist activism, political thinking, analysis,
dissemination of ideas, and education?  In lending a real helping hand
to people being hit hard by the present crisis of capitalism in their
personal lives? We could create an actual firm basis for
counter-hegemony in ideas and action. We could avoid this maddening
process where people just get demoralized or burned out or pressured by
career and economic impulses to give up hope. It's just mind blowing the
kind of evil suction effect the DP exerts on our potential.

I have just finished writing an article titled "How the Democratic Party
Creates Conservatism" that I'll post in a few days, in which I attempt
to lay out the broad political case for the need to make a clean break
with the Democratic Party, and I hope it will serve as a starting point
for anti-capitalists and serious progressives to re-orient ourselves.
Meanwhile, I will just end with this final paragraph of an essay written
by Paul Baran in 1950, "Better Smaller But Better", which I think poses
the nature of our present task quite deftly:

"There is hardly any room for political cooperation on the Left at the
present time because there are no politics of the Left. The time will
perhaps come, possibly sooner than we think. But just now the issues are
ideological, and ideological problems cannot be solved by organization
makeshifts. To the extent that so-called liberals are themselves fully
and unreservedly subject to the prevailing obfuscation, to the extent
that they serve as faithful soldiers of the Cold War army, to the extent
that they debase themselves to the function of informers and
stool-pigeons, to that extent "co-operation" with them can only be of
the same nature as "cooperation" between the murderer and his victim.
Nor is such cooperation desirable. What is needed - let us say it again
and again - is clarity, courage, atience, faith in the spontaneity of
rational and socialist tendencies in society. At the present historical
moment in our country - "better smaller but better." "

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