RE: [Marxism] Answer to Mr. Lause's challenge

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Of "a battle that the party and YCL won," Shane Brinton wrote, "I spent
last summer in Missouri with the CP and YCL working on electoral
politics. We knocked on hundreds of doors and got a black socialist
progressive (John L. Bowman) elected as a state rep. He ran as a
progressive Democrat against a white right-wing anti-choice Democrat
that was backed by the Republicans."

If you go to the voters and ask them to vote for a Democrat--and the
voters go to the polls and elect a Democrat--it is a victory for the
Democrats.  Adding the adjectives "progressive" and "socialist" to a
Democratic candidate mean no more than attaching them to a Republican.
It wasn't no more a blow against the capitalists today if the candidate
is black than it was when the capitalist Democrats was the main party
representing the class that owned black people.

In CLASS TERMS, the CP's own rhetoric on the two-party capitalist system
tells you what you've successfully persuaded voters to support: a
capitalist politician.  Under all the dissembling about fig-leaf
independent CP electoral campaigns, the essence is getting a mandate for
a "progressive" Democratic wing of the capitalists.

Radicals need to run for office and ask the voters for to give us a
mandate for our ideas because we want to discuss our ideas with the
voters.  That isn't easy for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of
which is that we're going to keep losing until enough voters are willing
to give our alternative a chance.  We can't help that and have to just
keep trying.

The Left historically learned this from hard experience and knew this.
Certainly, the Greens and participants in the Nader campaigns
rediscovered it on a mass scale in parts of the US--a process from which
the CPUSA simply abstained...save to the extent that its members and
supporters actively joined in the Democratic slanders that Nader was in
the pay of the monopolies and that we were secretly working to reelect
Bush.

Solidarity!
Mark L.






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