Re: [Marxism] Greens to be on Ohio State Ballot

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/2/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> But I know people who have been active in or around the DP, including one,
> Julio Huato, who we both know and who is well respected on this and other
> lists.
<snip>
> I have a Chicago friend who is still smarting from the
> Beltway Democrats parachuting Duckworth into his district to run instead of
> Cegelis, but he met plenty of good, serious people during her campaign. I
> looked on the Cegelis for Congress website out of curiousity, and found
> this: http://www.cegelisforcongress.com/getinvolved. I imagine this is
> fairly typical of the opportunities for people to get involved in the
> political life of the Democratic party across the country if they choose to
> do so.

Yes, you can get involved as a volunteer for an individual political
candidate (you might get a job out of a campaign if you are looking
for one), but that's different from becoming a member of a political
party in the traditional sense.

Whether entryism (which I don't' regard as a pejorative term) makes
sense depends on whether there is bureaucracy and/or democracy.  The
Democratic Party has neither.  That's what Bob Fitch was trying to say
about organized labor in the United States: it's neither bureaucratic
nor democratic, and that's why entryism doesn't make sense.  So, yes,
I regard this as an organizational problem rather than a political
one.

> the US left is
> mainly concentrated in solidarity work.

I don't think that's been always the case, but it's probably correct
to say that the sort of leftists who congregate here now tend to
concentrate more on anti-war/anti-imperialist work than anything else
(with exceptions like Andy, Jon, and Michael Yates).  That's a
reflection of the fact that only a very small proportion of the US
workforce is organized, so most of us, like other US citizens and
residents, are not union members nor can we easily start our own and
the fact that identity-based organizing (civil rights movements,
nationalist movements, women's movements, queer movements, etc.)
practically died.  What's left that leftists can still initiate or
participate in with relative ease and efficiency is opposition to US
military adventurism.  That is no good for us or the rest of the
world, but I can't think of any simple way out of it.

> This reminds me of Tariq Ali's novel Redemption, his very funny but friendly
> satire of the Trotskyist movement, and its frustrated penchant for chasing
> after different "sectors in motion"- what was derided as "greener pastures"
> theory.

I'm joking, but only halfway.  There is something to be said for
organized religion in so far as it is organized, which is more than I
can say for liberals and leftists in the United States, who are
totally unorganized.

> I'll look forward to that.  Walker (yes, her first name) and I are sometimes
> around your way. Everyone thinks she's terrific, and she is; if you'll like
> me, you'll love her. :) If you're ever up around these parts, we'll have to
> get together with Richard Fidler. You made the two of us famous last winter,
> remember?

Yeah!
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>

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