Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Carrol wrote:

> I think Yoshie has gotten a bit too wrapped up in the Greens (in the
> 2004 election). We cannot know the form that socialist activity will
> take in the future, but we can be fairly certain that it will not be
> electoral and will involve mass resistance to imperialist policies.
> Arguments against the Greens are equally arguments against paying
> any attention at all to elections at any level.

The future of mass resistance to imperialist policies that you speak
of, for all I know, may come, say, four years from now; it may not
come in our lifetime, however.  Whichever is the case, we have to do
what we can in the meantime, and among the things to do in the United
States is to challenge the Democratic Party, because it, unlike the
Republican Party, commands the allegiance of a politically active
layer (10-20%) of the American working class and thus is a more
effective instrument of capitalist hegemony at home and US hegemony
in the world than the Republican Party.

The reason why Democratic Party operatives are *hopping mad* at Ralph
Nader is that his campaign actually challenged the Democratic Party,
becoming a factor in its electoral defeat in the election for the
highest political office in the USA in 2000, it may do so again in
2004, and its supporters and sympathizers (choosing a more potent
standard-bearer in the future) may do even better in the near future,
eventually eroding the confidence of the aforementioned politically
active layer (10-20%) of the American working class in the Democratic
Party.

The Democratic Party operatives, in contrast, are not mad at
anarchists, Marxist-Leninist sects, the Socialist Party, independent
socialists, etc. at all, even though they, in theory, espouse more
radical transformations of American society as their respective goals
than Nader does.  Why?  Because they pose no practical threat
whatsoever to the Democratic Party's absorption of organizers,
activists, and voters on the left side of the political spectrum.

> There is another factor in all the discussions of the elections --
> the failure of so many to see that social democracy is as dead as
> stalinism. Both were equally discredited by the events of the
> twentieth century.

Both old-style socialism and social democracy are objectively things
of the past, in that "reforms" that parties of either type propose
today are, on the whole, "reforms" that bring down the living
standards of the working class (whereas they could and did implement
reforms that actually improved the living standards of the working
class before the mid-1970s), but they are still subjectively alive,
in that masses of people *consent* to live with the shadows of the
old selves of such socialist and social democratic political parties.
The subjective is as important as the objective, and as far as mass
political actions are concerned, it is probably more important than
the objective.

At 11:05 PM -0400 7/23/04, Marvin Gandall wrote:
> Don't you think it will be necessary for the Greens to win a number
> of congressional seats before they can be seen as a potential
> alternative to the Democrats by the unions and social movements, and
> a durable third party in the country as a whole?

For many people, that will be the case, but somebody has to be the
first person to get things started, for otherwise nothing will ever
get done.  Unions as organized entities (as opposed to factions of
activists in them) will be *the last* to join any third-party
movement on the left that has an actual potential to grow powerful
(that is, if they will ever join any such thing en masse at all --
very improbable), for most union leaders have so many things to lose
and a precious few things to gain from such a movement's challenge to
the Democratic Party.
--
Yoshie

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