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Chris wrote, "If you can build a big socialist party while having nothing to do with the Democrats, that will be great." Experience poses us a different question. People have been trying to build a socialist movement by springboarding off the Democratic party . . . well, the Owenites started almost as soon as there was a Democratic party. The real question is when did any of those efforts actually work? When did we ever build a big socialist party while working through the Democrats? Or even a teensy socialist party? We have already seen the kind of "movement" we can build through the Democrats, and we don't have to go back to the Locofocos . . . or any further back than very recent years. We watched the Democratic party and its adherents dead end the very promising Occupy movement. They sidetracked Black Lives Matter from small but spirited demonstrations into a kind of philanthropic NGO useful for making moral appeals in cable news interviews. And it sent home those massive wonderfully angry women's marches that greeted the Trump presidency. The mechanism of demobilizing people is the most well-practiced In or out of electoral politics, the movement we need has to understand the only reliable source of its own power and to function accordingly. I would add that experience also tells us that the discussion around the predictably doomed Sanders campaign has no practical point other than pave the way for the equally predictable arguments why everybody has to vote for Joe Biden. Cheers, Mark L. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
