As to the vitriolic attacks on Hawkins personally and the Green-Socialist alliance behind his campaign, what is the point? Would it have been better had Hawkins not run? Did the Hawkins campaign damage the left or in any way preclude a mass socialist party in the future? The answers, for any objective observer, are no and no. By returning the Green Party to its ecosocialist roots, Hawkins did the left a service. Hawkins may be many other things, but he is a socialist who has proved his willingness to forge alliances on the left. He can't be cast as an enemy of the mass socialist party merely because he believes his (and Peter Camejo's) party may be the core of that.
The Teamsters union, to which Hawkins has belonged for decades, did not support Hawkins. Quelle surprise. Angels did not come down and dance on Hawkins's head. This hardly disqualifies Hawkins as a worker or a socialist. Four hundred thousand votes in a presidential election may be only a drop in the bucket, but an organized party with that kind of membership would dwarf any of the sects and interlocking organizing committees that currently make up the umma of the US left. Here is the core of Hawkins's claim that Biden ran against the left. It's entirely rational: [Biden] boasted ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/bidens-response-to-voters-concerned-about-socialism-i-beat-the-socialist.html ) that “I beat the socialist.” He vigorously opposed the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. “Biden stiff-arms the left — which holds its fire” is how the Washington Post ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-debate-liberals/2020/09/30/88c54b90-033b-11eb-a2db-417cddf4816a_story.html ) headline aptly characterized Biden’s relationship to progressive Democrats in its article on the first Trump-Biden debate. Progressive Democratic politicians and pundits took Biden’s slights in silence. They equated defeating Trump with eliminating the neofascist threat. Socialist professors pontificated that progressives had to support Democratic neoliberalism in this election in order to defeat Trumpian neofascism. Once the neofascists are gone, they said, then we can start a left party. We can now see pretty clearly that "the neofascist threat"--although the post-Trump threat may well prove not to be fascist, but something worse--is not gone but is stronger than ever. The Proud Boys have found their fuehrer in Mike Flynn. Biden is already a lame duck, and his power and influence can only diminish as he pursues the economic and social agenda that is being dictated to him by Steve Mnuchin's squash partners at Goldman Sachs. The midterm elections are likely to be a complete disaster for the Democrats--who will of course try to justify their defeat by moving decisively to the right of Ronald Reagan. We will be told that the only choice is to support any version of neoliberal austerity as long as it as dignified and has Harvard somewhere in the background. We will cry out for the return of Bob Taft and Richard Nixon. And the hissing chorus of Democratic Party vampires will lead the pack in biting the necks of any group that look even remotely leftish. This may be their death as an electoral party. I do think that Hawkins would serve the Left cause more by trying to bring his hundreds of thousands of supporters into a membership party that prioritizes activism and broad-based organizing over elections. Such a party would have the discipline to organize things like a general strike, which is impossible under the present circumstances. This is certainly the appropriate action in an age when the electoral process has doomed itself to failure and may be close to an end. People need self-defense, mutual aid, a community presence that can prove itself helpful and trustworthy--they will need the soup before they get the sermon. A proper left party IMO could and should provide these things in a time of social dissolution. Is the Green Party doing any of this? Perhaps not, but denouncing--and misrepresenting--Hawkins gets us no farther toward the goal. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5057): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5057 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79355542/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
