To Marv's question,
I love the question because it confirms the conclusion that the various "third
party" options are no more than pressure groups attempting with a thread bare
string to pull the Democrats to the left while massive tow lines are pulling
them further to the right.
I would like to relay how this actually plays a negative role in holding back
the push for a workers party in the USA. A few (maybe not so few) years back
one CP'er running for congress on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket came to see
me for me to sign his petition to run in the congressional district I live in.
Having participated in many petition drives to run socialist candidates before
I was willing but that was not the issue. What was germane to this discussion
is that he explained that he was running in my district and not the one he
lived in because where he lived the "progressive" Democratic Congresswoman
Barbara Lee was the candidate and so the PFP had decided not to run against her
but to run in a "safe" district, mine just 3 miles to the north.
Well you don't need advanced logic to see how this operation is a sham and is
not aiming at challenging the capitalist class hold on power. The
"progressive" Democrats are maintain the illusions that the imperialist
Democrats can be reformed and the CP and a host of reformists help them to do
it. Their intention is not to win the vanguard of the working class and in
particular the Black Oakland community (where the ILWU is strong) to initiate
what long time CP leader Gus Hall famously promised, the coming of the Mass
Breakaway! Nor what the DSA more recently debated as the HardBreak vs the
soft-break No this CP/PFP candidate just wanted a place to play in the shadow
of the popular front and not ruffle any feathers. Best to "Keep Hope Alive" by
not challenging Barbara Lee.
This is the strategy of the "Safe State" votes pushed by many Greenies, Westies
and others.
So why would Debs, Lenin and Trotsky say its unprincipled to vote for the
Democrats seeing there are no "realistic" alternatives and considering the bulk
of the labor leadership is hitched to the Democratic Party even while the
Teamsters play footsie with the Republicans? The answer is because
revolutionary Marxists start from what is objectively necessary (we say what
is) not from the backward consciousness of the working class. That is what
gives us the authority to declare that only the workers government created
through class struggle means and defended by workers militia can meet our
classes most basic needs in the epoch of capitalist decay.
When the socialist leaders play to the backwardness of the working class they
are not socialist leaders the become opportunists tail-ending the reformists
and outright capitalist trade union leaders who keep our unions from becoming
schools class struggle and socialist revolution by maintaining them as tools of
class collaboration and social imperialism.
Of c
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common." IWW
founding congress opening statement
On Tuesday, September 3, 2024 at 01:39:32 PM PDT, Marv Gandall
<[email protected]> wrote:
My quadrennial election cycle questions for my American friends: 1. The issue
of whether to support the Democrats only matters in a handful of swing states
does it not? 2. Isn't there a danger that if a third party takes just enough
swing state votes from the Democrats allowing Trump to win, that the Democratic
base, rightly or worngly, will turn on those third parties and their Marxist
supporters with a vengeance - as happened in Bush vs Gore in 2000? 3. What do
these third parties stand to gain from being spoilers? 4. In the absence of a
revolutionary socialist alternative, is support for a bourgeois party backed by
the unions against an anti-union bourgeois party unprincipled?
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