John, The charge is that theory is a hiding place. Let me take it seriously rather than resent it.
You are right about the substance. Most of the socialist left has no plan for a stolen or cancelled election. You are right that the Democratic strategy is litigation and that litigation before this Court is a strategy of hope. You are right that the only force capable of stopping a seizure is a work stoppage broad enough to make the country ungovernable. I concede all of it. What I do not concede is that the fiddle and the fire are unrelated. The question of what kind of regime this is is not a scholastic question. It is a question about what breaks it. If this were classical fascism, a mass movement with its own armed cadre and a program of physically destroying the workers' organizations, then the answer would be self-defense units and a united front from below, built now, at whatever cost to the unions' legal standing. If it is what I have argued, a patrimonial Bonapartism, then the regime's method of rule is also its weakness. It has hollowed out the state's administrative capacity to make every office answerable to one man. It can seize. It cannot administer. Its coalition holds only as long as the patron can pay, and a coup that shuts down the revenue-collecting and contract-enforcing apparatus stops paying quickly. That difference is not a footnote. It tells you where to put your forces and how long a stoppage has to last to accomplish that. Now take your remedy. Shutting down the country through workplace stoppages is the correct answer. But a political general strike is not produced by warning people that one is needed. It is produced by a body that can call it and be obeyed. No such body exists in the United States right now. The unions will not call it, for exactly the reason you name. And the organization that has three hundred thousand paper members cannot call it either, because it has no mechanism by which a decision binds anyone. This brings me to your description of East Bay DSA. I think you have the diagnosis one layer too high. The problem is not which caucus holds the offices, but that no position binds anyone once taken. The problem is that no position binds anyone once taken. Convention resolutions do not bind the NPC. The NPC does not bind the chapters. Endorsement does not bind the endorsee. Elected officials cannot be recalled by the body that elected them, staff cannot be disciplined by the membership that pays them, and delegates carry no mandate they must adhere to. An organization unable to enforce a decision in a quiet year will also fail to enforce one in November. That is not abstract theory. That is a prediction, and it is testable. So the fiddle is not the theory. The fiddle is passing resolutions no one is bound by and calling the passage of them preparation. One narrower point, and here I think John E is right. Whatever the merits of the 2024 argument, it does not follow that everyone who refused a Democratic vote is indifferent to electoral fraud. Those are separate questions, and collapsing them costs you the people you are trying to convince. Comradely, Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42832): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42832 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120623848/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
