The discussion in this thread is really pointless, boring, and
unnecessarily contentious. Instead of focusing on Julio's seeming
misinterpretation of what I said, my efforts to clarify, and his
personal attacks, let's focus on my original point. (I'll send my
detailed response to Julio personally and to anyone interested in it.)
Otherwise, we're stuck in a house of mirrors.
This starts with the following, which Julio mentions in his last
missive but does not quote:
>> Why not accept the fact that elections in the US are a game you can't win by
>> voting? The most the left ... can do at this point is propaganda ....<<
It should be mentioned up front that this doesn't say that people
shouldn't vote or that it's morally or politically bad to vote, even
for Democratic Party candidates. It also doesn't say anything about
"immutability." That issue at best seems a dead-end discussion.
To me, it instead says that voting is merely a personal decision, one
with no strategic benefit to the left (which needs all the benefits it
can get, BTW). Voting is a bit like Pascal's Wager (as I understand
it) about belief in the existence of God. A lot of leftists voted for
Obama because _it's possible that the left might get something out of
it_ whereas voting for McCain seemed to provide zero probability of
benefits for the left. One way we might think of this Wager is that it
involves a defensive effort: voting for Obama _might_ keep things from
getting worse, since he would back the Employee Free Choice Act and
the like.[*] I can totally understand why people might have thought
this while in the voting booth last year. I can sympathize with their
response to their plight. To quote a DP leader, I feel their pain.
(By the way, the presumed odds might easily be wrong: voting for
McCain _might_ have made the left stronger, because it made it clearer
to working people what kind of country this is and the need for an
extra-electoral movement, while Obama might have intensified and
deepened the war in Afghanistan while totally watering down his
putative domestic agenda, making it totally pro-corporate. McCain,
despite his current rhetoric, might have seen the war as unwinnable
and had the military credentials to stand up the war-hawks. (He might
have pulled a Nixon with China maneuver.) Like Nixon, he could have
gone for "progressive" reforms like the EPA and OSHA (if he were
subject to extra-electoral pressure). After the fact, however, we
can't know: counterfactual speculation is pretty pointless.)
In the aftermath of the election, in trying to analyze and understand
it, Pascal-type wagers are totally irrelevant. We are not in the
privacy of the voting booth. Further, we're not talking about what's
good for an individual but for a cause. So what's important is
analysis and evidence. We need to figure out what to do in the future.
My point was that voting in US Presidential elections does not change
anything fundamentally, i.e., the balance of class power. (It may, as
I've said before, have some impact on institutions of racism, sexism,
and the like.)
Clearly, President Obama is different from President Bush or would-be
President McCain. But in the situation that we find ourselves ("at
this point"), the differences almost entirely reflect debates within
the capitalist class. Obama, as I've said, represents a movement to
rationalize neoliberalism to serve the (perceived) long-term class
interests of the capitalists, while Bush represented an extreme
expression of neoliberalism which represented the short-term
particularistic interests of some sectors of the capitalist class.
Likely, McCain would have been somewhere in-between on these issues.
In a word, Obama is more on the Soros wavelength, while Bush was and
is in the Cheney gang, favoring the United States of Halliburton. The
latter (an effort to liven up my prose, by the way) means giving as
much power as possible to individual corporations and capitalists (in
proportion to their power and thus political influence) rather than
trying to temper individual greed with any kind of long-term
perspective. (Of course, Obama isn't totally on the Soros team: look
at how Summers and Geithner are pandering to Wall Street's infantile
interests instead of acting like the adults in the room.)
Now this didn't have to be the only choice. The world is not
"immutable." If there had been serious movements pressing from
_outside_ of the electoral arena, then the electoral arena would have
thrown up (as it were) more choice, as with McGovern vs. Nixon in
1972. It's likely that McGovern's election wouldn't have changed the
class balance of power, but it's possible that it would have allowed
the growing oppositional movements to continue to grow.
My point is (and in recent decades has always been) that if we want to
win via elections, we need to pressure the electoral arena from the
outside. At this point (note these words), the best a left presence in
the electoral arena can do is to somehow leverage the election process
to make propaganda to strengthen the movement outside of the electoral
arena. Outside of the electoral arena, however, I don't see propaganda
as sufficient.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
[*] BTW, how's the EFCA doing?
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