On 10/7/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote:
>All examples you bring up are those from the West, though, namely
>France and the USA. What makes sense at the core of the multinational
>empire doesn't always make sense at the periphery -- even a relatively
>richer part of it like Brazil -- and vice versa.
I have no idea what you mean by making sense.
There are more constraints on political and economic options on the
periphery than at the core, and consequences of errors are larger on
the periphery than at the core, too. We at the core also have to keep
in mind the governments we are unable to dislodge or restrain here are
in no small part responsible for the aforementioned constraints and
consequences.
I have Marxist
principles about voting for capitalist parties, even if they are in
the South Pole. Lenin advocated voting for a social democratic party
in a situation where it has not ever come into power and when workers
still have illusions in its candidates.
The question is what to do when, after having experienced a social
democratic party in power, workers have few illusions about social
democracy and yet they are not in favor of social revolution either.
He advocated that approach in
order to allow the revolutionary party to get a hearing without
creating artificial barriers.
It doesn't seem to me that Heloisa Helena, et al. to the "left" of
Lula are all that revolutionary, but we can say that they did get a
hearing, and now we can gauge the level of Brazilians' support for
them: not shabby, but not enough to take power without the PT. Why
not use that leverage -- the demonstrated power to take 7% of the
votes or so from Lula to pressure Lula and the PT once he gets
narrowly reelected (if he gets reelected, the margin of his victory
will be narrow)?
>What are the revolutionary left to do, though, when people are, well,
>not really revolutionary?
>
>Yoshie
Build parties like the PT of the early 1980s. If Lula is not
interested in such a party and prefers to create a Brazilian version
of New Labour, then it will be up to some other people to recreate a
most promising electoral formation. It was a good idea at the time
and still is.
Until such time as the PT implodes, it seems to me that a party to the
left of it will remain small, unless and until social and economic
conditions of Brazil experience a sudden downturn of the sort that
happened and destroyed the two dominant parties in Venezuela.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
