councilor.org
| Source | Carrol Cox |
| Date | 04/07/24/01:44 |
| Marvin Gandall wrote:
> Don't you think it will be necessary for the Greens to win a number of > congressional seats before they can be seen as a potential alternative to > the Democrats by the unions and social movements, and a durable third party > in the country as a whole? You are assuming business as usual in u.s. politics. There is another factor in all the discussions of the elections -- the failure of so many to see that social democracy is as dead as stalinism. Both were equally discredited by the events of the twentieth century. Justin argues that there will never again be mass "Marxist" parties. Could be. But the same argument suggests that there will never again be mass social democratic parties. And if there can be no more social democratic parties (and classical liberalism is one would think equally dead) all the jargon and pieties of social democracy (lesser evils, small gains, progressive wing of bourgeosie) are as dead as the slogans of Stalin's _Foundations of Leninism_. Those leftists appealing to the social democratic tradition (e.g., cooperation with progressive or less reactionary bourgeois politicians) are as trapped in dead pieties as are the Sparticists. ABBs and Sparticists unite in the Graveyard. I think Yoshie has gotten a bit too wrapped up in the Greens (in the 2004 election). We cannot know the form that socialist activity will take in the future, but we can be fairly certain that it will not be electoral and will involve mass resistance to imperialist policies. Arguments against the Greens are equally arguments against paying any attention at all to elections at any level. I think that until the electoral hysteria has ebbed it would be more interesting and more relevant to the future to explore the forms of commodity fetishism in the 21st century. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho