Marta Russell wrote:
>
> > Carrol Cox I think, ...said [he doesn't]
> > vote. I won't claim it makes a big difference. But voting
> > is just one part of a spectrum of political action. . . .
> > But the point is to engage all the forms available, from pointless
> > boycotts to meaningless voting, to getting self-serving, last minute,
> > mid-night measures on the local ballot. All that pointlessness,
> > meaninglessness and those self-serving measures add up, after
> > awhile. . . .
>
> The fact that so many of these "reforms" affect people's lives directly is
> the reason to act when there is something in the process. I did vote for
> the reasons you expressed and because my ass is on the line. If Social
> Security, Medicare and Medicaid get pounded even more than already, I will
> pay the price. So while I deeply understand that the problem is
> capitalism itself, I do want the health care I need and can't wait for the
> much hoped for but very distant revolution for that.
Marta,
I may or may not be correct on not voting, but it is really quite senseless to argue against my reasons as though they were only connectec to the goal of revolution. Even if I became convinced tomorrow that no revolution were ever to occur, that capitalism was going to last forever, I would still maintain that, even for the very short run of 5 to 10 years, and from a strictly reformist point of view (saving your disasbility, for example), the main enemy is the Democratic Party.
All reforms, all "progress," all simple human decency even, are now in the position that black americans were in the 1950s and 1960s: only mass action (mass action of what, in demographic terms, was carrie forward by a minority even of blacks) could forward their struggle. If leftists or would be leftists continue to cling with this knee-jerk clinging to the Dem. Party, the continual erosion or utter destruction of all past reforms, is a certainty, because it is that hopeless clinging to an enemy that disables all progressive political action, even for short-run defensive purposes.
The detailed arguments for this position have been exhaustively developed by both revolutionaries and radical reformists, and I won't try to recapitulate them in a mere e-mail posting, but I do resent the knee-jerk assumption that all (or even most) marxists oppose the Dem Party because "capitalism is the enemy" and "only revolution will solve anything." Most, even all, the marxists on this list even do not support these positions. To write as though we do is red-baiting. Certainly it is not a position you can ascribe to Marx, Engels, Eleanor Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho, Gramsci, Trotsky, Luxemburg, George Jackson, and on and on through thousands, hundreds of thousands of (mostly forgotten) names.
I think you owe many of us (including the dead) an apology of some sort.
Carrol