Carrol Cox wrote:
> 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.
I don't quibble with this. I attack the Dems every chance I get. In local elections, as here in California there were Dems. Greens, and Peace and Freedom party candidates on the ticket. We also have had a Republican governor who has cut SSI/SSP so that severely disabled persons have lost 23% of their purchasing power. We have a budget surplus yet Gov Wilson refused to go along with plans to increase our in home support service attendants wages which are inexusably low at minimum wage. The governor has chipped away at public programs, targeted women on welfare, eliminated overtime pay, etc. IN THIS CASE it would have been self destructive NOT to do what ever was possible to get rid of him. We did, we elected Gray Davis who is a political careerist but who I believe will not refuse a pay increase to IHSS workers, who will restore some of the lost funding to social programs as flawed as they may be, they keep some people from a worse fate.
AND I must say that the Greens and the Peace and Freedom Party to my knowledge have not made much of an attempt to educate themselves on our issues, though the disability community shares equally in being remiss to make these connections.
>
>
> 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.
>
Sorry, but I am not willing to see my brothers and sisters be institutionalized in horror ridden nursing homes where they are killed or neglected laying in feces because the staff and the corporations that run them cannot be bothered, while waiting for enough people to join the left and "get it."
> 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."
I never said that. To me capitalism is the enemy, if you assumed that I was talking about anyone else, then you have projected that onto me.
> Most, even all, the marxists
> on this list even do not support these positions. To write as though we do is
> red-baiting.
That is really over reaching.
> I think you owe many of us (including the dead) an apology of some sort.
>
Well Carol, I don't think I am *guilty* of what you accuse me of doing.
It is not "a hopeless clinging to the to an enemy that disables all progressive political action, even for short-run defensive purposes" that is the stumbling block, it is a lack of a clear plan on the part of the left and organized support for that plan. Where is the plan??
Best, Marta