bautiste at uswest.net wrote:
Why --apart from marxist dogma--necessary, absolutely imperative--that the left group itself around a "non-electoral program"?
It's hardly marxist dogma, first many marxists currently might well disagree, and secondly it is almost certain that such a policy would be wrong under many conditions. I don't blame the CPUSA for supporting Roosevelt in 1936 -- though it was probably even then advisable to maintain (visibly, in the public eye) positions, programs, and activities which would also have maintained a sharp line between them and Roosevelt.
The argument now (and it is an argument I believe which could be made convincingly to non-marxists) is simply that even for the barest reforms of any significance the Democratic Party is clearly an enemy, and that an appeal to electoral politics (or any appearance even of sympathy to the democratic party) will be dangerous to preserving even those few measly earlier won reforms that have not already been destroyed (mostly by Carter, Clinton, or the Democrats in Congress and the various State Houses.
I'm *not* making the argument here, I'm simply declaring it. The argument for it in fact can't be very far developed in cyberspace, since it mostly depends on the actions of the thousands of Father Gapons that over 90 years ago Trotsky declared were impossible, to be answered by Lenin who claimed that without many more Father Gapons nothing would happen. (I own the collected Lenin, but have misplaced around the house somewhere the volume containing the article I'm referring to, so I can only vaguely summarize it from memory.)
In the meantime we (communists) have to wear two hats, one communist and one father gaponish. I'm having preliminary success with the latter hat in grouping people from several different positions in the community (members of the depressive manic depressive support group, the remnants of a local Witness for Peace group from the 80s, a few trade unionists into what we currently call a "Social Concerns" group within dmdsg, its focus being (slowly) to build non-electoral support for maintaining and expandind social security. I' let you know sometime in 2000 whether anything comes of it. (None of the people I'm working with are communists or even sympathizers, they all know that I am a dogmatic -- your word -- communist, and it doesn't bother even the religious fundamentalists among them. The most surprising people are sometimes quite flexible in their responses to the world -- if someone gives them a chance. Those who plug away for the Democrats don't give them a chance.)
Carrol