Third Parties (was RE: Fulani's endorsement of Buchanan)

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Nov 16 08:07:34 PST 1999


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>I'm not at all supporting the Buchanan/Fulani combo, neither of whom is a
>friend of the working class. I'm just wondering if left third party
>efforts (the Labor Party, the Greens, etc.) have any sort of political
>strategy to break the two-party system. Nathan seems to think they don't,
>and I'm inclined to agree with him. In fact, as far as the Labor Party is
>concerned, I'm not even sure if it wants to be an independent political
>party or just a pressure group vainly trying to move the Dems to the left.

While that seems to be the goal of the New Party, the LP people I know, from Tony Mazzocchi on down to rank-and-file members of the NYC branch, are serious about breaking with the Dems. "The bosses have two parties - it's time we had one" is a party slogan. The strategy is to develop a platform and to build membership. Mazzocchi wanted to wait a long time before running candidates, saying that electoral politics without any kind of membership base would be a waste of resources (and run the risk of pursuing personalities to act as standard-bearers instead of building membership). I don't know whether this is going to work or not, but it's worth a shot.

The LP's website is <http://www.labornet.org/lpa/index.html>.

Doug



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