The Jim Crow Five and the Coming Political War

Max Sawicky sawicky at epinet.org
Wed Dec 13 14:14:15 PST 2000


. . . Of course there will be tensions between our forces on exact priorities at each juncture, but the general theme of the deep radical democracy, whether at the polling booth or in the workplace, is a powerful unifying call to action. Gore is now irrelevant; maybe he'll jump on board and be a useful liberal martyr or we'll have to push his dead corpse out of the way. . . .

Poor Al. Yesterday he was a vehicle. Today he's a dead corpose, and lord knows they're the worst kind. (cf. Living Dead thread).

More seriously, I am uncomfortable with the idea of democracy as a leading issue because it is a process thing. My bias is that process stuff is not very revealing to the public, and lends itself to cliche too easily. I would go further and say what is fundamentally wrong with this great nation of ours is not that the franchise is flawed. It is that the working people do not know their own interest as a class, and this interest is reflected not merely in their views of process, but of outcomes.

In particular, the priorities from my standpoint would include the 'deep democracy' discourse, but also full employment, labor rights, income security, and health care.

Insofar as the outcome issues are ignored, the next election will indeed narrow to a 'fuck you' vote that does nothing more than return Democrats to power. To do whatever.

mbs



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