The point is, it's not like the DP, at the local or any other level, is justa neutral shell waiting for "the left" to take over. It's charged with folks willing to fight the left off in any real battle for control. Of course they willing to have us work for them as long as we do what we are told.
--jks
>
>
> >What makes you think that the left is too weak to get its own
>institutions
> >going, but powerful enough to take the Democratic Party away from its
> >owners? --jks
>
>Because in elections, we have first-past-the-post elections, so new parties
>inherently suffer collective action problems that primary challenges do
>not.
>Similar problems exist in the union context, where workers are unlikely to
>sacrifice existing power, however flawed, for starting from scratch.
>
>As I've stressed, the problem is not that the opposing rightwing forces are
>necessarily more strategic than the left, since I have confidence we can
>beat them in the right contexts, but that the constituency that the Left
>seeks to lead itself will not follow the Left into new institutions because
>of these collective action problems.
>
>But since those constituencies are the majority at the base level in
>institutions like unions and the Democratic Party, there is no collective
>action problem in the Left seeking to take them over, only the normal
>strategic problem of marshalling power and resources to combat more
>conservative forces.
>
>The Socialist Party and the IWW were, respectively, the strongest third
>party and the strongest dual union in US history, and neither of them ever
>achieved significant power or even majority support among the working
>class.
>In a sense, you could call the CIO a dual union, but that was a split from
>the broader AFL that at least started with a significant base. I leave
>open the possibility of a third party or dual union taking signficant
>leadership if it is formed out of a significant caucus or organization
>formed within existing institutions, since the collective formation in
>existing institutions may lead to the power to collectively walk out -
>thereby solving much of the collective action problem that traditionally
>stops third parties and dual unions.
>
>But parties like the Greens essentially starting from scratch with no
>organized base are dead ends from the get-go.
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>
>
>
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