>to join the Labor Party to initiate or participate in such campaigns.
>Why do they need "another hat to wear," if the LP is not to run
>candidates with a program including universal health care?
When they get tired of a campaign for prescription drugs for retirees, followed by a campaign for campaign finance reform, followed by a campaign for a living wage for city contracted employees, followed by a campaign for paid parental leave in companies with over 50 employees, followed by a campaign to restore the inheritance tax, followed by...
It is to run candidates. It's not to run them stupidly or precipitously. Right now we're running the program directly, with referenda.
Yoshie writes:
>If the LP has an ambition to
>one day replace the Dems, it has to offer what the Dems cannot and
>will not offer, both in domestic and international affairs,
>especially as domestic and international are inseparable in this age
>of so-called "globalization."
Many fine words about how the LP needs a foreign policy--again I don't view any of this as prerequisite to what we're doing now. And many who insist on this at this stage seem to be asking the LP to pass some kind of anti-imperialist litmus test in order to be worthy of their support. Polls show people want the government focusing on the economy, not Iraq. Well, we're focusing on the economy.
>You can probably have a "political party" that does not run
>candidates and make it even grow. The Labor Party's _raison d'etre_
>is, though, to become an electoral alternative to the Dems, no?
A political alternative. Running candidates is just part of that, and certainly not the first part. By contrast, the Dems. are a party of candidates and nothing else, there is no organization to speak of (except in a few big cities) not even a pork-dispensing one. It's a shell. We don't plan to follow that model.
No, the LPs raison d'être is to change the shitty conditions we're living in.
Running for office is one tool among many.
>That's the main reason why many labor and other activists said, "it's
>about time," when they heard of its founding. If it's not gonna make
>an electoral challenge any time soon, you might as well keep doing
>whatever activist work you've been already doing, while waiting to
>see if and when the LP leaders who control the party decide it's time
>to go for those who have felt they had no party to vote for or had to
>vote for the Dems for lack of alternatives.
I don't get why anyone, least of all leftists, should be so excited about running candidates. The same old conditions apply when you get into office (as noted about the social dems in Europe selling off pieces of the public wealth to pay the bills.) Without a conscious movement, an organization, accountability, and an active constituency, elected office is just a muddy rut in which to merrily spin our wheels.
On the other hand, if one is already in a party but it's NOT an electoral one (and it's saddled with a name like Trotskyites with Websites, or Sparts who Won't Shut Up, and therefore seems an unlikely votegetter) then I can see why one might constantly beat the drums for the LP to run candidates. Fortunately, that kind of tunnel vision factionalism has never been a problem in the U.S. left.
Jenny Brown