[lbo-talk] Opportunity costs of campaigning for Dems

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Jun 6 07:51:45 PDT 2003


Michael McIntyre wrote:
>
> Carrol & Yoshie, as far as I can tell, were talking about the opportunity costs of working for Dems rather than doing something else. Energy given to campaigning for Dems WILL come out of energy that could be devoted to other organizing tasks. Carrol & Yoshie may be wrong about where it's best to devote their energies, but talking about that issues is not changing the subject.
>

Yes. Actually, I'm a bit embarassed that I didn't come up with this "change of subject" some 20+ years ago. I just got my focus on this in the last week or two, and that is one of the reasons my posts formulating it are rather wandering and lacking in my usual brilliant conciseness & clarity. :-)

If someone can _combine_ electoral work with expanding the base of the (non-electoral) strength, numbers, etc. of the left that changes the 'calculation' somewhat. But energy, time, money spent simply to elect Dems (when it probably won't make a difference anyhow) is a really wicked squandering of human life.

Carrol



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