[lbo-talk] Campaigning vs. Voting

Tahir Wood twood at uwc.ac.za
Mon Nov 17 01:37:45 PST 2003


From: Kelley <the-squeeze at pulpculture.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Campaigning vs. Voting Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org

At 09:35 AM 11/16/03 -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>Marxists and other leftists who are in favor of helping create a mass
>political party of workers and our allies in the near future should not
>waste their time and energy campaigning for any Democrat.

well, like, d'oh! you're going around in circles, girrrrrrrrrrrrl!

who exactly are you wringing your aprons over? what's at stake? you haven't answered the question. you just keep qualifying your answer: "let me try this angle. now another. hey, maybe i can get at it this way?!" it's like watching a clown riding a unicycle around a cul-de-sac trying to figure out how to get out of a suburban housing tract. honk honk. Kelley

The true political cul de sac: thinking that you can ever get rid of the right by voting for the left. It's an eternal dance, just a jump to the left and then (later) a step to the right again. And after Nixon there was Reagan; after big Bush there was little Bush - they always come back, because liberalism and fascism are the two sides of the same coin. Capitalism needs its good cop, bad cop routine. To vote for the liberal is in a sense to legitimise the whole liberal-fascist paradigm of capitalist politics. It's a distraction from the task of building an alternative power in society, which is never going to happen while the 'left' spends its time preoccupied with the lesser evil - there isn't a lesser evil; there's only capitalism, which needs both its left and right in order to continue its macabre dance. So trot offf to the polls next year like the obedient little American poodles that you are. Maybe you got your heads so far up the arsehole of your own political system that you can see nothing else. Tahir



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