Kelley wrote:
>
>
>
> But NO ONE is talking about campaigning. I asked what harm voting did, not
> campaigning: VOTING.
>
I guess my answer is that they _should_ be talking about campaigning -- NOT about Voting. Voting (when we are speaking of the few registered voters on lbo-talk) is trivial. I have no objection to chatting on whatever, but if only the personal votes of those chatting are concerned, then such chat is in the same category as discussion of the NFL or of preferred brands of beer.
If I thought that defeating Bush was of such priority as to subordinate all other concerns, I would have tried by this time to join someone's campaign. And _all_ my arguments take that as the point at issue. Voting does not harm that I know of -- same principle is involved as when someone tries to impose moral or political standards on consumer choices: unless there is an organized boycott of significant political weight, I not only buy the brands that catch my fancy, for whatever reason, I attack anyone who wants to make an ethical matter of it. There is no political group in the u.s. today that could (without looking ridiculous) call for boycotting the election. Hence to vote or not is purely a matter of individual whimsy.
You began your post with the following quotation from me:
At 12:54 PM 11/16/03 -0600, Carrol Cox wrote:
>Bullshit. The reason for refusing to campaign for the DP, as Yoshie has
>indicated so many times that Kelley is now accusing her of
>repetitiousness, is that we need a mass movement (for real reforms), and
>that it is a waste of radical energy to campaign for the DP. (I don't
>give a hang one way or the other how anyone spends 30 seconds next
>November in the voting booth.)
The original context for that Bullshit is important. I was responding to a post which made the faturous assumption that the only reason for not supporting the DP was some kind of super-revolutionism. Back in the '70s a friend of mine in the Spanish department would drop by my office every so often to talk politics. I would chat along until the point at which he would begin to pronounce what I as a Marxist must necessarily believe. At that point I would usually say, "Get the fuck out of my office Gordon." (He was a good-natured fellow and never took offense.) The poster I was responding to had clearly either never read any of my posts or else held such rigid illusions re what a "revolutionary" MUST believe, that he merely saw on the screen what he expected to see there.
Hence the Bullshit!
Carrol