http://www.lefthook.org/Politics/Seidman3%20111103.html
*My favorate (the stuff on gender was pretty good, too):
*
*DS: John Kerry just finished his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. I was a little surprised, actually. It was a little more aggressive than I thought it would be. He'll probably get many people-including some on the Left-behind him more adamantly now. How do you think we should assess and respond to the upcoming elections, especially with regards to the Democrats? *
SG: The election has done us one service. It has exposed the fault lines in our so-called anti-war movement. We can see how many of our allies among the chattering class are running back to cling to the skirts of the Democratic Party.
That said, I don't think it serves us well to decomplexify elections as a phenomenon. I will not vote for John Kerry, nor will I vote for my oily, manipulative Democrat Congressman, David Price. They are both cheap fucking zookeepers in my opinion, who have pissed all over our legs then told us it's raining.
I am enjoying watching the Republicans confront John Kerry with his untenable so-called position on the war. Here's the technocrat trying to weasel-word his way past the electorate on the war, and the Republicans are the ones taking him to the woodshed. It's hilarious in a gallows-humor kind of way.
Not voting Kerry or Price is more than just a protest. I don't see the point in expressive politics. This is instrumental.
One of the things the more politically advanced in the United States can do now, and I mean advanced in terms of understanding the role of the bourgeois state, is to exercise the actual political power we have in our present state of under-development to shake up the situation--again, a Boyd tactic, make a strike, then reassess the situation for new vulnerabilities--is to deny the Oval Office to the Democrats, and make it public knowledge that this is an intentional political act.
This begins to disrupt the inertia of the good cop/bad cop routine the two party system keeps pulling on us. It says we are no longer so afraid of the Republicans that we run back to their doe-eyed body-doubles again and again. But when and if we do that, if we encourage that route of revolutionary defeatism, then we are duty-bound to be prepared and organized for the follow through. We have to be prepared to escalate our tactics against the returning Republicans. Calling on people to take risks carries with it some responsibilities.
I will vote, because there are elections here in North Carolina and Wake County and Raleigh that matter in very real and immediate ways as part of ongoing sectoral struggles. Mike Davis alludes to this in his extraordinary mapping of changing urban environments in books like /Ecology of Fear/ and /City of Quartz/, and the important if contradictory spontaneous struggles that appear in response to those changes.
I'm not an idealist. While I recognize that the Democratic Party is a bourgeois institution, I acknowledge that we still live in a bourgeois society. We work for capitalists to get money. We obey even laws we disagree with and so on. We have to live inside the system until there is a different one, even those of us who work to see it replaced. There are actual struggles going on here, as there are everywhere, that are local and immediate and that engage people less abstractly than national elections, and there are real reasons, in my opinion, to fight here to preserve some of the hard fought gains that have been made in carving out spaces of Black political power, which right now is still exercised through local Democratic Parties. We want to hang onto that power, then struggle with ways to extricate that power from both the Democratic Party and the abundance of jack-leg Black comprador opportunists. It's contradictory, and we have to work through those contradictions and not merely dismiss them as spectators.
I still feel some ambivalence about the national elections, for that matter, because I'm not 100 percent confident that the left is prepared to truly escalate, and because my crystal ball doesn't work. I don't know what will happen with another Bush-Cheney term. They are really a dangerous crew, and we shouldn't underestimate that. They want to nuke someone, as a trial balloon like Jose Padilla, jus to see what they can get away with.
But in another sense, that risk is exactly what the advantage is to having them back. Bush is reported to be on drugs right now to mellow out his mood swings, Cheney is as popular as cancer, and a number of scandals are still cooking in the kitchen. I think a lot about Nixon these days. It would be interesting to see that kind of crisis of legitimacy flowing into the second dip of a recession... maybe even another period of stagflation.
The form of imperialism is unstable right now. Neoliberalism is in a serious crisis. It is a monetary-military system, and the war in Southwest Asia is wrecking the myth of American military invincibility upon which the current system depends. The neocons are stepping on the gas to try and leap the gorge, so to speak, and the technocrats like Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, et cetera, want to stop the car, get out, and recon for a way around the gorge.
Just as important for the so-called left is that we continue to promote any activity that deepens the political polarization of the United States and grow the revolutionary left while deepening its connections to concrete struggles.
The elections can do that through organizing around the Nader-Camejo challenge, but I don't overestimate the impact of that.
The election phenomenon is ephemeral. Once the elections are over, and I'm personally impatient to see this distraction pass, then we will have a better opportunity to get back to the business of building and strengthening the social movements... and pulling them away from the non-profit NGO sector, by the way, where they are currently being contained. That's a book that needs to be written, but not by me.
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