>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>The Republican Party shows no sign of getting better, though. What
>>if the Republican candidates in 2008, 2012, 2016, ad infinitum will
>>be worse than George W. Bush? You'll keep supporting the
>>Democratic Party?
>
>I don't "support" the Democratic party. I'm going to vote for a
>Democrat for president, and urge others to do so.
Isn't your language getting a little Clintonesque? :-> If voting _and urging others to vote for the Democratic Party_ aren't support for the party, what is?
>I'm going to keep analyzing why capitalism sucks, trying to convince
>others that capitalism sucks,
Once you convince others that "capitalism sucks," they will ask you, "So, what's the alternative?" The point of political organizing is to create a mass political party rooted in a mass social movement, so that we can actually change the system.
>and supporting all kinds of independent radical organizing. For some
>reason, you think that that's all incompatible with pulling a lever
>(which is what we still do in New York)
What I'm saying is that the only sort of activism that is compatible with support for the Democratic Party is what you call "activistism": Alinsky-style community organizing, protests for the sake of protests, etc.
Seth wrote:
>Yoshie, what if the Democrat nominee was Frantz Fanon? Or Slavoj
>Zizek, or whoever. Wouldn't you support him?
Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition went as far as they could go in the Democratic Party ("20 percent of the Democratic primary vote and 80 percent of the Black vote," Max Elbaum, _Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che_, Verso, 2002, p.278) -- today, you can't go even that far in the party -- and Rainbow activists ended up with nothing for all their work after the Jackson campaigns got defeated by the party. If Rainbow activists had built their campaigns independent of the Democratic Party, they would still not have won any presidential election, but they would have been able to create their own political party rooted in broad and energetic Black mobilization. -- Yoshie
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