> 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.
This is a non-sequitir if I've ever seen one, though it's essentially the argument put forward by everyone who hews to the Trotskyite line on elections (which is what it is -- why mince words?).
There are a lot of critiques that people could make of the Rainbow experience; I was too young for it, so I can't comment adequately, though the standard one is that the development of vibrant, permanent local organizations was thwarted, largely because of the focus on Jackson-as-Messiah. The contrast with Pat Robertson's run for president in one of the same years (1988) is remarkable, in that Robertson took his lists of supporters and welded them into a formidable reactionary mass organization, the Christian Coalition.
There is no rational explanation that any supporter of the Trotskyite line can give for their argument that "the Democratic Party" made the Rainbow doomed from the start while an "independent" campaign supposedly would have succeeded. If they think about it, they ought to realize how ridiculous their argument sounds -- what, operationally, did "the Democratic Party" do to halt Rainbow's leaders from taking full advantage of the lists and contacts they had collected in order to build a viable, long-lasting organization, regardless of what the party regulars thought? The question almost answers itself, because the premise is so ridiculous to begin with -- so much so, in fact, that the outlook of the Trotskyites on elections can better be explained with reference to religion than politics.
In fact, the Trotskyite outlook is basically a version of what Lenin called "parliamentary cretinism," in which participation in real-life electoral politics has some uniquely corrupting quality that other tactics supposedly do not. Why does it? "Just because," is essentially the Trot answer. Nothing empirical or concrete is forthcoming from them, just categorical assertion.
In the real world, this position amounts to defeatism, whereby the institutional obstacles to struggle in the electoral arena become arguments for abstention -- or token "third-party" silliness that amounts to abstention:
* The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party? They should have expected they'd get screwed, so they should have just stayed home.
* The Rainbow? They would have been better pursuing a "third-party alternative," whereby they would have ignored the long-established electoral allegiances of 90+% of the black population of the US, because, you know, that would have made a lot of sense. (Somebody once said that the people are the real heroes while we so-called "revolutionaries" are often foolish and ignorant, but this certainly doesn't cross the Trots' minds.)
* Cynthia McKinney? Hell, let the DLC hang her out to dry before we ever so much as contemplate contracting cooties from contact with "the Democratic Party."
I could go on in this vein, and the implications for extending this logic to other arenas of struggle should be obvious -- it's really just a variation on "You can't fight City Hall."
I suppose that I can now expect a lot of straw men in response, especially ones that counterpose "movement building" to "electoral politics," a strict dichotomy in which the Trots have lately invested a lot of importance, although it has eluded every community organizer, union organizer, and rank-and-file leader of mass organizations that I have ever known. But hey, sorry for being anecdotal -- God knows the Trots never are. ;)
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!