Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Open Letter to Ralph Nader
-the surreal belief is that you get "real change" through elections. what -you get through elections is minimizing damage, and that requires strategic -voting. and if you don't promise that you're doing more than minimizing -damage, you don't create false hopes, but you do minimize damage. and most -ordinary people desperately need the damage to be minimized. it makes a -difference to ordinary u.s. citizens whether they have more or less health -insurance. more health insurance doesn't change the world, but if you're -sick and old, it sure helps now. -yours/immanuel wallerstein
I've always like Wallerstein's writing-- it's nice to see I agree with him so much on the pragmatics of voting.
But that may not be surprising given his theoretical focus on broader social changes and his cynicism that the "principled" withdrawals from the capitalist world system by the Soviet Union and China were anything more than an attempt by those countries to jump the queue on Wallerstein's hierarchy of core and peripheral countries. THere is that strain in Wallerstein that is very distrustful of utopian promises of golden alternatives promised by the Left.
Nathan Newman