> All other things being equal and/or non-existant (which I know they
> aren't), any self-respecting conscious prole would jump at Yoshie's
> position. What's so repugnant about it that the vast majority of
> people would reject it?
Yes; all other things *aren't* equal, and never are, which makes the whole subject of politics (realistically discussed) very complex.
One thing that comes back to my mind every time I consider this subject is that so few Americans have any experience with belonging to small, strong, face-to-face, sustaining communities. Their whole lives are predicated on the principle that individuals and nuclear families have to make it on their own -- sink or swim by your own efforts. (This is especially true of men, of course; women tend to understand mutual support communities much better.) Anything you can't do for your self, you buy from a big corporation, which, unlike the government, is a legitimate institution, in the American ideology.
So if you hit them with an idea like single-payer or govt health systems, they don't think of it as a mutual aid system, but as the nasty govt taking "their" money in taxes and squandering it on some fool, "socialistic" wasteful boondoggle. (Mind you, enough such boondoggles do exist to keep this idea alive. But somehow no one thinks of corporations, even the HMO's, as wasteful and dictatorial. Haven't seen the film "Corporation" yet, but I hope it deals with this issue.)
If I were designing a strategy for the U.S. Left, the first step would be to get people used to working in face-to-face action projects -- about whatever they might be concerned about. Third parties running presidential candidates would be way down the road.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax