Another quote from Tony Kushner caught my eye:
"I was involved in Act Up, and one of the great lessons was that it was only about an achievable agenda, about getting things done. People worked on so many different levels. It was direct action, but it was also incredibly smart infiltration. It wasn‘t about hanging on to some cherished notion of being on the outside or being in opposition. Because if that‘s all you are, then when do you stop opposing and start creating?"
I was in Act Up as well, and I guess one of my problems with Nader's candidacy is that I do not see much creating going on, just a lot of signifying.
As for the Green Party, I think that they create, in fact they create too much. Since the start of this dialogue I have looked more closely at the party. I still I am not convinced that the party can pull all its strands together. On a microlevel they may do well, but I do not get a sense of how all these locals will come together as a cohesive whole. It certainly hasn't happened here in New York City. One local prioritizes the issue of spraying; another the war in Iraq, etc. etc.
Michael P. may be right that the Green Party will be best in small towns, and traditional radical centers like San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, etc.
For that reason I hold out more hope for the Working Families Party approach -- what Kushner calls "smart infiltration." For me it is much more pragmatic and centered way of going about things. It also makes alliances with labor and working class people.
I guess I find it odd that the WFP can elect their candidate to the New York City Council and the Green Party cannot.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister
Message: 8 Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:12:49 -0400 From: Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] 2d Amendment/Rule of Law (Was: The curse of
literacy) To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Message-ID: <a05100300bd219063248e@[24.199.119.138]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
Justin wrote:
>I don't know from the legislative history. But when it
>comes to law, if the text is clear, I'm sort of a
>textualist. Meaning that the law is what the text of
>the law says. The legislative history is not law.
>It's not even commentray. Here the text is pretty
>clear. If the Framers meant to support the individual
rights interpretation, they shoulda said so.
But of course "they" did, in the most unequivocal terms. The very first phrase of the Constitution--"*We* the people"-- defines "people" as a plural, not a collective, noun. Although the "Framers" of the Bill of Rights were not the original Philadelphia writers of the text but the popular masses who insisted on inclusion of those guarantees of their rights, this makes no difference. The Constitution would never have been ratified if the people even suspected that it gave them not individual but governmentally defined "collective" rights, nor that their right to keep and bear their firearms would disappear in favor of their "right" to enlist in a governmentally regimented military force.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)
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Message: 9 Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:21:45 -0400 From: snit snat <snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: What the Ruling Class Want to Get: A Green
Light To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Message-ID:
<6.1.2.0.2.20040719112047.036133f0 at pop-server.tampabay.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
At 10:38 AM 7/19/2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>So, I put this as an honest question to Chucko, Shane,
>Melvin, Yoshie, and all the intransigents, and I guess
>I used to be one too -- if not practical reformism in
>the context of keeping longer range goals alive as
>aspirations, then what?
Boots for President!
Boots Riley (of The Coup) December 11 2003, 22:57:46 <...>
While I'm on the subject, one of the other criticisms I have of many current revolutionary organizations (I should say here that I used to be in, and on the central committee of, the PLP) is they have taken the old slogan "reform AND revolution" and distorted it into "reform OR revolution". Every single person in the working class is in a daily struggle against the ruling class in order to just buy groceries and pay rent. But they are struggling individually because no one has organized them. This struggle for survival is the first struggle most people are willing to fight, die, and sometimes kill for. It's the reason people sell dope, work three jobs, and steal checks out of mailboxes. It's why songs are written about "bling-bling". It's why we need a new system. These struggles around basic survival could be led by revolutionaries who would use these reform struggles to have victories and losses that would inspire, organize, and teach masses of people lessons about the system much more effectively than the little red book could do alone.
The CPUSA did this in the '20s and '30s and it got them about a million committed party members and countless others who were sympathetic. This strategy had the ruling class actually fearing revolution. When reforms are won with a revolutionary analysis and plan attached people accept the ideas as being connected materially to reality and not just intellectuals wanting to hear themselves. Coming up in Oakland, for instance, I didn't really encounter anti-communism, it was just like "Communism? So? That's cool but I gotta go pay some bills." We need to make union movements that are revolutionary, help and instigate rent strikes, and generally do some fighting and movement building at this level. If we don't, revolutionary organizations will only attract those ALREADY interested in revolution or some kind of counter-culture, which means we attract only a certain "type" of person who then attracts similar types. If we are going to win we need to have campaigns in which the community immediately changes their material situation. This can teach the necessity and possibility of a new kind of system. It will also attract people who embrace the ideas as a material necessity in their lives as opposed to a hypothetical debate.
<<http://atomicboards.com/board.pl?user=minor_coup&board=2401&sid=&mode=read&action=34051>http://atomicboards.com/board.pl?user=minor_coup&board=2401&sid=&mode=read&action=34051>
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'
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End of lbo-talk Digest, Vol 7, Issue 205 ****************************************