Meanwhile, you keep talking about "the anti-war movement." What anti-war movement? A social movement is a sustained, coherent phenomenon with clear goals. Between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, there was -- AT MOST -- a small and weak proto-movement. Just because it makes you feel superior and Leninlike, doesn't mean it's rational and realistic to call every interest group who holds a few meeting a movement.
You self-serving prattle and mindless and narrow form of activism is a huge distraction from the real work we have to do.
You have as much rethinking to do as any of us (not that you'll actually admit it).
Ugh.
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 11:26 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; furuhashi.1 at osu.edu Subject: [lbo-talk] Not a Referendum on Bush, Notwithstanding the ABB Hype
[lbo-talk] Re: Tariq Ali Reiterates, kjkhoo at softhome.net kjkhoo at
softhome.net, Tue Nov 2 21:29:21 PST 2004
>Worse, I don't think there are any rationalisations for this. It was
>a referendum on Bush, and he romped home.
No, it wasn't a referendum on Bush. Only the silly AnybodyButBush brigade, who are a minority of the US population and whose only claim to achievement in 2004 is helping the Democratic Party avoid important issues (such as the Iraq War and health care) and evade popular solutions (bringing the troops home and establishing single-payer universal health care), thought that it should and would be only a referendum on Bush. Voters in Ohio, for instance, didn't think so:
YOUR VOTE FOR PRESIDENT WAS MOSTLY...
Bush Kerry For Your Candidate (70%) 57% 43% Against His Opponent (26%) 29% 71%
<http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/OH/P/00/index.html>
Neither did the majority Florida voters think that they were mostly voting against the candidates they oppose:
YOUR VOTE FOR PRESIDENT WAS MOSTLY...
Bush Kerry For Your Candidate (69%) 60% 39% Against His Opponent (27%) 30% 69%
<http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/FL/P/00/epolls.0.htm l>
Urban Ohio voters (whose votes are counted later than rural and suburban voters') may still manage to save Kerry's bacon, but, whether Kerry wins or loses, the results so far demonstrate that an exclusive reliance on anti-incumbent sentiments -- when Kerry and his party backed Bush's most egregious policies and is pledging to continue them in the main -- didn't even help Kerry. It only cost leftists a chance to keep social movements on the left -- especially the anti-war movement -- alive and to build the Green Party by agitating and propagandizing about real issues, rather than candidates' imagined personalities.
I told you that the only thing that the ABB hype, to which even otherwise intelligent leftists Tariq Ali (!) and Noam Chomsky contributed, would do was to create circumstances that would ensure a lose-lose choice: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041101/024900. html>.
What we need to do now is to come out into the streets on November 3rd, reject the elections as a sham, and raise the demands that the ABB brigade tried to silence during the electoral campaign by attacking Ralph Nader, Peter Camejo, and the Green Party:
End the Occupation of Iraq Bring the Troops Home NOW! Jobs, Health Care, and Living Wages for All! -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/> ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk