> Brad Mayer wrote:
>>
>> Man, the ABB crown is really showing its true colors: Screw progressive
>> politics, lets court rightwing ideology instead.
>>
> And we need also to distinguish _among_ ABBs, as well as among those
> who, as yet, are "Democrats Period." First of all, those ABBs who really
> meant, and stuck to, the position that Bush represented a radical
> exception, these I presume will return to movement-building (which of
> course is all the more necessary if they were right about Bush). Let's
> try to keep them out of the crossfire.
Agreed, except one hopes they will see the mistake (of nostalgia) in thinking Bush a "radical exception" if they hope to be able to make a realistic assessment of the actual political terrain. This is important. The election has proved that this is not an accident, but a systemic outcome of a systemic crisis of American imperialism. It means the "situation has changed" in some fundamental ways, and we can't just mindlessly continue in the same old leftist way.
There'll be no going back to the good old days. That's over, for good.
>And secondly, at the local level,
> we will have to work, mostly, with Democrats -- though, one hopes, many
> of them are not permanently so. And from what Jan tells me about the
> people she works with at State Farm , many of our recruits will even be
> among those who voted for Bush. There has been a lot of fuss on this and
> other lists, raised to an extravagant level of shrillness yesterday and
> today, about "willfull ignorance" et cetera. That is plain bullshit as
> applied to the vast majority of working americans, whether they voted
> for Bush or for Kerry or stayed home. It isn't "willful ignorance," it
> is ignorance plain and simple.
It is, specifically, _provincial_ ignorance whose material social basis is an out of control proliferating suburban/auto/strip mall complex that, at the fringes, blends into the rural background more "traditionally" conceived. And not just geographically but ideologically: it breeds a sort of ideological peasantry devoid of any real cosmopolitan sensibility, let alone class consciousness. But worse, unlike actual historical peasantries, they are not a class of producers (they are not a class at all) and therefore without any progressive potential. They are rather "consumers" (not meant here in the commonplace sense) with the political power to demand a huge chunk of the world's savings in order to perpetuate their own largely unproductive existence. Since Reagantime, they have consistently elected reactionary politicians in order to accomplish this, furthering the vicious cycle. The economic wastefulness, ecological damage and financial irrationality (not to mention cultural repulsiveness) of this bloated complex have converted this into a downward spiral tending towards disequilibrium, provoking aggressive war in order to keep things on track. Yet, everything else remaining equal, the wars themselves will be the final expression of the unsustainability of what you might want to call a particular capitalist social regime without a future.
The wars themselves will finally become unsustainable, and the global American Bakufu will come to an end, and with it, the existence of this ideological peasantry. I'd hate to wait around to find out how they react to this...
> That is one of the reasons we have to
> build a VISIBLE movement (demos are the most obvious form such
> visibility takes, though not the only form of course) -- a visible
> movement which will bring us into direct _relationships_ with the
> UNwillfully ignorant. As I said in my first post-election post, Mao is
> still right: Trust the People.
Well, as you can see from above, there are people and there are people. My view recognizes that this is an imperialist country (something Mao would have also taken into consideration), and this kind of reactionary mass is characteristic of imperialist countries and must be taken into realistic account "as they are", as Doug would say. Right now, we are not even at the point of trusting our own natural, but only still potential, mass metropolitan base to bolt the Democrats, much less devise tactics to (at least) spilt and weaken the reactionary mass. I believe the former must be the priority, and am quite willing to "willfully ignore" the unwilling ignorant for the time being. Fascism is not imminent (but it is immanent!), we still have time.
We need to build a sober, serious-looking and visible political organization, starting in the most "progressive" districts. It must at some level, be a unified organization, not a welter of "coalitions".
> Finally, the traffic on lbo, on pen-l, and even on marxism the last two
> days is reminding me all too vividly of a long debate extending past
> 2:00 a.m. that I had with Jeff Jones after he had spoken here in
> September of 1969. (For those who don't remember, he was one of the core
> leaders of the Weatherman faction of SDS.) The wails on this list about
> american voters (workers) have a weirdly similar content to the
> Weatherman rhetoric of 1969. From that position one can only move on to
> political quietism or to individualist violence.
Yes, please, no ultraleftist antics. This is not about "me". Let's stay
focused. -Brad Mayer
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. It is also weird to hear all the losers on this list wail about
> being "realistic." Hah! The realists have been doing nothing but lose
> for 36 years.
>