> From the way you talk, I can only conclude that
> you regard a left party as primarily an electoral
> vehicle, and one for winning presidential elections
> at that. The constitutional/federal system didn't
> prevent the Communist Party from electing a
> Congressman, Vito Marcantonio, right down to
> the McCarthy period, or Vermont from electing
> Bernie Sanders on a socialist ticket. The problem
> with both these guys was that, once elected, they
> failed to act independently of the Democrats.
Vito Marcantonio was elected as a Republican. Only later did he occasionally get the Democratic nomination as well, until the red-baiters drove him out of the nomination process in both major "parties" and he had only the American Labor Party ballot line to fall back on. As for this stuff about him "failing to act independently of the Democrats," the only response of a rational person has to be, "um, whatever dude," since Marcantonio strongly opposed the Cold War when that was decidedly the Not Cool thing to do. And he paid for it dearly. And yes, the Communist Party was the base of his electoral coalition, but there is no evidence that I've seen that he was ever a Party member.
All of which is proof of my point that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are "parties" in any real sense. They are electoral coalitions that are made up of interest groups that are effectively "parties" in all but name. The Non-Partisan Leagues of the Popular Front era recognized this, and our goal in the electoral arena should be to do something like that (while the "party" proper is primarily concerned with base-building in the extra-electoral field -- no one disputes this, only dichotomy-addled trots and anarchists who cannot chew gum and walk at the same time), although I think the opportunities for running on the Republican line in many places these days are virtually nil. When all is said and done, we need maximum tactical flexibility, and for that we need people to stop conflating princip les and fetishes. Principle means not renouncing our independent positions and agitation on critical issues (the war, gay rights, whatever) even as we work in coalition with people who are not fully-developed revolutionaries -- but this goes both for "movement-building" AND electoral politics, since it is fetishistic to think that electoral politics has some especially corrosive effect on principle that the necessary coalition work we pursue on other fronts somehow does not. Further, talking about "the" Democratic Party (or "the" AFL-CIO "bureaucracy" in the context of other discussions), without more than a superficial understanding of how these instututions work in the real world, or a plan to break out of our conundrum that can be articulated and explained in terms of real-world strategy -- all of these are fetishes, too, and should be dispensed with. People who stick to them have no claim to be taken seriously.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories