[lbo-talk] The very worst custodians of empire

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Wed Jun 28 07:49:17 PDT 2006


Carrol Cox wrote:


> Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
> Man never Is, but always To be Blest.
> The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
> Rests and expatiates in a life to come....
> (EonM, I, 95-98)
>
> Or, as Joe Hill put it, for DP supporters "There'll be pie in the sky
> when you die."
=============================== And another sigh from I.

It's mistaken - or, more likely in your case, a deliberate distortion - to paste the label of "DP supporters" on the foreheads of those US leftists who suggest that it is more productive to develop relationships with the larger mass of Democratic activists rather than with the Green party and assorted socialist groups who are less representative of the US working class and subsist on the margins of American political life.

So far as I know, groups like Code Pink, the Committees of Correspondence, CPUSA, Progressive Democrats of America, etc. strongly oppose the Democratic party's direction and leadership, and are trying to change both. I think this is true of also of the greater number of liberals and radicals on this and other left-wing lists who share that perspective. I expect you would argue they all "objectively" support the Democrats because their they are in and around the party trying to influence its members. I was always repelled by Stalinist efforts to slander the Trotskyists as "objectively" social democratic because of their tactical orientation towards the members of those parties, and I regard your views about the relationship of this part of US left to the DP in much the same light.

Instead of your poetry and smug one liners, I'd be more interested to see you develop a case - as Yoshie, to her credit, tries to do - for why US leftists should cultivate relations with with Ralph Nader and David Cobb more than with dissident DP rank-and-filers like Cindy Sheehan and elected representatives like Cynthia Mckinley. Or, more accurately in your case - since you seem to be indiscriminately opposed to all political tendencies and perhaps even to political action in general - what should the US left be doing apart from joining you in angry and abstract calls from Bloomington to "build the movement!" and "expose the ABB'ers!"?



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list