[lbo-talk] Elections, Mexico, and the USA (was anti-Kinky)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Sep 7 18:17:13 PDT 2006


On 9/7/06, Michael McIntyre <mcintyremichael at mac.com> wrote:
> What's not irrational? Perhaps camping out in the Zocalo for two months.
> We'll see.

If few on the (broad) Mexican Left believed that voting mattered, there would have been few votes for AMLO, and if few of them believed that elections mattered, they wouldn't have camped out in the Zocalo.

But it seems impossible to advance a populist economic program of the sort that can get leftists elected elsewhere through US elections.

The US ruling class have more plutocratic control over who can get on the ballots and into the MSM than almost any other ruling class in the world, making this country not so much liberal democracy as liberal plutocracy, and yet American workers (except Black and American Indian workers) tend to believe that their country is freer and more democratic than the rest of the world. . . .

On 9/7/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Michael McIntyre wrote:
> > I usually try to
> > convince people that this is wasted breath. It never convinces
> > anyone.
>
> There are some years when it would be worthwhile to convince a few
> people to give energy to non-electoral ends. It didn't make any
> difference in 2000, for there was no particular non-electoral work to
> do. It did make a difference in 2004. If we could have convinced even a
> quarter of the ABBs to work instead in local anti-war groups -- it still
> wouldn't have made much difference, but there was a theoretical
> possibility for non-electoral work to make a difference, while there
> wasn't even a theoretical possibility for voting or electoral work to
> make a difference.

The Iraq War is unlikely to become the kind of galvanizing issue that the Vietnam War was. It affects too few, and white working-class youth from rural and suburban areas, who are usually the last to stop mistaking an empire for a republic, are overrepresented in the military.

Military recruits by race and ethnicity, 2005 <http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=232> Army recruits per 1000 youth according to urban-rural range, 2005 <http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254> Top 100 counties by White army recruits per 1000 White youth, 2005 <http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=243>

In addition, potential refusers in the ranks of active-duty soldiers have to overcome the ideology of professionalism that a volunteer military, in contrast to an army of conscripts, instills into many of them, which is a tough thing to do.

What is potentially promising is interaction between Mexican immigrant workers here and the new development in Mexico, what with the upcoming constituent assembly on Mexico's independence day. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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