[lbo-talk] Development of Political Underdevelopment (was electability)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/23/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 23, 2007, at 6:34 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > As far as Americans are concerned, most of them don't really believe
> > in being the same in god's sight or equal opportunity or level playing
> > fields, despite what religion or the constitution says.   Why do I
> > know that?  Because they believe in "electability."  What is
> > electability but the fact of having enough support of the ruling class
> > and therefore having a shot at high office?  The dominant ideology is
> > deference to the Master Class.
>
> You're taking American exceptionalism too far. People everywhere
> practice strategic voting. The problem isn't really in the electoral
> realm - it's that our level of extra-electoral organization and
> consciousness is fairly primitive.

The other day, I was reading John Mage and Bernard D'Mello's notes on
Nepal, an extremely economically underdeveloped country:

     The material basis for creating a new realm of

     freedom has not as yet developed in Nepal;

     it is a backward economy with conditions of life

     that are harsh for most of its people.  But the human

     resources, from what we saw, are bettered nowhere.

     Young people with whom we talked startled us with

     a superior knowledge of some of the fundamental

     processes taking place in the world than the

     "sophisticated" youth we encounter elsewhere,

     whether in New York City or Mumbai.  A young

     PLA soldier at the Tila sub-cantonment engaged

     us vigorously on the role of intellectuals in advanced

     capitalist society, and the relative absence of their

     solidarity with dominated peoples as compared to

     metropolitan red intellectuals of the past.

     ("The Beginnings of a New Democratic Nepal?,"
<http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/md160307.html>)

Political development doesn't coincide with economic development.

What we have in the USA is development of political underdevelopment
-- the more economy gets developed, the more politics gets
underdeveloped here -- and there ought to be a new dependency theory
to explain this political tendency at the heartland of capitalism.

Part of that is bad faith, as Sartre explains it: people, especially
those on the left side of the political spectrum, freely deny their
own freedom, thus avoiding responsibility for the choices they make.
"I have the courage of convictions, but politicians don't," say the
voters on the Left, all the while voting down politicians who have the
courage of convictions they lack.
-- 
Yoshie