[lbo-talk] sprinting rightward

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Sat Jun 28 15:38:56 PDT 2008


Jim Creegan writes:


> In aswer to Marvin Gandall's "millions of blacks and workers can't be
> wrong" argument:
>
> Let's take an example from the pages of history.

[...]


> Yes, Marvin, people, especially in the US, are very naive politically.
> They don't ask for very much from politics because because they are
> used to getting little. They are grateful for the crumbs. They are
> gullible and susceptible to manipulation, especially at the hands of
> people who specialize at it. Not to grasp this is not to understand the
> essence of bourgeois electoral politics, which is to maintain the rule
> of a minority under conditions of political democracy, in which the
> non-capitalist majority possesses the right to vote. If this majority
> can't be ignored politically, or coerced, it must be deceived. That is
> why we have evolved political parties that have polished deception into
> a fine art.
>
> This doesn't mean that that the majority would be seething with
> rebellion if not successfully gulled. But the dominant political
> discourse, supported by millions of dollars, bars the way for
> dissenting voices, which might contribute to making the majority more
> conscious of their own interests.
==================================== I don't believe millions of blacks and workers always make the right choices, but neither do I believe they have always or mostly made the wrong ones. They've made progress, including in the US, both when democratic rights were absent and when "the rule of the minority has been maintained under conditions of political democracy". They've advanced when it was far more difficult and hazardous for the more politically aware among them to organize and lead than it is now, and when plutocratic control of communications was even more pronounced than it is in the age of the internet.

I think the problem may be less with them than with us, or at least some of us, who consider anything less than fundamental changes in power and property relations, anything which reforms rather than overthrows the system, as mere "crumbs". But from the perspective of unionized workers seeking card check, women trying to protect choice in abortion, environmentalists pushing for a more sane energy policy, homeowners looking for relief from foreclosures, immigrants seeking amnesty, the uninsured and underinsured seeking affordable health care, etc. - all of the varied needs reflected in the different programs developed by thousands of mass-based organizations - legislative attainment of even a fraction of their goals represents more than "crumbs". Only outsiders without experience in these organizations, whose see their programs as largely irrelevant to their own circumstances, tend to make these claims.

If working people are congenitally unable to choose what is in their interests, and "dissenting voices" such as ours are "barred" from showing them what these are, what logic keeps you on the left?



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