> Julio, the danger of this analogy is that gold is able to function as
> money due to its ability to operate as an empty signifier due to its
> divisibility, its ability to be radically reshaped, and its permanence.
> This is linked to a fetishistic libidinal investment in its preciousness.
> I'm not sure this helps your case all that much. At best you could say
> that if there was a big social movement, gold equivalent Obama would mold
> himself to it, which would mean you needed the movement before the
> candidate.
Yours is a good summary of the physical properties of gold, robert. But the process is more chicken and egg than you suggest. The fetishistic libido doesn't fall from the sky or pops up full and fresh like Athena popping out of Zeus' head. It was itself the result of a previous development of exchange and value forms, that after a point showed their limitations. So, I don't think the analogy is dangerous.
I think it's suggestive of the contradictions of the process. What we need is collective motion forward.
I have made my views clear. When people, in mass, set out to change the conditions in which they live and work, they grab whatever existing tool may look like capable of doing the job. It's through the struggle to change our conditions that we refine or discard instruments replacing them with others that may fit the task better. That's why I'm convinced that, in this country, the most likely scenario in which the U.S. working class may -- if at all -- evolve politically as a united, independent, and enlightened force in the foreseeable future will be through a prolonged struggle for the body and soul of the Democratic Party. Two or three cats may decide that it's already high time to dump the Democratic Party, but the bulk of the people won't dump it until it proves to them to be beyond repair. And that will more or less coincide with the forging of the new tool. A third party alternative would have to evolve organically out of the strongly felt needs of crowds not finding the existing political formations adequate to meet those needs.
I don't think the work from outside the Democratic Party -- I mean, propaganda, agitation, and organizing against the many ills of the system -- is useless. It is better than nothing. But if that work is divorced from the immediate efforts of working people to change their political conditions -- because those efforts never measure up to some arbitrary ideological standard, because they flow through the Democratic Party rather than through some other pre-conceived organizational framework, because they don't follow some pre-ordained political pattern -- then that work is essentially sectarian, which is to say largely irrelevant and wasteful of the energy and lives of those few who get into it.
That said, at this point, even those supporting the candidacies of -- say -- Nader and McKinney have my respect. It's better than nothing.