but the point is something more interesting, to me anyway, where everyone avoids discussing what the real issue is and instead points at symptoms.
IT's a fundamental difference between those who think you can reform the system from within. Carrol doesn't think that. The real enemy isn't the DP: it's electoral politics at all.
He does go on a lot about how the existence of the DP saps energy from the left. Basically, because people throw themselves into electoral campaigns every four years, they don't have the energy to get involved in local political organizations and the like. Thus, they don't get involved in actually existing struggles where, involved in materially reshaping the world around them they are simultaneously experiencing changed political consciousness.
That's Carrol's reasoning.
I disagree with him about the DP - if I have his argument right. I don't think it will matter.
The folks who disagree with him, I suspect, just have a different set of assumptions or conjectures about how they think social change will work. Some folks *do* think that working within the system is an appropriate approach. I think Gar Lipow outlined his own view on this back in January of this year.
At 09:01 AM 4/6/2012, Joseph Catron wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
>
>When was yakking ever destructive? Yakking is sort of the essence of
> > politics no?
> >
>
>I often get the impression that in Carrol Cox thought, politics resembles
>what the rest of us might consider magic. There's an awful lot of emphasis
>on using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones, no?
>
>--
>"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
>lytlað."
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