On 2012-02-15, at 2:29 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Nothing is
> more frustrating than a party that has no intention of putting
> candidates to political offices (cf. Tony Mazzochi's Labor Party).
I think programatically the Labor Party accepts in principle the need to run independent candidates, and it tried to do so in North Carolina and Ohio (?), without much success.
The problem is that we're dealing with a vicious feedback loop.
The working class and its allies need legislative, agency, and judicial representation to defend their interests against the Republicans, and have been forced by default to rely on the DP as the (imperfect) vehicle for doing so, causing them to vote for it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Many trade union, black, Hispanic and other movement activists may even be more sympathetic to the Greens, Labor Party, etc. but in the end they balk at supporting these alternatives to the left of the DP because they are rightly perceived as powerless, with little prospect of meeting the immediate needs of working people. The conundrum, of course, is that no potential third party formation will ever be in a position to attract trade union and other activists until the activists see it as a realistic alternative to the DP.
I don't know what it will take to break the loop. Maybe a deepening crisis coupled with the continued attempts of the DP leaders to distance the party from the unions and social movements so as to displace the Republicans in the centre-right of the political spectrum. Under Obama, we've at least seen the loop begin to fray.