[lbo-talk] Sachs on Obama's budget for the rich and powerful

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Wed Feb 15 13:52:52 PST 2012


Marv
> 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.

A structural problem. If there are grassroots organizations in place genuinely strong enough to get a candidate elected (a big if) what is wrong with running genuinely left people in Democratic primaries. I mean it is a mistake to participate in electroral politics at times. Electoral poltiics are endless time and money and energy sucks, and if you don't have an enormously strong grassroots base, it can just vacuum all your resources into a losing electoral fight. But that is as strong an argument against the Green and Labor parties as against running in Dem primaries. But if you are in a position where electoral participation at the level of running candidates makes sense, why not run in Democratic primaries, especially given that the system is heavily biased towards the Republican and Democratic parties, and makes it much tougher to run outside them than inside them. Again I can see strong arguments against running candidates at all. But in circumstances where it makes sense to run candidates, what is the advantage of running 3rd party as opposed to in Democratic primaries? There is actually no legal requirement that such a candidate adhere to any particular party line. A Democratic candidate could run as a socialist, Marxist, whatever they pleased - though it might not be a big vote draw. Again, I can see a lot problems with this. I'm just trying to figure out which of those problems don't apply to running as a Green or Labor Party member.

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
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