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Right, it was "It was only about an agreement on electors"--and the political basis for that agreement was meant to prevent votes for the Bolsheviks from ending up 'spoiling' certain electoral outcomes by throwing a seat to a reactionary party from a "counterrevolutionary" but liberal party. We don't have electors but we do have the 'spoiler' problem and particularly with Trump in office, a left that intervenes in elections in a way that ignores the possibility of empowering a Trump-ist Republican Party is a left that will be isolated from the millions it needs to reach and rightfully so. However, we also do not have truly membership based electoral parties with internal discipline, which means the left can use the Democratic Party ballot without any built-in mechanism to require them to "sell-out." Rather, the mechanism of accountability is primarily who controls their ability to be re-elected, which today means who controls the "ground game"--the canvassing--and the left and far left are in a better position to do that than the moneyed centers of traditional Democratic Party power. This doesn't mean there won't be a million pressures to conform or flip or what have you, but just pointing to the existence of such pressures solves nothing and carried to its logical end means adopting the stance of the 'ultra-left' of the Third Congress and after who refused to run anyone at all because of the "pressures" of parliamentarianism, since those pressures would exist, just in a different way, for someone elected on a different ballot line. Further, the Bolsheviks and electors example is just one such example. It was the standard practice of the Second International, including its left wing, to use a range of tactical and strategic judgements in the second round of elections. Philippe Bourrinet, historian of the 'ultra-left', summarized this when writing about the left split in Holland: "The left, like the left in other parties, did not refuse, during the course of the elections, to support liberal candidates who took a stand in favour of universal suffrage against property-based electoral rights." I agree Lenin was against "blocs" in some general sense: maintain the separate organization and program and criticize and point out the limitations of the other parties, yes (and plenty of those who supported Sanders did not do this), but again, that did not rule out voting for such parties or even working within them if one had freedom of criticism and organization (as they did in the Labor Party and as the DSA has today in relationship to the Democratic Party in a different way). -Jason _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
