On Fri, Aug 9, 2024 at 04:17 PM, Mark Baugher wrote: > > If it's between building a movement to preserve our present electoral > arrangements or building a movement against US genocide in Gaza, I'm > putting my time into the latter.
Is there a contradiction between the two? Only a very small percentage of party supporters actively go door-to-door or staff campaign rooms - in the US as everywhere else. Most express their support in conversations and emails with friends and family or more widely on social media and then cast their vote. You’ve been helping shape opinion on this list without having sacrificed your Palestine solidarity activity. In the age of the internet, political opinion now crosses state lines and international boundaries. The rise of the far right in the US and the UK fed on the rise of the far right in Europe and elsewhere and vice-versa. So discussion about whether you live in a Kansas or Connecticut no longer carries the same weight. Moreover, as energetic as it is, the pro-Palestine movement is only one of many - of women, unions, BIPOC, climate, LGBTQ+, civil liberties etc. - where Marxists come in direct contact with other activists. Feelings are running very high in these circles in favour of the Democrats, and hard-won connections can be easily ruptured by the kind of blasé or hostile attitudes exhibited on this list. It was less politically fraught in an earlier time to dismiss Dukakis-Bentsen versus Bush Sr. and Quayle as Tweedledum and Tweedledee than it is today when the differences between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance are much more starkly posed and the threat to democratic rights - what you understate as merely the " present electoral arrangements” - is much more pronounced. Many pro-Palestine activists here are repulsed by the Biden administration and more generally the indispensable support of both parties for Israel. If they were in the US, I expect most would abstain, but a minority would vote Democratic on the understanding that a Trump administration would be more closely tied to the Israeli fascistic right and even more inclined to violently suppress the solidarity movement at home. We shouldn ’ t lose sight of the fact that Palestine, as much as it enrages and engages us, is one of many movements, and it is an error IMO to make that the starting and end point of US electoral politics. I earlier posed the question of whether a stance for or against the pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist Democrats is a tactical or principled question. It ’ s clear from my answer that it’s a tactical question - much as it was incidentally for Lenin when he urged Marxists to support the “bourgeois” British Labour Party in a period, moreover, very much unlike our own when it was the revolutionary left rather than the far right which was globally on the march. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#31565): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31565 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/107815585/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
