----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Meanwhile, we work on reforms while getting out a
>revolutionary message at the same time. Otherwise, we end up being
>not so different from Brad, Nathan, & other supporters of the
>Democratic Party, except in our self image.
But Yoshie, you aren't so different, at least from me. (I'll let Brad speak
for himself). On day to day work in the community, I doubt 99% of people
could distinguish much between us. We may have theoretical disagreements on
some issues and strategic differences, but most of our core analysis - the
class nature of history and struggle, the core importance of the racial
divide, a core internationalism that defends the rights of immigrants and
the global working class - is far more similar than different.
You are the one who makes a fetish of the question of strategic support for
the Democratic Party. But to excommunicate me as a revolutionary on that
basis, you also have to retroactively excommunicate all communists and
socialists who supported the Popular Front of Roosevelt and who have
supported Democratic campaigns throughout the last fifty years, including
all those socialist parties who promoted the Jackson campaign back in 1988.
Justin and I disagree vehemently on the issue of the Democratic Party yet as
lawyers are both involved in building up the National Lawyers Guild, a key
legal defender of radicals since it's founding in 1937 and a core promoter
of socialist values in the law. There is not some simple divide between
"revolutionaries" and "social democrats" but a whole host of seperate
organizational and strategic issues that radicals of good faith agree and
disagree over. The search for Manichean divisions is a sectarian virus that
would be better dispensed with, whether in its Leninist or anti-Communist
versions.
You may want to vote everyone off your theoretical revolutionary island on
that basis, but I just think it's historically a silly thing to do. And
very un-Marxist, since both Marx and Engels never made electoral political
alliances a pure theoretical criterion but had a very practical view of
supporting the parties where the working class was strongest, country by
country. Without illusions of what Lincoln was all about, he was a strong
supporter of him because he saw the critical nature of defeating slavery.
So lesser-evilism is not some latter-day revisionism but derives directly
from the Old Man himself.
