Julio wrote:
My neighbors, friends, family and myself -- all people who live off
our work -- began supporting Dean. Then we supported Kerry,
consciously, deliberately, with time and other resources. We
traveled, we spent time in Ohio and Pennsylvania, doing clerical and
other menial work, phone banking, knocking on doors, turning the
vote out, etc. We collaborated with a bunch of superb people (mostly
women), union officers, plain workers, young and old volunteers.
These networks are latent and can be reactivated when need be.
<snip>
If the criterion is the number of votes attained, how can they call
Kerry's support a failure?
What did rank-and-file Kerry supporters on the left achieve by
campaigning for John Kerry, registering voters and getting them to
vote? Did they fail or succeed? What are the criteria of success
and failure in this instance? The criteria are (A) whether
rank-and-file Kerry supporters on the left have kept their own
databases of names and contact information (especially those of "a
bunch of superb people [mostly women], union officers, plain workers,
young and old volunteers") that they have collected "while doing
clerical and other menial work, phone banking, knocking on doors,
turning the vote out, etc.," rather than turning over all products of
their labor to the John Kerry campaign or the Democratic Party or
union or liberal non-profit bureaucrats; and (B) whether they have
already planned for post-election activities to keep the networks
that they built alive.
In politics, the most important products are databases and networks.
Build them and maintain control of them for your own purposes, and
you have a foundation for independent organizing on which you can
build. If you have built them and given them away to the Democratic
Party or union or liberal non-profit bureaucrats, however, you have
let them alienate the products of your own labor from you. In that
case, you worked (probably for free or cheap), and they profited.
--
Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
