ravi wrote: > Since I still continue vacillating between the two positions could you > summarize why ABB was absolutely correct? There are some obvious > arguments in favour of it and I think Chomsky outlined strong reasons on > why W is a special case (are your arguments similar ones?). Additionally > the arguments against ABB are non-obvious, though, to my mind, not > irrational. Also, is Leiberman admitted under ABB?
I wasn't the one who started this rehashing of the old debate. Anyway, my rationale in arguing for the need to cooperate with the DP in the 2004 elections was a pretty rough cost-benefit calculation: In 2004, all evidence indicated that, if Bush got re-"elected" (or "re"-elected) or re-selected we would have more of his aggressively militaristic brand of imperialism and more of his enrich-the-richest economic policies. More concretely, that would translate into prolonging the bloody occupation of Iraq that gave us (inter alia) Abu Ghraib and the obliteration of Fallujah with radioactive and chemical artillery, threatening Iran, harassing Venezuela and Cuba, plotting coups and political assassinations, extending taxcuts for the hyper rich, starving "the beast" (the source of funds for social programs), eroding Social Security and Medicare, fumbling macro policymaking, auctioning off trade policy to special interests (even worse than under Clinton), etc. Other four years of that were extremely costly for workers in the U.S. and abroad not to take it seriously. So, stopping Bush was a top priority. And it was feasible. It wouldn't have led to paradise under the DP, but it was unlikely to lead to something worse than Bush. The antiwar movement and politically-active workers would not have felt terribly demobilized, depressed, passive, and cynical with a partial victory with the Democrats, at least not as much as with a Bush's re-"election" defeat. In 2004, due to a history nobody could undo overnight and by far, the best chance to get Bush out of the White House wasn't by staging a proletarian revolution, abstaining from vote, or postulating some presidential candidate of the left. The best chance was by cooperating with the DP and electing a Democratic president. The left would still orient its strategy, its propaganda, its long-run organizing, on the basis of its (correct) view of the DP as a fundamentally corrupt, bourgeois political apparatus. But it'd have to adjust its tactics, its agitation, its immediate actions and cooperate with the DP during the campaign. People with a weak stomach would have to hold their noses, but the alternative wasn't Chanel 5 either. Given what was at stake and what was likely, the left *had to* cooperate with the Democrats. Life is a bitch. That was, words more or less, my argument early in 2004. (I sketched this position before, in 2002, before Iraq was invaded.) The superficially radical options were (1) support Nader or some virtually unknown marginal candidate, or (2) abstain from voting altogether and preserve your (useless) ideological purity. Of course, superficial radicals that favored (1) argued that the Nader campaign was the means to set in motion the working class as an independent political force while any cooperation with the Democrats could only be ruinous. The argument of "political independence," understood as mechanical separation from bourgeois party politics, was one of their favorites. I made a case against that argument and a mishmash of other objections in a number of postings in Louis Proyect's list from January 2004 to March 2005, when I finally decided to expel myself from Marxmail. Also in March 2005, I tried to recap and refine my arguments in an article published by Swans: http://www.swans.com/library/art11/jhuato01.html Julio
