Re: [Marxism] Paul Jay's interview with Dem insider Bill Curry
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. * On 5/4/16 6:16 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote: > what he [Bill Curry] says about the permanent barriers to a third party that > have increasingly been built into the framework of our electoral system and > counting, including the prohibitive sums and the number of signatures it > takes to even gain access to the ballot in almost every state This premise of "permanent barriers to a third party" is wrong. I have gathered over 100,000 signatures for Green and other third party candidates over the last four decades. The barriers are difficult but not impossible for a left third party with a minimal core of activists. I sketched a ballot access plan for Jill Stein's Green Party campaign a year ago. For $750,000 at a dollar a signature, the Greens could get on every ballot with paid petitioners. One third of that budget would have been devoted to three states -- Georgia, Oklahoma, and North Carolina -- which had the highest petitioning requirements. Greens have won court cases in Georgia and Oklahoma since that significantly lowered the requirements. A case is pending in NC. We expect to get on in Georgia. In any case, upwards of 90% of American voters will see Jill Stein of the Green Party on their ballots. The inside path of "taking over" the Democratic Party has been tried and tried, not just by the reform Democratic clubs that Louis cited, but by labor's COPE, McGovern's new politics, Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Dean's Democracy for American, Kucinich's Progressive Democrats of America, and many, many others, including the fusion parties in New York State over the decades: American Labor, Liberal, and Working Families. In every case, they failed. Worse, many of the reform Democrats went over the other side and became career Democratic regulars. McGovern's lieutenants like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton became leaders of the anti-worker neoliberal New Democrats. The Jackson legacy is a Congressional Black Caucus stuffed with corporate money that is almost universally in the Clinton camp. The operatives and the pols backed by the fusion parties in New York State have not only become embedded in corporate-financed Democratic politicians' organizations, many have been corrupted. Working Families Party kept backing Sheldon Silver, the fallen Speaker of the NYS Assembly (and Clinton Superdelegate), even after he was indicted for corruption. Silver was just sentenced to 12 years for selling his office for financial kickbacks and sexual favors. A top political aide to NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and former Working Families Party campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, has just been subpoenaed in a federal investigation of a scheme to skirt around New York State's campaign contribution limits. And on and on. No doubt we'll be reading in the future about Sanders activists who became careerists and corrupt in corporate Democratic organizations. Working class independence has been the first principle of socialist politics since 1848. There's no shortcut through the Democratic Party to building a mass party on the left. That "shortcut" is a dead end. Hopefully, many new activists energized by the Sanders campaign will come to the realization that road to "political revolution" for "democratic socialism" lies not inside the Democratic Party but in a left party that is opposed to and starts beating the Democrats. -- Howie Hawkins _ 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
Re: [Marxism] Paul Jay's interview with Dem insider Bill Curry
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. * On 5/4/2016 3:26 PM, Louis Proyect wrote: On 5/4/16 6:16 PM, Ralph Johansen via Marxism wrote: And I would argue b, that the Tea Party model is the model; not their politics, not their tone, not their extremism, not all their astroturf stuff. But you have to make a choice between the Green Party model of an independent race, or the model of the tea party, where you retain your independence and you start going after these people. The Tea Party in the Republican primaries chased forty to sixty Republicans out of office. In four years they took over the United States House of Representatives and became the loudest voice in the United States Senate. Progressives would give their eye teeth to have half that track record. There can be no leftwing version of the Tea Party for the simple reason that the left must grow through a democratic process. The small d is essential since the large D is by its very nature undemocratic. There is nothing remotely resembling the grass roots collective decision-making process at work in the Occupy movement, with all its flaws. The other thing to keep in mind is that there has been a sort of leftist Tea Party for fifty years at least. It is made up of all the reform Democratic clubs around the country with the one on the Upper West Side being typical. I had a friend who was in Avakian's group in the 60s who spent about 10 years in the club and finally joined the Greens because the club was so calcified. All this business about young people carrying out a political revolution in the DP is nonsense. After the convention, the Sanders machine will fold up its tent and he will go back to being a Senator doing spots on the Rachel Maddow show. It is not as if he is a "traitor". He long ago gave up any pretenses at being committed to radical change in the USA. That is up to us, I'm afraid. ___ Lou, I have no knowledge about how the Tea Party model operates in practice. I don't get what in the Tea Party model, as model, is necessarily undemocratic or prevents it from growing through a democratic process. I also don't know what was Tea Party-like about the reform Democratic clubs or how they actually functioned. I may remember hearing of them but nothing positive - and I don't know how their make-up relates to that of the movement around Sanders, in composition and objectives, in changed times, and tactics, seemingly fluid at present; and is "calcified" inevitable if the Tea Party framework is used? As Curry says, after removing "their politics, their tone, their [right] extremism, all their astroturf stuff"? And what got to me about this interview and this counter-proposal is its persuasiveness in terms of outcome, if you take what he says about the difficulties in trying to introduce a radical left third party in an electoral process so hostile to the genre and so innately constructed to block its entry and outcome (despite Socialist Alternative's success in a local setting, where it is ultimately constrained by the design of the national political process – and the Green Party is currently only eligible in 26 states)), and the impracticability of attempting to function outside of the legislative and administrative process (which has been called “the legislative arm” as opposed to the “industrial arm” of labor) entirely, when that is where the basic decisions that affect both process and material outcomes are nailed down. Doesn’t the struggle have to be waged in both and if so, how? I don’t want to take a necessarily apostate position; I see another possibility presented which appears to have merit, I can’t reject it out of hand, and I’d like to be clearer about it. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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
[Marxism] Paul Jay's interview with Dem insider Bill Curry
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. * Paul Jay yesterday interviewed Bill Curry http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content=view=31=74=16244, an advisor on domestic strategy and speechwriter for Bill Clinton, who twice ran for governor of Connecticut, led a nuclear freeze movement, apparently a thoroughgoing reformist Democrat now supporting Sanders. Portions of what he said provide perspective it seems to me against which to pit one's thoughts. Despite what may be commonly accepted here, that the Democratic party is where progressive movements go to die, what he says about the permanent barriers to a third party that have increasingly been built into the framework of our electoral system and counting, including the prohibitive sums and the number of signatures it takes to even gain access to the ballot in almost every state and the resulting lack of exposure which has been increasingly shutting out third party attempts (since Wallaces Henry and George and Nader), and his thoughts as a Dem insider about the Tea Party as a model for a left independent progressive movement that seeks greater influence in the Democratic Party - need to be taken into account, pro or con. It's a game-changer particularly because as Meszaros writes, "The future of socialism will be decided in the U.S., however pessimistic this may sound ... Socialism can either assert itself universally and in such a way that it embraces all areas, including the most developed capitalist areas of the world, or it won't succeed." - which by now should be obvious and at the top of our agenda. Attempting to change the system by entering that process as a third party movement being thus fraught, the alternative may be extra-parliamentary, but I can't imagine that process, without extra-parliamentary access to and networks within the parliamentary system - all of which entails somehow working within that parliamentary system. Think of trade unions in the U.S. finally shorn of defensive, reformist tactics, in an attacking mode at the head of a radical movement, for example, trying to bring needed legislative relief to constituents without that access. So he examines the merits of the Tea Party takeover of the Repugs as a model. Would someone like to offer an articulate response? Here is some of what Bill Curry said : In a party where there's a broad consensus about objectives, it's usually a pretty easy thing. The primary campaign winds up, one candidate gets more votes, the loser takes a few days to nurse their hurt feelings, and then they try to get together to win one for the gipper ... When Clinton said she got over her defeat by Obama and jumped on board in 2012, there weren't many differences between them except the personal ... It's the realization that globalization and trade and universal health care and public corruption and military intervention and public education and climate change are the most important issues where there are profound differences between Sanders and Clinton ... In 2016 I think we're really seeing the beginning of a longer fissure and a real insurrection ... this will play out very differently ... in Connecticut the Sanders people having lost such a narrow fight, I've never seen people in a campaign just popping up the next morning and saying, "What's next?" The sense that they are a presidential campaign and an ongoing movement has been part of the dual identity of this from the very first ... Joining a presidential campaign is like running away to join the circus, and building a movement is like staying home and doing your chores. And it's a longer, delayed gratification kind of exercise, but in the end it's more important. One of the things we've seen here is the implosion of the left. It's been going on for at least a generation. But what the Sanders campaign shows is how the institutional left in Washington has turned its own grass roots base into a mailing list. All the great progress we made, from the women's movement, the consumers movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement - it was always an independent progressive movement putting pressure on both of the parties, finding more friends among Democrats, and it was actually better for the movement and the Democratic Party, because that pressure was needed to force the party to stand up for its own values (??). Those Washington institutions, including unions representing seventy percent of organized labor went with Hillary despite knowing that on global trade and a living wage, issues that they are purportedly fighting for, she was on the wrong side. And in this race,
