: Much though I respect SDF, I am bound by honour, the hostility clause, and a deap and abiding evil, to point out that most of the benefits of voting Green SDF enumerates, can be gained from aactually spoiling your ballot - just writing "World Socialism" across your paper, rather than any presidential candidate, is suffice to challenge the system, and clear you of collaboration.SDF: Since half of the voting-age public in the US doesn't vote at all, why not just avoid the polls? Well, they've tried this for the last 25 years or so... did it work? Work for whom? Fantasies about how the public "sees through" the election process aside, it's most likely the voting-age public doesn't vote because it's too busy working, and not out of any "political consciousness" they supposedly have that we can appropriate for the PR aims of our Marxist sect.
: What SDF needs to show, attractive though his reforms
SDF: This reference to my "reformism" needs an actual reference to actual reforms I've advocated. I have, on the other hand, advocated briefly in a conversation with Gee, the abolition of money and the democratization of property. Do those count as "reforms," RD?
My candidate Kovel, on the other hand, advocates reforms as a rhetorical ploy -- he wants people to ask why the present aims of government are so thoroughly steeped in a public ignorance of the real conditions of human society and global ecology.
: In continuing this debate, I will be uninterested in responding to complaints about "Kovel doesn't have a chance" -- that wasn't his intention in running...
: are, is how these will alter the fundamental and inherent problems capitalism arises, and, though Barry was probably applying an unduly mechanical materialist interpretation,
SDF: No, Stoller is in the land of pure fantasy. Go ahead, Stoller, enact your violent revolution... but don't forget to purge the ranks of dissenters first... don't mind my criticisms, I'm just a defeatist, triumphalism is more important than realism...
: SDF shouild really show how Green policies under capitalism can occur without needing to be *conditioned* by the needs of the capitalist class/economy.
SDF: Green politics is an attempt to disrupt the system by re-engineering it toward the needs of the people -- clearly American democracy has been engineered as a mere support system for American capitalism, and Green politics would have to, for starters, eliminate the Federal government, majoritarian elections, the working class, and the US dollar and money in general if it were to uphold its values of decentralization, grassroots democracy, and community-based economics. But why say so now? The process of Federal self-destruction isn't forwarded by a blunt public description of some future paradise of no government that won't be a paradise because we'll be too busy dealing with the aftereffects of two centuries of capitalist "growth" (read: cancer). 'Tis more expedient at present to explain why it's necessary to avoid the ills that will come with the continued operation of capitalism -- most of which are ECOLOGICAL ills (greenhouse effect i.e. the destabilization of global weather, the dry-up of global oil supplies, collapse of the ecological gene pool, fuckup of the ozone layer, the coming end to global oceanic fishing etc.) and are not explained in Marx's (false) advertisement of the utopia of abundance to come.
And, as you can see from the evidence of this Debate Room, American voters such as MDG are still struggling with the idea that indefinite support for the One-Party System is the road to ruin. Come on by the States, RD, see what it's like.
: Further, we should ask why American greens neeed be any different from German greens - if we remove any implication of personal disreputability and failing from the German greens, we must ask why they voted *for* war.
SDF: Can we ask why the American Greens voted almost unanimously against it too?
: Clearly, the fact that their representatives threatened to ignore the party vote must be taken into account - and so the entire system of representative democracy must be applied in opposition to the intrentions of the Green movement.
SDF: We have plenty of people doing that within the Green movement itself. Too bad they don't get oligopoly media coverage, tho' they make it into the pages of Synthesis/ Regeneration now and then. Don Fitz ain't no electoralist, that's for sure. Would you like to join them RD?
: Further, I feel it is for SDF to explain to us why we should ask for bigger crumbs, when we could have the whole damn bakery.
SDF: And MDG, on the other hand, thinks I ought to stop thinking about the Presidential elections and should support a candidate for School Board or some other such tinier crumb. You been paying attention RD? That's what I've been doing.
: Vote world Socialism for President, don't vote capitalist....
SDF: Join the Greens, don't vote capitalist.
