: The connection between the examples is a thin one...So I noticed.
Again: to compare the Russia of 1917, where Tsarist autocracy had been supplanted by bourgeois democracy for less than one year, to America today where bourgeois democracy has demonstrated, for decades, that America is the 'model country of the democratic swindle' Marx said it was 150 years ago, is ludicrous.
: The subjectivity of the people, the REAL, empirically-determined subjectivity of the people, is an essential element of social change that cannot be papered over with quotations of one's favorite saint. It has to be LISTENED TO.
And what are the working people saying, Sam? We want the Greens to inaugurate an era of energy austerity? No. They're saying the system is shit, it doesn't matter who gets elected. And considering that the economy is 'great,' that is amazing. Wait until the economy gets real nasty, then the talk will get louder. And that talk needs to be led by a non-collaborationist, non-centrist, non-reformist, honest, proletarian party that intends to use both legal and extra-legal means to accomplish the aim of overthrowing capital.
: And education of the type that merely broadcasts communiques while disparaging their nonbelievers is education of the type that teaches people not to learn.
Being honest, I believe, is something that working people DEMAND. They've had all the ass-kissing, disingenuous, strategically vague, campaign promises they can tolerate. Politicians talk to working people like they were children. Would you have me do the same? All the talk in the world about 'freedom for everybody' and 'liberty in the workplace' and '5-minute revolutions' is just more bullshit. I want it out in the open: proletarian revolution, capital will be crushed, everyone's expected to work, special 'exceptions' for anarchists and other shirkers will be rewarded with empty stomachs.
: Similarly, one can bludgeon fencesitters such as Lark enough with Trotskyist dogma, and sure enough their politics will move to the right.
If Lark's me-first politics were any further to the right, Sam, he'd fall off the map. Do you think there's room in a proletarian party for someone who doesn't even acknowledge the existence of classes? If that's so, then I guess there's room in the Green Party for someone who thinks the last of the rain forest should be turned into an amusement park.
While we’re at it: Can I say I'm a member of the Green Party while talking about turning the rain forest into Disneyworld---or would the Green Party act like a 'vanguard' and throw me out?
: The Spartacists aren't even close to starting a revolution -- I think it has something to do with their tactics.
And I repeat: I'm not a member of the Spartacists, I only agree with some of their program.
Nonetheless: It is a Marxist-Leninist axiom that the masses must have their own political experience, that strikes and street actions against the capitalist regime are essential for the growth of mass movements. Bourgeois elections are an institutionalized annulment of this essential experience. Voting itself is a refutation of the first task of the day: mass political experience. You say that capitalist democracy is better than nothing. I say you should be ashamed of yourself.
Ralph Nader announced his presidential campaign today. The New York Times devoted more than three pages to the presidential campaign---NOT ONE WORD for Nader. Won't you wise up?
