Well, I’m officially ill, and stuck at work, facing a sodding five hours train journey home... bumtweezers. but I can still be a revolutionary, even when sick.So, SDF’s responce, many, many moons ago, to my point against reformism, to whit the german Greens, was to point out that the American Greens had in fact consistantly opposed the war - this, from a materialist sociologist is worrisome.
we have to ask - if, say, Nader had held political office during the war, and had chosen to support it, what would the U.S. Greens have done? After all, Fischer threatened to ignore any party vote. Would they have fallen in behind him, to avoid splitting the party? Or would they have stood their ground, and faced political rouination?
Are we to attribute Fischer’s decision to personal malfeasance? Or should we look for further structural factors - his coalition (and although the Greens in the US will almost certainly never face a coalition situation, to expand into state power they would have to grow into a de facto coalition of differently minded groups, the inevitable consequence of grubbing for votes) partners were determined upon war, his ministerial officials wanted war, as would have most of the political elite.The power structures that extend beyond formal democracy would prevent any Green administration do anything other than administer Capitalism in the way it needs administrating.
my criticism of reformism is, oddly enough, identitical to my attacks on leninism and the Russian revolution (and Lenin was, in his own odd-sock way, a gradualist reformist, instead of fighting elections to make reforms, he merely wanted to establish a party dictatorship to make reforms, the difference is that slight). The first duty of any government is to stay in power, and and all principles must come secondary to that, comprimise is the only road - and in an unequal society, where some have more economic say than others, there will be a disproprtionate amount of comprimise with the privately wealthy and powerful.
No matter who you vote for, the government gets in - that is to say, that the social relations inherent in the liberal democratic state will remain intact - unless, you vote against those structures, send delegates as rebels, not reformers, to take the power system apart, and block it up - to vote for any party advocating reforms is to implicitly vote capitalist, because any reform *must* be based on the logic of functioning under capitalism, under the Law of no Profit no production.
the only way to end capitalism is to vote against Capitalism, and since there isn’t a Socialist Party standing in the U.S., the only option must be for American workers to spoil their ballots, writing ‘World Socialism’ across them.
Workers cannot be led by the nose, through reform after reform, to Socialism, they can only reach it with a clear understanding and desire.
