[Marxism] RE: Stan Goff, Bill Fletcher and the 2-party system (Austin, Andrew)

[Richard Tan]

Andrew, I could make an argument along Joaquin's, which I agree with. But I 
remember an article by Gary Younge during which a woman in a rural area, 
who had decided to vote Green in 2004, and Younge asked her why; she 
replied that voting Democrat wasn't going to solve her problems - massive 
debts, healthcare, mortgages.

The Democrats are not exactly making efforts to bring in the Marxist vote. 
The left is so fragmented that unions like SEIU can get away with 
undermining the transit worker's strike and, never mind not experience 
consequences about it, they can escape ever having the issue raised at all. 
In such a situation, "strategic" collaboration only has the effect of 
undermining and suppressing one's own politics at the mass level. You don't 
have to be a Marxist to understand this logic. The Freedom Democratic 
party, for example, didn't decide to collaborate, and the argument used 
against them was that LBJ's election was allegedly on the line.

This is forward of me, since you are undoubtedly older than I am and may 
have experienced the events in question, but I am attaching a Wikipedia 
link to the 1964 election results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ElectoralCollege1964-Large.png

My point is that the enemy behind the hill is always going to be used to 
force capitulation to a lesser evil now and defer one's real demands to 
some unspecified time in the future. Assuming that you are only talking 
about a single vote, why not use it to push for precisely the policies that 
you want and that are needed? If you don't see it that way, why would you 
want to give the Marxist vote to the Democrats? What's that, 0.01% of the vote?