[Marxism] A Retort on the Left and Elections

[milongonsinga]

Mark Lause wrote:

"As far as I'm concerned, if such characters like this want to slander
Nader or McKinney as liberals..."

As far as I know, Nader and McKinney are liberals. I've never heard either one advocate for the overthrow of the capitalist system. McKinney WAS a Democrat until not that long ago. While a Representative from the state of Georgia she was more progressive than the average Democrat but hardly a revolutionary. In fact, at the local level there are many Democrats with similar politics. Just examine many of the Democrats in the NYC Council. So, in that sense, she's not unique.

In 1993, David Dinkins, the Democrat, narrowly lost the mayoral election to the Republican, Rudolph Guiliani. It was well known that Guiliani was a white supremacist and a great friend of Wall Street. His eight years as mayor were a disaster for the working class. Under Guiliani we saw an unremitting effort to destroy the provision of all social services to working people in NYC. One of the first things he did was cut funding for public hospitals. He eliminated the penny tax on stock transactions costing the city billions of dollars. He encouraged more "aggressive" policing, resulting in greater abuse of black people by the police: Abner Louima was sodomized in a police station, and Amadou Diallo was murdered entering his building. He cut funds to after-school programs, forced people to do menial work for their welfare benefirts, and cut the Summer Youth Employment Program. He claimed credit for a drop in crime that had started under his predecessor but
 was actually a national phenomenon, and had more to do with the end of the crack epidemic than anything else. He opened the city to capital in an unprecedented way, transforming Times Square into a Disney World, and giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to developers and the professional sports teams. He cut services for the homeless.He cut the public school budget by two billion dollars, and cut the school repair budget by almost 5 billion dollars. He placed 12 billion dollars into the budget for parochial school vouchers. He consistently attacked people's civil liberties, and heightened racial tension in the city. I was a school counselor for most of his tenure and got to see the impact of his policies up close. Poor families were devastated while Guiliani yucked it up with his friends in the media. 

You can talk about third parties all you want but there are real consequences to allowing these reactionaries to take power. Real people in the working class are hurt. The Green Party is still, nearly, lily white and middle class. They've failed to do the work necesary to build the party among the most opperessed sectors, and until they do they'll continue to be largely irrelevant. The Democratic Party actually has greater representation from communities of color and the working class. 

It's not enough for the Left to love the working class in the abstract. We have to fight for the actual, flesh and blood, workers. Actual conditions will dictate what exactly that means.


 
"To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter", Marx.