Meanwhile many people I would call "self-styled" revolutionaries, who fit the portrait you describe above, were promoting one or another of their endeavors in a way of zero help to either building their groups or stopping Trump. They were essentially committing what we used to call revolutionary suicide. Your piece about promoting yourself seems relevant to my pre-election piece in Cleveland's Real Deal Press, re-published on my substack piece Lessons from Dr. King's Drum Major Instinct Sermon here: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/speaking-from-the-heart and also my pre-election piece about the Struggle for Representation: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/this-2024-election-day-lets-advance.
Going forward, we need to drill back down into the Marxian, Weberian, and Durkheimian sociological traditions and of course that of DuBois and all their descendants to learn lessons for the future. I'm busy highlighting now the trenchant questions being asked in Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. Like Charles Perrow's Weberian-driven Organizing America and Stinchcombe's Information and Organizations, they show that radicals and anti-racists need to do just what Marx said we should do: draw on the latest knowledge, which Brown shows means science, social science and the humanities and even theology to guide us.
Just rolling out a revamped #Resistance from 2016 will not work. We'll just end up with President Vance. I want to be as sure as I can be that going forward, I am able to answer as best as I can the questions Brown raises. Also, in that regard, I'm reading the translation by Robert Stolz of The Japanese Ideology, a classic of Japanese historical materialism in its analysis of fascism and liberalism. I hope to cover these in the “book corner" of my substack.
Bill, thank you for your on-going analysis - it helps so many of us find a solid ground to stand on - it's not that what you say is new, rather a tool to use in organizing, to resist defeatism, to embrace possibilities.
The point is there is no purity in politics. There may be in ideology but not in politics. We are in a "cold civil war" with the MAGA forces. The question is who is against Project 2025 and the forces arrayed with it? You need not school me about the problems with the Democratic Party establishment. But one could have made similar arguments--and some did!!--during World War 2 about aligning against fascism. There are risks always, the question revolves around the immediate and gravest of the dangers.
Yet third parties DON'T teach people how to organize. They teach people how to express their outrage. Your analysis of the political system fails to recognize the contradictions within the thing called the Democratic Party. As my friend, Carl Davidson, repeated notes, the DP is actually a collection of mini-parties that, in a parliamentary system, would be on their own. We are fighting, within the DP, because of the undemocratic nature of the political system. And in that fight, we need to be building the organization and platform of left/progressive forces.
Your solution of non-participation is amazing. So, we should ignore the jobs programs created by Biden; the money devoted to addressing environmental disaster; the shift away from neo-liberalism--albeit inconsistent--and simply say 's--t happens'? We are to ignore who the Republicans put into the Supreme Court--which, I will add, is sufficient reason to vote for Harris when you consider the damage the Supreme Court has done--and simply say that there is nothing we can do? I would never have said this of you, but your suggestions seem so out of touch with the reality facing millions of people. You seem to be awaiting the apocalypse to ignite the masses. I am sure that approach can be justified in some texts. It just cannot be justified in reality, with all due respect.
Thanks for your reply. There are several areas of concern I have here. The first is that we are in a period of dramatic political instability, so I do not assume the security of traditionally Republican or Democratic voting areas. The second area of concern is that we need a massive pro-Harris vote in the face of anticipated mischievousness on the part of the Republicans. Third, we need to encourage support of down-ballot candidates who can easily be forgotten when people either sit out the race or jump to a third party. One important corrective would be to win fusion voting, a long-time goal of the Working Families Party.
While I agree with much in this article, I think there is a space in the US Electoral System for people to express a protest vote that both parties are not going to meet the needs of the people. If you live an state that is solidly Blue ( Democrats win 90%) or red ( Republicans with 90%) then your vote for the minority in your state is essentially useless. When I lived in CT republicans votes for President were mostly wasted and me voting for the Democratic presidential candidate was in effect “piling on”. I believe voting 3rd party or your conscience in this case is useful for getting the alternate parties more national funding they could use to elect statewide or congressional candidates. Whether the party you are supporting use this funding strategically or not is a different discussion. Also I think the appeal of third parties is largely due to the trend you reference in the article of the democrats strategy of playing defense consistently instead of using the power they are given to implement policies to help the populace.
In addition to what Bill says, I would add that the problem with Ben's argument is that is was in solidly blue states -- in New York and in California -- that the Democrats lost the House of Representatives to MAGA in 2022. The idea that there are 'free votes' in solidly blue states to indulge one's conscience does not pan out in practice.
They didn’t lose the presidency in New YORK OR California. I highly doubt that someone voting for a Green Party or peoples party presidential candidate will vote for the Republican congressional candidate. And most places don’t have a 3rd party candidate for the lower offices. I think that the people 3rd party candidates appeal to are informed enough to vote for the best choice to represent them.
The Green Party is trying to build a third party which is different from Cornell West's quixotic campaign which can be correctly described as self expression. The Democrats' arrogance and loyalty to their corporate and Zionist donors will be the reason they lose if they do lose. They've been smelling like a sewer for quite a few election cycles now and counting on people holding their noses and voting for them. Your analysis is compelling but doesn't overcome that stench.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Bill. I guess my question is, so what? If we agree that the chances of a third party candidate winning anything is effectively zero, does it then follow that we're going to vote for the genocidal neoliberal wing of the ruling class over the genocidal racist wing of the ruling class ad infinitum?
And it's very difficult for me to get worked up about theoretical threats to innocent people in some dystopian project 2025 future when I'm looking at pictures of beheaded babies and pagers blowing up and making people volunteer to donate their eyes right now. Asking me to campaign for these monsters is not in accordance with the basic principles of what it means to be a human being, let alone someone who believes in socialism or Marxism.
If your critique of brother Cornel is that he hasn't been building working class power on the streets (and I think that's a fair critique), my response to you is that Cornel hasn't been on the front lines of the Labor movement for the past 30 years in the way that you have. Where is the working class anti-neoliberal, anti-racist, anti-genocide party? If it doesn't yet exist, when will it?
Forgive the cliché but I'll end with a quote from Marx. In a very famous 1850 speech (which I'm reliably informed Lenin memorised) he said the following: "Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled."
Note the small "d" in democrats. Could well be a capital D today.
Bro: My concern with your reply is that it is abstract. It has nothing to say to the concrete reality that in the USA we are facing the authoritarian threat from Project 2025 and MAGA. Your argument is moral but not strategic. It actually borders on cavalier, as if to say that the very real concerns about the ability to operate politically; the threat to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of immigrants in the USA; the attack on women's right to control their bodies; the attacks on LGBTQ+ populations (and the physical threats they face!); the attack on workers rights, including the right to form unions; and the abdication of the struggle to save the planet are irrelevant or, as you say, "theoretical." Really? Seriously? And the failure of the Left to build a mass party that can respond to the Democrats, for instance, should mean that we stand aside and throw rocks? Seriously? As I raised with you earlier, in a different thread, it is difficult to find the words to respond. Many of us are trying to block the MAGA forces in order to keep open the opportunity to struggle towards victory. Perhaps that is too theoretical?
I perhaps should have used the word "hypothetical" not theoretical (it was the end of a long day for me). And they are hypothetical in that Trump coming to power doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen. Trump's previous administration was able to advance some of that agenda, but not that much of it.
And in real terms, the Democrats have also advanced a similar agenda, often outflanking the Rs from the right. The border/immigration is one example. I found this article interesting on the bi-partisan consensus around violating human rights. https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/the-border-cold-war-election-tension
And I have personally been on the front lines in the battle to end healthcare apartheid (to give another example) and seen that the D's are not allies and often undermine efforts to ensure equity, often preferring the solutions coming from the R side of the aisle over listening to their own base. I'm sick of it.
Which brings me to the real issue. For as long as I've been alive the Republicans are essentially the bourgeois party of innovation. They have ideas, they're not particularly good at implementing them. The Democrats are the ones who cement the systems that the Republicans have pioneered. You see this with Clinton being more Reagan than Reagan, with Obama being more Bush jr than Bush jr was and so on. Biden, despite all his words, has done little to nothing to roll back the most dangerous policies of the Trump administration. In fact he's added new levels of danger by toying with nuclear war in Eastern Europe and expanding Israel's genocide in Palestine.
For the left this looks like a consistent bait and switch. We are told not to support independent candidates because of the threat of the R's and then the D's do exactly what the R's would have done.
But I take your point that what I'm saying is a bit abstract, in the sense that it may not translate into a strategy or into action. Lenin and Marx had answers to this problem as well. If you're not at a point where the working class can contest elections, you don't take part in them. You build your infrastructure and your mobilisation power until the point where you can contest them.
A tipping point is coming. I can't tell you when but I can tell you that this moment is not like anything else I've experienced. I would compare it to the 1960s but I think it's beyond even that moment. By not building a base and preparing for that tipping point, by instead investing energy in right-wing parties that would much rather align themselves with neofascists than with progressive forces, we're setting ourselves up for a disaster.
Which brings us back to brother Cornel. Now as it happens I agree with you that he should drop out, but not for the reasons that you state. If Cornel was running as a Green, or as a member of the CPUSA or anything else that represented a party, an infrastructure or a class base, I would change my mind. The purpose of third party candidates (or ideally one third party candidate of a genuine working class party) at this point is not to win. It's to teach people how to organise, to build the party, to build the base. Elections are important moments for base-building. That project is far more important than keeping Trump out of office, especially at this moment.
A new flavour of fascism is coming. In some ways it's already here. Aligning with some element of the fascist forces in an attempt to keep another element at bay seems like a really bad strategy for the left.
Bill, I somehow missed this post of yours, https://liberationroad.substack.com/p/the-cornel-west-campaign-third-parties/comments?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=post_viewer.
During the actual electoral campaign, so many progressives and those on the left were actually working in the trenches, yourself included no doubt.
For a great retrospective case example, see this from Jay Schaffner: https://stansburyforum.com/author/jayschaffner.
Yours, nowm and it are on my Election Analysis page bibliography: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/2024-election-analysis
Meanwhile many people I would call "self-styled" revolutionaries, who fit the portrait you describe above, were promoting one or another of their endeavors in a way of zero help to either building their groups or stopping Trump. They were essentially committing what we used to call revolutionary suicide. Your piece about promoting yourself seems relevant to my pre-election piece in Cleveland's Real Deal Press, re-published on my substack piece Lessons from Dr. King's Drum Major Instinct Sermon here: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/speaking-from-the-heart and also my pre-election piece about the Struggle for Representation: https://michaelalandover.substack.com/p/this-2024-election-day-lets-advance.
Going forward, we need to drill back down into the Marxian, Weberian, and Durkheimian sociological traditions and of course that of DuBois and all their descendants to learn lessons for the future. I'm busy highlighting now the trenchant questions being asked in Wendy Brown's Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. Like Charles Perrow's Weberian-driven Organizing America and Stinchcombe's Information and Organizations, they show that radicals and anti-racists need to do just what Marx said we should do: draw on the latest knowledge, which Brown shows means science, social science and the humanities and even theology to guide us.
Just rolling out a revamped #Resistance from 2016 will not work. We'll just end up with President Vance. I want to be as sure as I can be that going forward, I am able to answer as best as I can the questions Brown raises. Also, in that regard, I'm reading the translation by Robert Stolz of The Japanese Ideology, a classic of Japanese historical materialism in its analysis of fascism and liberalism. I hope to cover these in the “book corner" of my substack.
Bill, thank you for your on-going analysis - it helps so many of us find a solid ground to stand on - it's not that what you say is new, rather a tool to use in organizing, to resist defeatism, to embrace possibilities.
Venceremos
Thanks so much! Keep your seatbelt on!
When one is in a war, one lives with the stench.
The point is there is no purity in politics. There may be in ideology but not in politics. We are in a "cold civil war" with the MAGA forces. The question is who is against Project 2025 and the forces arrayed with it? You need not school me about the problems with the Democratic Party establishment. But one could have made similar arguments--and some did!!--during World War 2 about aligning against fascism. There are risks always, the question revolves around the immediate and gravest of the dangers.
Yet third parties DON'T teach people how to organize. They teach people how to express their outrage. Your analysis of the political system fails to recognize the contradictions within the thing called the Democratic Party. As my friend, Carl Davidson, repeated notes, the DP is actually a collection of mini-parties that, in a parliamentary system, would be on their own. We are fighting, within the DP, because of the undemocratic nature of the political system. And in that fight, we need to be building the organization and platform of left/progressive forces.
Your solution of non-participation is amazing. So, we should ignore the jobs programs created by Biden; the money devoted to addressing environmental disaster; the shift away from neo-liberalism--albeit inconsistent--and simply say 's--t happens'? We are to ignore who the Republicans put into the Supreme Court--which, I will add, is sufficient reason to vote for Harris when you consider the damage the Supreme Court has done--and simply say that there is nothing we can do? I would never have said this of you, but your suggestions seem so out of touch with the reality facing millions of people. You seem to be awaiting the apocalypse to ignite the masses. I am sure that approach can be justified in some texts. It just cannot be justified in reality, with all due respect.
Thanks for your reply. There are several areas of concern I have here. The first is that we are in a period of dramatic political instability, so I do not assume the security of traditionally Republican or Democratic voting areas. The second area of concern is that we need a massive pro-Harris vote in the face of anticipated mischievousness on the part of the Republicans. Third, we need to encourage support of down-ballot candidates who can easily be forgotten when people either sit out the race or jump to a third party. One important corrective would be to win fusion voting, a long-time goal of the Working Families Party.
While I agree with much in this article, I think there is a space in the US Electoral System for people to express a protest vote that both parties are not going to meet the needs of the people. If you live an state that is solidly Blue ( Democrats win 90%) or red ( Republicans with 90%) then your vote for the minority in your state is essentially useless. When I lived in CT republicans votes for President were mostly wasted and me voting for the Democratic presidential candidate was in effect “piling on”. I believe voting 3rd party or your conscience in this case is useful for getting the alternate parties more national funding they could use to elect statewide or congressional candidates. Whether the party you are supporting use this funding strategically or not is a different discussion. Also I think the appeal of third parties is largely due to the trend you reference in the article of the democrats strategy of playing defense consistently instead of using the power they are given to implement policies to help the populace.
In addition to what Bill says, I would add that the problem with Ben's argument is that is was in solidly blue states -- in New York and in California -- that the Democrats lost the House of Representatives to MAGA in 2022. The idea that there are 'free votes' in solidly blue states to indulge one's conscience does not pan out in practice.
They didn’t lose the presidency in New YORK OR California. I highly doubt that someone voting for a Green Party or peoples party presidential candidate will vote for the Republican congressional candidate. And most places don’t have a 3rd party candidate for the lower offices. I think that the people 3rd party candidates appeal to are informed enough to vote for the best choice to represent them.
Agree with Leo on this. For one thing, as Jay Schaffner just pointed out and NPR confirmed, in the final analysis it looks as if Trump did n-o-t win the popular vote. That is quite significant. https://stansburyforum.com/2024/12/03/this-was-a-very-close-election-trump-won-but-got-less-than-50-of-the-popular-vote-now-lets-act-like-that-and-build-on-it-monroe-county-pennsylvania-a-case-study
He was a no show in CA, I was shocked… I voted instead for Jill Stein
Vital piece that needs widespread distribution.
The Green Party is trying to build a third party which is different from Cornell West's quixotic campaign which can be correctly described as self expression. The Democrats' arrogance and loyalty to their corporate and Zionist donors will be the reason they lose if they do lose. They've been smelling like a sewer for quite a few election cycles now and counting on people holding their noses and voting for them. Your analysis is compelling but doesn't overcome that stench.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Bill. I guess my question is, so what? If we agree that the chances of a third party candidate winning anything is effectively zero, does it then follow that we're going to vote for the genocidal neoliberal wing of the ruling class over the genocidal racist wing of the ruling class ad infinitum?
And it's very difficult for me to get worked up about theoretical threats to innocent people in some dystopian project 2025 future when I'm looking at pictures of beheaded babies and pagers blowing up and making people volunteer to donate their eyes right now. Asking me to campaign for these monsters is not in accordance with the basic principles of what it means to be a human being, let alone someone who believes in socialism or Marxism.
If your critique of brother Cornel is that he hasn't been building working class power on the streets (and I think that's a fair critique), my response to you is that Cornel hasn't been on the front lines of the Labor movement for the past 30 years in the way that you have. Where is the working class anti-neoliberal, anti-racist, anti-genocide party? If it doesn't yet exist, when will it?
Forgive the cliché but I'll end with a quote from Marx. In a very famous 1850 speech (which I'm reliably informed Lenin memorised) he said the following: "Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled."
Note the small "d" in democrats. Could well be a capital D today.
Bro: My concern with your reply is that it is abstract. It has nothing to say to the concrete reality that in the USA we are facing the authoritarian threat from Project 2025 and MAGA. Your argument is moral but not strategic. It actually borders on cavalier, as if to say that the very real concerns about the ability to operate politically; the threat to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of immigrants in the USA; the attack on women's right to control their bodies; the attacks on LGBTQ+ populations (and the physical threats they face!); the attack on workers rights, including the right to form unions; and the abdication of the struggle to save the planet are irrelevant or, as you say, "theoretical." Really? Seriously? And the failure of the Left to build a mass party that can respond to the Democrats, for instance, should mean that we stand aside and throw rocks? Seriously? As I raised with you earlier, in a different thread, it is difficult to find the words to respond. Many of us are trying to block the MAGA forces in order to keep open the opportunity to struggle towards victory. Perhaps that is too theoretical?
I perhaps should have used the word "hypothetical" not theoretical (it was the end of a long day for me). And they are hypothetical in that Trump coming to power doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen. Trump's previous administration was able to advance some of that agenda, but not that much of it.
And in real terms, the Democrats have also advanced a similar agenda, often outflanking the Rs from the right. The border/immigration is one example. I found this article interesting on the bi-partisan consensus around violating human rights. https://www.theborderchronicle.com/p/the-border-cold-war-election-tension
We could do this on the Black Lives Matter treachery as well. This is what happened to our calls to defund the police (when Trump was in power): https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/9/22/23367572/democrats-policing-bills-midterms
And I have personally been on the front lines in the battle to end healthcare apartheid (to give another example) and seen that the D's are not allies and often undermine efforts to ensure equity, often preferring the solutions coming from the R side of the aisle over listening to their own base. I'm sick of it.
Which brings me to the real issue. For as long as I've been alive the Republicans are essentially the bourgeois party of innovation. They have ideas, they're not particularly good at implementing them. The Democrats are the ones who cement the systems that the Republicans have pioneered. You see this with Clinton being more Reagan than Reagan, with Obama being more Bush jr than Bush jr was and so on. Biden, despite all his words, has done little to nothing to roll back the most dangerous policies of the Trump administration. In fact he's added new levels of danger by toying with nuclear war in Eastern Europe and expanding Israel's genocide in Palestine.
For the left this looks like a consistent bait and switch. We are told not to support independent candidates because of the threat of the R's and then the D's do exactly what the R's would have done.
But I take your point that what I'm saying is a bit abstract, in the sense that it may not translate into a strategy or into action. Lenin and Marx had answers to this problem as well. If you're not at a point where the working class can contest elections, you don't take part in them. You build your infrastructure and your mobilisation power until the point where you can contest them.
A tipping point is coming. I can't tell you when but I can tell you that this moment is not like anything else I've experienced. I would compare it to the 1960s but I think it's beyond even that moment. By not building a base and preparing for that tipping point, by instead investing energy in right-wing parties that would much rather align themselves with neofascists than with progressive forces, we're setting ourselves up for a disaster.
Which brings us back to brother Cornel. Now as it happens I agree with you that he should drop out, but not for the reasons that you state. If Cornel was running as a Green, or as a member of the CPUSA or anything else that represented a party, an infrastructure or a class base, I would change my mind. The purpose of third party candidates (or ideally one third party candidate of a genuine working class party) at this point is not to win. It's to teach people how to organise, to build the party, to build the base. Elections are important moments for base-building. That project is far more important than keeping Trump out of office, especially at this moment.
A new flavour of fascism is coming. In some ways it's already here. Aligning with some element of the fascist forces in an attempt to keep another element at bay seems like a really bad strategy for the left.