But earlier your reservation had been that nobody but the SO was
sup****ting this campaign. This contradiction mirrors a contradiction
in this steering strategy. To the extent the movement is successful,
it will gather diverse sup****ters, and any steering in a proletarian
direction will become less and less possible. You can steer non-
proletarian movements in a non-proletarian direction. This is what the
SWP/YSA did with the Mobilization Committees against the Vietnam War.
But I doubt you can steer a non-proletarian movement in a proletarian
direction, unless the steered "movement" itself is only a sect.
Have there been precedents for effective use of this steering
strategy? Then, were the Stalinists at fault in sup****ting the Wallace
Progressive Party only because these Stalinists were steering in the
wrong direction, not because the sup****t itself was fundamentally
misguided? What about the Farmer-Labor Party, which I know less about.
srd
On Aug 28, 10:58=A0pm, ross <nob...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> nada <dwalters...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
innews:97775f49-bc1b-423f-932c-44a3a15=
0a322@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
> > On Aug 28, 9:57=A0am, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> nada wrote:
> >> > On Aug 27, 10:33 pm, stephen <srdiam...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >> > > I had understood you to favor exactly this policy, a socialist
> >> > > party running a non-socialist campaign, when you criticized the
> >> > > SWP's electoral campaigns.
> >> > No, I favor a broad based workers party that actually represents
> >> > workers and not just some small cadre group.
>
> >> Of course, but the question was how to get such a party, a question
> >> that today for socialists means what kind of campaigns a small cadre
> >> can run--or in general what a small cadre group should do--to move
> >> the working class toward forming a broad party. Doesn't your answer
> >> include running programmatically-non-socialist agitational electoral
> >> campaigns? And isn't the SO doing the same as the PFP, in the sense
> >> of a socialist cadre running a non-socialist electoral campaign?
>
> >> srd
>
> > All interesting questions actually. My answer certainly does include
> > this (probably overstating my previous case, I have participated in
> > some genuinely working class political campaigns like Mark Zola's SWP
> > run for Gov. of Pa in 1978) and in fact favors this so long that clear
> > working class perspective can develop out of such campaign, one that
> > openly sees the campaign AS a working class campaign and points for
> > the WHOLE class to be involved.
>
> > David
>
> Which probably works as an answer to my original questions. The problem
> then becomes whether the SO are actually influential enough in the
> campaign to steer it in the proletarian direction.
>
> All of this is not exactly in my line of experience, you see, as I'm
> used to doing electoral politics within the New Democratic Party, which
> is still a genuinely labor-based social-democratic party. We don't have
> to build one.
>
> --
> Ross in Toronto
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