QUESTION FROM A GREEN
A respondent to my last post (as I circulated it on the ecosocialism Yahoo! group wrote:
"Could you expand on this and explain why you think the Greens are to be lumped with the Republicrats??Thanks!"
SDF: The current MECHANISM for winning a Presidential election (raising huge quantities of money in order to hire a corporation to manage one's national election effort, avoiding the media blockade by promoting a corporate-friendly agenda, bombarding the public with advertising in said corporate-owned media, getting into corporate-sponsored debates, pleasing constituencies with corporate ideologies etc.) requires corporate obedience at every step of the way. If the Greens (or anyone else) are to offer anything different, the mechanism for winning elections must be dismantled.
Thus any candidate under the current system, Democrat, Republican, Green or otherwise, incurs an automatic suspicion of being another interchangeable shill for the System, another suit. Ralph Nader, for all his mediocre political ideas, recognized at least this much: to "win" as an anticorporate candidate, one must attempt to rush into the corporate-controlled buildings past the corporate bouncers while at the same time organizing an alternative election system (superrallies etc.). Nader was the best we could get at pulling this trick without selling out, and he didn't succeed by any standard one cares to name. Any future Green that actually manages to shake hands and chat with the corporate bouncers will furthermore be suspected, correctly, of being One Of Them.
The idea that a small, white middle-class, almost sectarian, party such as the Green Party is going to dismantle the mechanism for winning elections in a mere year and a half is wishful thinking. The point is that any alternative to the policies of the present, whether it be Democrat, Republican, independent, or Green, will have to begin with a boycott of mainstream news. Really, anyone who despises corporate plutocracy, the "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot mentioned in '92, or endless warfare on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan, should be promoting such a boycott regardless of their party affiliation. The revolution will be made possible with political organization, but it will begin with the turning-off of television sets.
A respondent to my last post (as I circulated it on the ecosocialism Yahoo! group wrote:
"Could you expand on this and explain why you think the Greens are to be lumped with the Republicrats??Thanks!"
SDF: The current MECHANISM for winning a Presidential election (raising huge quantities of money in order to hire a corporation to manage one's national election effort, avoiding the media blockade by promoting a corporate-friendly agenda, bombarding the public with advertising in said corporate-owned media, getting into corporate-sponsored debates, pleasing constituencies with corporate ideologies etc.) requires corporate obedience at every step of the way. If the Greens (or anyone else) are to offer anything different, the mechanism for winning elections must be dismantled.
Thus any candidate under the current system, Democrat, Republican, Green or otherwise, incurs an automatic suspicion of being another interchangeable shill for the System, another suit. Ralph Nader, for all his mediocre political ideas, recognized at least this much: to "win" as an anticorporate candidate, one must attempt to rush into the corporate-controlled buildings past the corporate bouncers while at the same time organizing an alternative election system (superrallies etc.). Nader was the best we could get at pulling this trick without selling out, and he didn't succeed by any standard one cares to name. Any future Green that actually manages to shake hands and chat with the corporate bouncers will furthermore be suspected, correctly, of being One Of Them.
The idea that a small, white middle-class, almost sectarian, party such as the Green Party is going to dismantle the mechanism for winning elections in a mere year and a half is wishful thinking. The point is that any alternative to the policies of the present, whether it be Democrat, Republican, independent, or Green, will have to begin with a boycott of mainstream news. Really, anyone who despises corporate plutocracy, the "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot mentioned in '92, or endless warfare on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan, should be promoting such a boycott regardless of their party affiliation. The revolution will be made possible with political organization, but it will begin with the turning-off of television sets.
posted by Samuel at 6:43 AM
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