Gore doesn’t want to change the System–up until a few months ago he wasn’t even willing to criticize its current avatars. Gore wants to replace Bush, but he is far from labor (with a little “l,” as Labor with a big “L” is drawing its last breath in this nation) and he is FAAAAR from Green.

Gore is a believer in the Democratic Party. I never really understood the power, the sweet, seductive, hypnotic power that participating in one of the Establishment parties could exert. Now I know–and now I will forever understand the effect. Gore is one of them. McCain is one of them. Feingold is, Boxer is, Leiberman is, ad nauseum… They all believe that the Eighties can be brought back, that environmental and social degradation don’t necessarily have to be permanently linked with capitalism. They all believe in the miracle of the Market in all things (with a little tweaking here and there).

The people at the bottom of the party with me are good people, but most can’t see what’s really happening. Lord knows, I’ve tried to help them, as have many others. And the few who begin to catch a glimmer of the real depths, the true antipathy the system carries for them usually withdraw in despair. As I will soon.

Gore is no saviour. There are no political saviours, with the exception of–and I say this with knowledge that I am quite…trite–us. The people. The scum. The workers. The thing they fear more than anything else in the whole world.

Randy

Is Gore committed to stop the war in the process of taking us all to the promised land?

A march for our brothers and sisters that have lost everything and seem to have not even have a prayer for replacement!!!!!

Come on people lets get with the program and bring our troops home now.

Oh yes, Elaina - go get’em girl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m not a veteran of the field when it comes to radical politics. I’ve been involved for what, 3 years or something like that. The last 2 years that I was in college. I kinda developed my own radical politics, then went out looking for groups to become involved with. So when I was 24, I started doing organizing, etc.

Now. Even at the age of 24, as a non-traditional student, working very hard to make ends meet and NOT AT ALL ABLE TO COUNT ON MY FAMILY FOR MONEY (caps is ’cause that’s important to remember) I can say that for all the lip service that was given my lived experience, and all the lip service that is given to making sure that women have leadership positions in orgs, feminist process at meetings, what have you; I can honestly say that I still felt alienated and I still felt like I didn’t belong. My working full-time is something that conflicts TO THIS DAY with my wish to be involved in political and community organizing. I have never had a “day” job, that is, one with hours to facilitate going to meetings and that sort of thing. In college, I worked a lot of 36-40 hour weekends that kept me from “socializing” with folks.

I’ve not felt as alienated from workmates or from people in the same type of situation.

SO what I’m getting at with all this is maybe the left needs a few hard nips at it’s toes to get it stepping in the right direction, which is forward.

It’s fascinating, open-ended and is changing the game. I’m not wed to forcing reality into a conceptual framework — but I also think that we should be careful about “wish fulfillment,” even and especially in those places that are most exciting.

The idea that we (or I) sit in judgement over movements and say what is worthy is not the same as dogged criticism. Will Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution provide a model? Is standing up to US imperialism’s poltical maneuvering the same as breaking the internatinal capitialist system?

A friend of mine put it like this: Chavez doesn’t look nearly as radical from Madrid as he does from DC… and there is more than a little truth to that.

The same way here.

Do you think we can wait until we need a party to DEPLOY in order to start building it? Aren’t revolutionary parties built through struggle in non-revolutionary times? Isn’t an essential part of that process questions of line and orientation?

While Lenin was in a social-democratic party, he founded the communist movement as such and BROKE with them. He encouraged splits internationally, advocated periodic “house-keeping” of political parties based on the sharpest line distinctions — and demonstrated how opportunism in times of weakness trained for abdications in times of strength.

All I’m really saying, Stan, is not to snipe so hard at your left. There is room for principled disagreement, and those who can’t wait (or don’t think we should) aren’t simply fools talking to themselves.

Regarding the question of gender and class: One thing I think the Maoist movement has demonstrated throughout the world is the primacy of women’s liberation. It is how the social question is put at the fore. Demanding that largely peasant armies accept political AND military leadership from women is earth-shaking.

I don’t know if it involves the conceptual break you are currently advocating, and I eagerly await your book so I can see exactly what you’re getting at.

Speaking personally, I can’t even imagine a socialist movement that doesn’t foster and create the immediate liberation of women. From my experience with Leninist organizations, and forgive me if yours is different, I’ve seem that they are largely led by women at every level and view women’s emancipation as intrinsic to socialism, not an “issue” to be “dealt with.”

Lenin was not a Leninist:

http://www.marxmail.org/DemocraticCentralism.pdf

Lenin belonged to a social-democratic party.

Lenin led a revolution in an only-partially proletarianized, mostly peasant, backward Eurasian nation at the turn of the 20th Century, before the advent of modern anticommunism, and on the heels of a ruinous European war.

Lenin is dead, and the capacity for revolutionary thought did not die with him.

Lenin was not omniscient.

Lenin would probably agree with me right now.

Is what’s going on in Venezuela right now “Leninist”?

All the comments about outer space and delivering to Democrats are straw men.

And not to introduce too much of a distraction around “secondary contradictons,” as soon as the Leninist left shows me that they have the least clue about gender as a class system, I will start to take them more seriously.

We aren’t presented with the War of the Roses, and we are not being presented with the Bolshevik Revolution.

Give me some form of broad socialist alliance in this country right now, and I’ll die happy.

The possibility, under current conditions in the US, for a genuinely mass revolutionary party are about the equivalent of me walking out in my front yard and being killed by a meteorite.

Lenin was very big on recognizing these kinds of realities. Because the question before us, at all times, is:

What is to be done?

That’s my Leninism.

Right now, we are planning a march on the Gulf Coast. The goal, along with other campaigns, is to stop the war.