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Friday, January 09, 2004

More Dean news

Following yesterday’s news that various far-left fringe groups had united behind Howard Dean as the Democratic candidate most likely to advance the cause of revolutionary socialism, readers have written in to this site to ask why the Socialist Workers Party has withheld its endorsement of Dean.  One reader suggests that the SWP must be holding out for a Nader/neo-Trotskyite ticket, trying to play “spoiler” in the last weeks of the campaign by throwing its support further left in key states like Michigan, Florida, and Missouri where the question of “council communism” is likely to determine the eventual outcome.  I happen to have it on good authority, however (and this is an exclusive-- I’ve been talking to Washington insiders that Josh Marshall doesn’t know about), that the SWP intends to endorse Wesley Clark in a surprise “all is forgiven in Kosovo” announcement sometime later this month.  Sounds to me like the SWPers are looking to become power players in the primaries this time. . . .

And over on the premier listserv of Dissent-style worshippers of American power, DemocraticLeft, DLer Mike Hirsch writes in to say,

What did you expect?  If Dr. Dean sees a contradiction between workers councils and a revolutionary vanguard, I say he doesn’t deserve to be president.  Those idiot sects can stump for Herr Doktor, but I’m sticking with Kucinich.  The son of workers from west Cleveland, he knows you need both a cadre party and factory organs of workers power. It is dialectical, dontcha know?  Lenin said that when you are sick, never go to doctor comrades, and this is-- I believe-- exactly what he was talking about.  If we can’t get single-payer health care out of Dean, what hope is there he will recognize a revolutionary situation when it is staring him down or deliver a democracy based on soviets?

Well, yes, this is exactly what Lenin was talking about (though in liberal circles there are still some who insist that he was warning us about Bill Frist), but it dodges the critical issue by awarding the palm to Lenin when Leninism is precisely what’s at stake in this primary season.  As if there were no contradictions between the vanguardism of Lenin and Karl Kautsky and the workers’s councils advocated by Anton Pannekoek!  Leaving aside the whole Kucinich question, it’s this kind of faux-"dialectical" thinking that cost Dukakis dearly in 1988 when he said, “this election is not about ideology, it’s about building a party in which all power rests in the soviets.” Remember that by the time Dukakis finally stopped running away from the “c-word,” he was down 17 points to Bush.  Yes, he closed the gap by half, but he’d opened it in the first place because of his attachment to vanguardism.  Let’s not go down that road again, comrades. 

Posted by Michael on 01/09 at 10:13 AM
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