redstar2000
31st October 2003, 12:45
This is an article that will tell you something (perhaps more than you want to know) about San Francisco, the Green Party, various left sects, bourgeois electoral politics, ANSWER, and the Democratic Party.
:redstar2000:
===========================
Why are the CP, CofC, ISO, and WWP not supporting a left victory in the SF mayoral election?
And what the heck does that alphabet soup mean, anyway?
by Gina Alvarez
The location of the story is San Francisco. The unfolding story line provides the possibility that Green and broad left Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez might win what would be a stunning victory for the left nationally: capture the Mayoralty of one of the large urban and political centers of the country.
Now, about the characters. Let’s explain the acronyms for those unfamiliar with these organizations. CP=Communist Party, a shadow of its former Stalinist self; CofC = Committees of Correspondence, a social democratic split from the CP, still practicing good Stalinist lesser-evilism politics; ISO = International Socialist Organization, a mostly student-based left wing group; WWP = Workers World Party, mostly known for its work in ANSWER as organizers of antiwar activities.
The plot: in spite of the claims of all these organizations to represent the "left," they are either abstaining from which could constitute one of the fundamental struggles of the US left in the last period (ISO) or overtly and actively opposing the left represented by the candidacy of Matt Gonzalez (CP, CofC) or claiming "neutrality" in the race (WWP) while helping the Democrats under the table.
What and who supports Matt Gonzalez for Mayor?
Matt Gonzalez is a member of the Green Party and presently the President of the Board of Supervisors. He is running as a Green and a broad left candidate with a progressive platform of radical democracy, economic development including fair taxation of big corporations and social justice.
He is for the creation of a municipal bank and developing alternative sources of energy such as tidal energy. His plans for eventual free mass transit and alternative modes of transportation and his advocacy of working class home ownership through land trusts are both egalitarian and environmentally sound.
He defends rent control and is in favor of strengthening it.
He is opposed to the war and occupation of Iraq. He speaks forcefully against the Patriot Act and in defense of Civil Rights. He is becoming the champion of the right to vote for non-citizens at the local level and of raising the minimum wage, along with other social justice issues.
There is no other well known politician in town that so promotes popular culture and artists. He states he is for building a new progressive left movement. In the recent past he has endorsed and supported candidates of the left and of the Green Party.
But most importantly, Gonzalez is a broad leftist that is demonstrating the possibility of breaking with the Democratic Party - the jailhouse of social and political movements and the unions - as he runs a successful and popular campaign.
It is this last element which is fundamental for the left in this country to develop, because unless the working class, oppressed communities and youth find a way out of the Democratic Party and create an independent political movement, the left will remain marginal and small.
Without overcoming the bipartisan political regime, all talk of political independence of the working class and the oppressed is just that: talk.
This movement toward independent and left politics is of the greatest importance and should be appreciated and supported as such by the left. In fact, the most successful socialist group which runs candidates for public office in the City, the Left Party, is endorsing Matt Gonzalez campaign.
So is his own party, the Greens and a number of left wing individual activists and the left leaning SF Tenants Union, immigrant rights groups, environmentalists and union activists.
Together with others, these forces behind Matt Gonzalez candidacy will get most of the radical left and Green vote in town (about 10%) plus layers of the environmental, left liberal and independent voters, which could place him - with above 20% of the vote - in the runoff against the favorite candidate of the local Democratic Party political machine: neo-liberal and anti-poor campaigner Gavin Newsom.
He counts on substantial support among African Americans, including the most popular newspaper in Bayview-Hunters Point, and Latinos.
Once in the runoff, Matt Gonzalez could potentially attract new groups of labor activists, working families and African American, Latino and Asian voters and he would be able to attract the support of moderate voters who appreciate his vision of clean government and honesty.
Matt is no socialist or radical left winger. His views on economic development are limited to certain areas of public ownership - like public power - and fair taxation and he does not espouse the virtues of a planned economy.
He does not, as far as we know, raise issues such as tax devolution for working class neighborhoods or the establishment of elected district councils with real power over issues of planning, services and taxes.
Many of his close collaborators are moderate progressives or even liberal Democrats, mostly to his right. These present an objective pressure for Matt - who apparently is to their left - to be restrained and too careful. Some of the literature produced for his run contains hints of this conservatism and tension between different points of view.
While he encourages people to get organized into existing left organizations and allows for an open debate of ideas, his own inner circle is a little narrow and closed to input and participation of the broader forces behind his candidacy. He is not presenting the idea of using the success of this campaign to structure a new progressive, left and united and independent political movement.
Often the energy required for building such a movement, which is the only guarantee of strategic success beyond a particular campaign, gets sucked up by the urgency of winning the extra percentage points to put the candidate in the top tier.
My impression, however, is that Matt and his closest advisers are not deaf and committed to a traditional campaign framework and that what they don’t raise and the shortcomings that are visible are more due to lack of strategy and experience in movement building, than a desire to shut out people who are joining the movement every day.
From the point of view of radical leftists it is possible that certain other criticisms could be raised. But the central question in this debate is: does the Gonzalez campaign represent the mobilization of new social forces behind a politically independent progressive left movement?
Is this a first approximation to the formation of such politically independent movement?
The answer to these questions is an unqualified yes.
Unfortunately, some left groups are blind to this. They even ignore the tremendous impetus for the left that a victory of Matt could mean for their own possibilities of building a new left mass movement .
The stabbing in the back of leftists by leftists on behalf of the Democratic Party
From the beginning, former and present members of the CP and Committees of Correspondence have not hidden their hostility to a run of leftist Matt Gonzalez.
They rushed to endorse Gonzalez’ opponent, liberal now moving to the center Democrat Tom Ammiano - and a few of them center-right millionaire Angela Alioto. But they did not stop there.
Prominent CofC National Committee Members Eric Quezada and Barbara Blong, together with CP and CofC members, engineered an attempt to destroy or at least split the local Green Party.
More than a year ago, several members of this faction joined the Green Party together with several activists of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party including Jerry Threet, Larissa Casillas and others. We called them demogreens.
They are part of a broader Democratic Party’s faction with representation at the County Central Committee headed by Robert Haaland.
While Quezada, Haaland and others did Ammiano’s bidding from outside the GP and inside the Democratic Party, Blong, Threet, Casillas and others conspired inside to either obtain the nod for Ammiano, a Democrat, running against the most prominent Green in the country or at least to throw a monkey wrench and stop the GP from campaigning for its candidate.
Ultimately they failed when over 70% of the active Greens refused to give way to the wave of blackmail and backstabbing and proudly endorsed their own candidate. (See the articles: SF Greens Mayoral forum: Democrats, Demo-Greens, Greens ... and Matt Gonzalez got the overwhelming nod from Green Party, Demogreens routed... for more background on this struggle inside the Green party) and when the Democratic Central Committee failed to endorse anyone for Mayor.
These same members of the CofC and former leftists embarked on a campaign of slander and public attacks against Gonzalez, almost immediately after he filed to run for Mayor on August 8. They accused the candidate of being homophobic because he did not bow and ask for Ammiano’s permission to run.
They are frequently quoted in the media attacking Gonzalez and they are busy in the City’s chatboards trashing the independent left. Prominent in the latter role is another of Ammiano’s core supporters, Esperanza Macias.
Most of these characters are today's Ammiano's hardcore advisers and campaign managers.
Workers World Party’s underhanded endorsement of Democrats works against the left
The Workers World Party has a long history of sectarianism and of refusing to deal with other leftists on an equal basis. At one point they asked Frontlines for endorsement of a candidate for local office in 1996 but they refused to endorse other independent left candidates also running for local office.
Through the control they exercise over ANSWER, one of the coalitions organizing antiwar rallies, they usually ban left wing competitors from speaking at rallies or bully other left organizations for money and resources.
Of course, they only participate in elections when they can present a candidate for office from their own ranks. Unity in action or advancing the broader interests of the working class and the oppressed are no considerations for sectarians.
When they are not running and supporting their own candidates, they tend to support Democrats. And this election is no different.
They can’t, however, say this as openly as they are going through an "independent" phase. So they operate in an underhanded way. At the last ANSWER-sponsored event on October 28 they invited, among others, two speakers: Democratic stalwart actor Danny Glover and liberal Democratic candidate for Mayor Tom Ammiano.
They managed the list of speakers so that Danny Glover, who supports Ammiano for Mayor, spoke immediately before the candidate. Glover used his speech to eulogize Ammiano and introduced him as "the next Mayor of San Francisco."
This was designed to give the perception that the antiwar movement was supporting Ammiano for Mayor, which is of course, ridiculous. Ammiano came late to support the antiwar movement, did absolutely nothing to build it and holds an apolitical pacifist position reminiscent of the 60’s hippies - "Make love not war" which has little echo among present-day antiwar activists.
By supporting Democrats, at least at the local level, both the CofC and the WWP share a common interest: they need those liberals to sign their petitions or as endorsers of their activities to give them legitimacy they lack. They won’t therefore, "alienate" the Democrats by explaining the character of their politics.
Sectarian abstentionism in favor of the local political machine
The WWP also shares with other groups a kind of contemporary disdain for local politics as they have found them an obstacle for their more propagandistic and abstract policies and a source of conflict with people who otherwise agree with them on international or certain national issues.
Other organizations such as Socialist Action and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) understand that the deeper they go into local politics, working class communities and oppressed layers of society, the more difficult it is for them to do politics on abstractions. They come under heavy pressure to actually address daily problems around housing, jobs, gentrification, transportation, wages, social services... that require hard work to develop a socialist platform that will be accessible - not just simplistic sloganeering - for real workers and youth.
They seem not to understand that any mass movement led by the left will have to link immediate needs and programs with the historical objectives of socialism: a society without classes and a planned economy.
They don’t understand, or they feel incompetent to develop, transitional demands to move people by a series of approximations from their present day consciousness immersed in daily struggles toward making the connections with more complex goals. They ignore that this is one of the things you can do through electoral campaigns.
They have nothing but shallow explanations as to why they don’t participate in elections altogether (ISO) or why they support liberal Democrats (the lesser evil.)
Sometimes they pepper their abstentionism, which works for the benefit of the status quo, with sectarian rhetoric. For instance, Socialist Action accuses Nader and the Green Party of being just one more candidate and party of the US ruling class
ISO, always late, always little, sometimes nothing, always selfish
The ISO is a special infantile case of abstentionism and sectarianism. We call it the zigzagging type. When Nader ran for President, they first denounced him and the Green Party as bourgeois.
Later, when their own base in the student movement was swept by mass support for Nader, they turned around 180 degrees and uncritically supported him. At the same time, they staged, as they usually try to do in any movement, an organizational raid of some Green Party locals.
When the latter failed, they moved on to greener pastures (pun intended.) No analysis, no balance-sheet, no consistency.
In the last California Recall election they repeated the pattern: late, little, selfish around the Camejo campaign.
When we asked their members in San Francisco what their position was on the Mayoral election the response we received was: "We didn’t discuss it. It is not an issue of critical importance for us." Another response was "we are not aware of the positions in the polls of Gonzalez and we know little about him."
This is, to say the least, false. The local leadership of the ISO invited Gonzalez last year to their regional educational conference in Berkeley as a keynote speaker and discussed with him electoral strategies and tactics.
Don’t get me wrong: the combined active membership of the CofC, WWP, ISO and SA consists of about 150-200 people. They do not have any support in the working class, either structurally or electorally, beyond their numbers and outside the left milieu.
By themselves, they can’t guarantee more than a puny number of votes.
But as part of a vastly broader movement, the work of 150-200 committed socialists in a broad left electoral local campaign would have been invaluable to help win a victory for the entire left and would have helped to better the image of socialist groups among the thousands of people, potential activists, who are being mobilized in this campaign.
But if you look at the newspapers of these organizations, this most monumental event of the US left, this campaign which carries the potential of winning the Mayoralty in one of the most important urban and political centers of the US, is not even being mentioned and might as well not be happening.
Frontlines the on-line newspaper of the Left Party (San Francisco), October 31, 2003.
http://www.sf-frontlines.com/modules.php?o...order=0&thold=0 (http://www.sf-frontlines.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=489&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)
:redstar2000:
===========================
Why are the CP, CofC, ISO, and WWP not supporting a left victory in the SF mayoral election?
And what the heck does that alphabet soup mean, anyway?
by Gina Alvarez
The location of the story is San Francisco. The unfolding story line provides the possibility that Green and broad left Mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez might win what would be a stunning victory for the left nationally: capture the Mayoralty of one of the large urban and political centers of the country.
Now, about the characters. Let’s explain the acronyms for those unfamiliar with these organizations. CP=Communist Party, a shadow of its former Stalinist self; CofC = Committees of Correspondence, a social democratic split from the CP, still practicing good Stalinist lesser-evilism politics; ISO = International Socialist Organization, a mostly student-based left wing group; WWP = Workers World Party, mostly known for its work in ANSWER as organizers of antiwar activities.
The plot: in spite of the claims of all these organizations to represent the "left," they are either abstaining from which could constitute one of the fundamental struggles of the US left in the last period (ISO) or overtly and actively opposing the left represented by the candidacy of Matt Gonzalez (CP, CofC) or claiming "neutrality" in the race (WWP) while helping the Democrats under the table.
What and who supports Matt Gonzalez for Mayor?
Matt Gonzalez is a member of the Green Party and presently the President of the Board of Supervisors. He is running as a Green and a broad left candidate with a progressive platform of radical democracy, economic development including fair taxation of big corporations and social justice.
He is for the creation of a municipal bank and developing alternative sources of energy such as tidal energy. His plans for eventual free mass transit and alternative modes of transportation and his advocacy of working class home ownership through land trusts are both egalitarian and environmentally sound.
He defends rent control and is in favor of strengthening it.
He is opposed to the war and occupation of Iraq. He speaks forcefully against the Patriot Act and in defense of Civil Rights. He is becoming the champion of the right to vote for non-citizens at the local level and of raising the minimum wage, along with other social justice issues.
There is no other well known politician in town that so promotes popular culture and artists. He states he is for building a new progressive left movement. In the recent past he has endorsed and supported candidates of the left and of the Green Party.
But most importantly, Gonzalez is a broad leftist that is demonstrating the possibility of breaking with the Democratic Party - the jailhouse of social and political movements and the unions - as he runs a successful and popular campaign.
It is this last element which is fundamental for the left in this country to develop, because unless the working class, oppressed communities and youth find a way out of the Democratic Party and create an independent political movement, the left will remain marginal and small.
Without overcoming the bipartisan political regime, all talk of political independence of the working class and the oppressed is just that: talk.
This movement toward independent and left politics is of the greatest importance and should be appreciated and supported as such by the left. In fact, the most successful socialist group which runs candidates for public office in the City, the Left Party, is endorsing Matt Gonzalez campaign.
So is his own party, the Greens and a number of left wing individual activists and the left leaning SF Tenants Union, immigrant rights groups, environmentalists and union activists.
Together with others, these forces behind Matt Gonzalez candidacy will get most of the radical left and Green vote in town (about 10%) plus layers of the environmental, left liberal and independent voters, which could place him - with above 20% of the vote - in the runoff against the favorite candidate of the local Democratic Party political machine: neo-liberal and anti-poor campaigner Gavin Newsom.
He counts on substantial support among African Americans, including the most popular newspaper in Bayview-Hunters Point, and Latinos.
Once in the runoff, Matt Gonzalez could potentially attract new groups of labor activists, working families and African American, Latino and Asian voters and he would be able to attract the support of moderate voters who appreciate his vision of clean government and honesty.
Matt is no socialist or radical left winger. His views on economic development are limited to certain areas of public ownership - like public power - and fair taxation and he does not espouse the virtues of a planned economy.
He does not, as far as we know, raise issues such as tax devolution for working class neighborhoods or the establishment of elected district councils with real power over issues of planning, services and taxes.
Many of his close collaborators are moderate progressives or even liberal Democrats, mostly to his right. These present an objective pressure for Matt - who apparently is to their left - to be restrained and too careful. Some of the literature produced for his run contains hints of this conservatism and tension between different points of view.
While he encourages people to get organized into existing left organizations and allows for an open debate of ideas, his own inner circle is a little narrow and closed to input and participation of the broader forces behind his candidacy. He is not presenting the idea of using the success of this campaign to structure a new progressive, left and united and independent political movement.
Often the energy required for building such a movement, which is the only guarantee of strategic success beyond a particular campaign, gets sucked up by the urgency of winning the extra percentage points to put the candidate in the top tier.
My impression, however, is that Matt and his closest advisers are not deaf and committed to a traditional campaign framework and that what they don’t raise and the shortcomings that are visible are more due to lack of strategy and experience in movement building, than a desire to shut out people who are joining the movement every day.
From the point of view of radical leftists it is possible that certain other criticisms could be raised. But the central question in this debate is: does the Gonzalez campaign represent the mobilization of new social forces behind a politically independent progressive left movement?
Is this a first approximation to the formation of such politically independent movement?
The answer to these questions is an unqualified yes.
Unfortunately, some left groups are blind to this. They even ignore the tremendous impetus for the left that a victory of Matt could mean for their own possibilities of building a new left mass movement .
The stabbing in the back of leftists by leftists on behalf of the Democratic Party
From the beginning, former and present members of the CP and Committees of Correspondence have not hidden their hostility to a run of leftist Matt Gonzalez.
They rushed to endorse Gonzalez’ opponent, liberal now moving to the center Democrat Tom Ammiano - and a few of them center-right millionaire Angela Alioto. But they did not stop there.
Prominent CofC National Committee Members Eric Quezada and Barbara Blong, together with CP and CofC members, engineered an attempt to destroy or at least split the local Green Party.
More than a year ago, several members of this faction joined the Green Party together with several activists of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party including Jerry Threet, Larissa Casillas and others. We called them demogreens.
They are part of a broader Democratic Party’s faction with representation at the County Central Committee headed by Robert Haaland.
While Quezada, Haaland and others did Ammiano’s bidding from outside the GP and inside the Democratic Party, Blong, Threet, Casillas and others conspired inside to either obtain the nod for Ammiano, a Democrat, running against the most prominent Green in the country or at least to throw a monkey wrench and stop the GP from campaigning for its candidate.
Ultimately they failed when over 70% of the active Greens refused to give way to the wave of blackmail and backstabbing and proudly endorsed their own candidate. (See the articles: SF Greens Mayoral forum: Democrats, Demo-Greens, Greens ... and Matt Gonzalez got the overwhelming nod from Green Party, Demogreens routed... for more background on this struggle inside the Green party) and when the Democratic Central Committee failed to endorse anyone for Mayor.
These same members of the CofC and former leftists embarked on a campaign of slander and public attacks against Gonzalez, almost immediately after he filed to run for Mayor on August 8. They accused the candidate of being homophobic because he did not bow and ask for Ammiano’s permission to run.
They are frequently quoted in the media attacking Gonzalez and they are busy in the City’s chatboards trashing the independent left. Prominent in the latter role is another of Ammiano’s core supporters, Esperanza Macias.
Most of these characters are today's Ammiano's hardcore advisers and campaign managers.
Workers World Party’s underhanded endorsement of Democrats works against the left
The Workers World Party has a long history of sectarianism and of refusing to deal with other leftists on an equal basis. At one point they asked Frontlines for endorsement of a candidate for local office in 1996 but they refused to endorse other independent left candidates also running for local office.
Through the control they exercise over ANSWER, one of the coalitions organizing antiwar rallies, they usually ban left wing competitors from speaking at rallies or bully other left organizations for money and resources.
Of course, they only participate in elections when they can present a candidate for office from their own ranks. Unity in action or advancing the broader interests of the working class and the oppressed are no considerations for sectarians.
When they are not running and supporting their own candidates, they tend to support Democrats. And this election is no different.
They can’t, however, say this as openly as they are going through an "independent" phase. So they operate in an underhanded way. At the last ANSWER-sponsored event on October 28 they invited, among others, two speakers: Democratic stalwart actor Danny Glover and liberal Democratic candidate for Mayor Tom Ammiano.
They managed the list of speakers so that Danny Glover, who supports Ammiano for Mayor, spoke immediately before the candidate. Glover used his speech to eulogize Ammiano and introduced him as "the next Mayor of San Francisco."
This was designed to give the perception that the antiwar movement was supporting Ammiano for Mayor, which is of course, ridiculous. Ammiano came late to support the antiwar movement, did absolutely nothing to build it and holds an apolitical pacifist position reminiscent of the 60’s hippies - "Make love not war" which has little echo among present-day antiwar activists.
By supporting Democrats, at least at the local level, both the CofC and the WWP share a common interest: they need those liberals to sign their petitions or as endorsers of their activities to give them legitimacy they lack. They won’t therefore, "alienate" the Democrats by explaining the character of their politics.
Sectarian abstentionism in favor of the local political machine
The WWP also shares with other groups a kind of contemporary disdain for local politics as they have found them an obstacle for their more propagandistic and abstract policies and a source of conflict with people who otherwise agree with them on international or certain national issues.
Other organizations such as Socialist Action and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) understand that the deeper they go into local politics, working class communities and oppressed layers of society, the more difficult it is for them to do politics on abstractions. They come under heavy pressure to actually address daily problems around housing, jobs, gentrification, transportation, wages, social services... that require hard work to develop a socialist platform that will be accessible - not just simplistic sloganeering - for real workers and youth.
They seem not to understand that any mass movement led by the left will have to link immediate needs and programs with the historical objectives of socialism: a society without classes and a planned economy.
They don’t understand, or they feel incompetent to develop, transitional demands to move people by a series of approximations from their present day consciousness immersed in daily struggles toward making the connections with more complex goals. They ignore that this is one of the things you can do through electoral campaigns.
They have nothing but shallow explanations as to why they don’t participate in elections altogether (ISO) or why they support liberal Democrats (the lesser evil.)
Sometimes they pepper their abstentionism, which works for the benefit of the status quo, with sectarian rhetoric. For instance, Socialist Action accuses Nader and the Green Party of being just one more candidate and party of the US ruling class
ISO, always late, always little, sometimes nothing, always selfish
The ISO is a special infantile case of abstentionism and sectarianism. We call it the zigzagging type. When Nader ran for President, they first denounced him and the Green Party as bourgeois.
Later, when their own base in the student movement was swept by mass support for Nader, they turned around 180 degrees and uncritically supported him. At the same time, they staged, as they usually try to do in any movement, an organizational raid of some Green Party locals.
When the latter failed, they moved on to greener pastures (pun intended.) No analysis, no balance-sheet, no consistency.
In the last California Recall election they repeated the pattern: late, little, selfish around the Camejo campaign.
When we asked their members in San Francisco what their position was on the Mayoral election the response we received was: "We didn’t discuss it. It is not an issue of critical importance for us." Another response was "we are not aware of the positions in the polls of Gonzalez and we know little about him."
This is, to say the least, false. The local leadership of the ISO invited Gonzalez last year to their regional educational conference in Berkeley as a keynote speaker and discussed with him electoral strategies and tactics.
Don’t get me wrong: the combined active membership of the CofC, WWP, ISO and SA consists of about 150-200 people. They do not have any support in the working class, either structurally or electorally, beyond their numbers and outside the left milieu.
By themselves, they can’t guarantee more than a puny number of votes.
But as part of a vastly broader movement, the work of 150-200 committed socialists in a broad left electoral local campaign would have been invaluable to help win a victory for the entire left and would have helped to better the image of socialist groups among the thousands of people, potential activists, who are being mobilized in this campaign.
But if you look at the newspapers of these organizations, this most monumental event of the US left, this campaign which carries the potential of winning the Mayoralty in one of the most important urban and political centers of the US, is not even being mentioned and might as well not be happening.
Frontlines the on-line newspaper of the Left Party (San Francisco), October 31, 2003.
http://www.sf-frontlines.com/modules.php?o...order=0&thold=0 (http://www.sf-frontlines.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=489&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)