If you were a communist, who would you vote for?

If you were a communist, terrorist, or anything anti-American that ends with IST, who would you vote for in November to further your cause?

The libs are clearly voting for scary kerry, and the conservatives are voting for Bush. This thread is more or less for the undecided voters.

Again, if you were an al qaeda sympathizer, would you vote for someone who will crush your balls without mercy and without remorse? Or would you vote for someone who will sellout America and put you in a strategic advantage that will allow you to create havoc and terror?

 

One of these guys of course:
SOCIALIST PARTY USA: Walt Brown (Oregon)
SOCIALIST EQUALITY PARTY: Bill Van Auken (New York)
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY: Róger Calero (New York)
WORKERS WORLD PARTY: John Parker (California)

 

Although the question is not phrased in what I would call an unbiased manner, it is an interesting speculation.

I don't think anyone can honestly be a communist in this day and age. Rarely has a system of government and economics ever been so thoroughly discredited by historical experience. Leninism is dead.

I think that I would vote for Nader if I were a terrorist. Why? Psychologically, I wouldn't vote for Bush because of he showed in Afghanistan that he's capable of a sort of blundering leadership when he's not obsessed with his family agenda. He actually CAN marshal international cooperation and take vigorous, if somwhat ineffectual, action. He would be, in short, dangerous to my hypothetical terrorist movement.

I wouldn't vote for Kerry because he is both physically brave and very subtle. Many Americans misunderestimate the power of subtle thinking and distrust the subtle thinker. However, an American President who thinks carefully and is willing to re examine his position in light of developments would be an even greater danger to me and my movement.

Note, please that my response is just as unbiased as the question! (grin)

 

Actually, if you were a communist you would not vote for the Socialist Party, USA candidate.

The SPUSA is adamantly anti-communist and always has been.

Read the works of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas.

 

Ralph Nader may be one of the most politically confused Presidential candidates in the history of American presidential elections.

He was the Green Party candidate but would not join the Greens. He solicited and won the nomination of the Reform and American Reform parties but wouldn't join.

Both the Reform and American Reform parties are anti-communist. Yet, Nader, this year, has selected Peter Camejo as his Veep.

Camejo was the Socialist Workers Party candidate for President in 1976.

Poor Ralph, he should stick to being a consumer advocate where he has accomplished much in the way of consumer protection.

 

Jimmy: Thanks for the emphatic correction about the utterly anti-Communist SPUSA. You beat me to it. Somewhere, Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger are smiling.

One cannot imagine, for that matter, a Communist voting for the SWP, which is Trotskyist. Most likely, where ballot access is possible, a Communist would vote for the Communist candidate.

 

OK OK. It was really more of a joke to take the wind out of his obvious motives.

 

If you were a communist, who would you vote for?

No one – good communists do not participate in free elections.

“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

Joseph Stalin

 

Denver:

You mean like in Florida in 2000???

 

You know, one of the greater ironies of the 2000 Florida issue that you don't hear much about is that the media prematurely called the election in favor of Gore before the polls were closed. I can't help but wonder how many people said to themselves "no need to vote now, it's all over" and just went about their business as usual. How many potential votes did the media stop from being cast? We may never know.

 

This is interesting.

The amazing (to me) thing is that up until around 1990, academic Marxism was an industry on university campuses. Marxist scholars existed in the thousands. Marxist journals proliferated. University presses churned out Marxist titles.

Everywhere you looked there was another exegetical work on the '1844 Manuscripts'. Everyone was writing on Althusser, Lukacs or Gramsci.

Then suddenly... overnight... it blew away like dust. Nobody was a Marxist. Nobody had ever been a Marxist.

Everyone was a ... postmodernist.

I disagree with you about one thing. Marxism wasn't discredited by historical experience, at least on American university campuses. There is no species on earth more oblivious to historical experience (to say nothing of common sense) than the university professor.

I think that what killed intellectual Marxism is that it suddenly stopped being cool. Hip intellectuals have to feel like they are surfing the wave of history. They have to feel that they can see further than the rest of us, that they are serving as the vanguard of historical changes that the rest of us are too reactionary to grasp.

When the Soviet Union folded, when it stopped being a superpower alternative to capitalism, it became difficult if not impossible to pretend that Marxism was still marching inexorably from triumph to glorious triumph.

I figure that's a major contributor to the current wave of cultural cynicism in academic circles. Idealism is dead. Truth is a joke. Everything is superficial and relative. Nothing is significant, everything is "irony" and "pastiche".

It's not very much fun to have the intellectual and emotional rug pulled out from under you. Things probably tend to appear meaningless and barren. Perhaps it's a little like losing one's religious faith.

 

Then suddenly... overnight... it blew away like dust. Nobody was a Marxist. Nobody had ever been a Marxist.
______________________________________________

I wish! They seem alive and well amongst university faculty to this day--they're just older and more embittered than they used to be, mutter to themselves, nearly-empty classrooms, curling Che Guevera posters in the cluttered offices, faded Leonard Peltier bumper stickers--primarily curiosities today: behold the nearly-extinct Marxist, habitat almost exclusively university campuses and crank web pages.

 

Too bad Gus Hall and Angela Davis (the Party's candidates in numerous elections) didn't know this. They could have saved a whole lot of money on campaign literature, media blitzs, etc.

 

Bill Dayson: brilliant post.

 

No, like in Cook County, Illinois and Texas in 1960!

 

You're welcome, Uncle Janko. I must confess, I have never heard of Morris Hillquit, however.

I'll have to conduct a Google search.

.

 

Say, listen! John Kennedy stole that election fair and square!

 

Say, listen! John Kennedy stole that election fair and square!

 

Re: communists on campuses.

I grind my theeth at the "critical legal studies" professors, many of whom enjoy large salaries at private law schools teaching the larvae of the wealthy while preaching the historic (Marxist) nonsense that legal systems exist only to preserve the power of the wealthy. In addition to bad scholarship, it's also rank hypocrisy.

 

"teeth"