From: USERLJD0@um.cc.umich.edu
Newsgroups: alt.politics.greens
Subject: A Left perspective on electoral wor
Date: 26 Jan 93 15:00:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #N:um.cc.umich.edu:19274479:000:12457
Nf-From: um.cc.umich.edu!USERLJD0    Jan 26 07:00:00 1993


From: USERLJD0@um.cc.umich.edu
Subject: A Left perspective on electoral work

 Subject: A Left perspective on electoral work.
 To: userID=LJD0, env-link+greenorg@andrew.cmu.edu
 From: env-link+@andrew.cmu.edu, moore@santafe.edu
 
 
 I thought this was really good, both from a student and community point of
 view.  - Cris Moore, NM Greens
 
 /* Written  6:27 pm  Jan 18, 1993 by nlns@igc.apc.org in igc:nlns.news */
 /* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.7 *** 1/18/93" ---------- */
 
 The Student Left and Local Governments:
 What Are You Working For?
 Jeremy Smith, Prairie Fire
 
 Electoral Politics and the Concept of the Left
 (NLNS)--Dealing with local electoral politics and public
 administration has always been difficult for the American
 Left. The student left must deal with both seemingly
 powerless student governments and the local college
 town governments, which most students do not consider
 relevant to their lives. When the Freedom Coalition (a
 progressive student group at the University of Florida
 [UF]) first formed and the organizers began going around
 with a plan to penetrate UF student government, we
 heard comments from politically progressive individuals
 like: "You'll sell out," "You'll get co-opted," "Nothing
 worthwhile ever gets done in there," or my favorite, "Any
 victory in [student government] can only be symbolic."
 These responses are objections I am very familiar with; I
 was not even registered to vote until a year ago, because
 I felt voting was only a collaboration with a system that
 existed to exploit, corrupt and paralyze. I never voted in
 [student government] elections because I felt (rightly)
 that they were a joke.
         The trouble arises in part from the premise of what
 it means to be "left." The left, in all its various and sundry
 forms, simultaneously negates the status quo and affirms
 that an alternative model--a better way--does exist. Of
 course, groups on the right such as the Klan and Nazis
 also do this, and so the left is further defined by a
 traditional identification with oppressed peoples and
 recognition that human consciousness and political
 activity is shaped by material and social conditions. For
 the left, ideals and utopias function as goals. The left
 traditionally recognizes that ideals which appear
 unattainable--such as abolition of slavery, universal
 suffrage and other "unrealistic goals"--are never realized
 without articulation of the possibilities and a certain
 amount of faith. Naturally, most political cultures are a
 mixture of both left and right; the complexities of this
 relationship are explored in many other places. The point
 here is that to most people who are left (and to some
 mainstream liberals), it is a contradiction to
 simultaneously negate the existing framework and to
 participate in it, and one of the principle conflicts in the
 history of left social movements has been whether or not
 to "work within the system."
 
 "What Are You Working For?"
         This is, of course, a legitimate conflict, and the
 answers to the questions it raises always change with the
 conditions that we live under. But it is also a distracting
 and sometimes self-destructive conflict, one that has
 paralyzed innumerable movements and organizations.
 "The real question," says feminist organizer and writer
 Kathie Sarachild, "is not working from inside or outside
 the present economic and political system, the real
 question is what are you working for? What are your
 final goals, both personal and political?"
         Politicians and other public administrators become
 co-opted when they confuse their personal ambitions
 with the goals and ambitions of their constituencies, or
 come to identify the needs and goals of the system with
 their own. Instead of being in a position of power to
 implement programs and serve the community, the
 politician or bureaucrat becomes consumed with
 preserving "efficiency" (at the expense of human
 interaction), getting on this or that committee or packing
 a resume (in place of real acccomplishment), and
 compromising principles or the wishes of the community
 for short-term gain, while in the long run things just fall
 apart. Leaders become stupid bureaucrats or dangerous
 tyrants when they are cut off from the grassroots--the
 rank and file of any political configuration: ideological,
 economic, geographic, or cultural--and become absorbed
 by the system that they were so idealistically trying to
 change. Conversely, the grassroots cannot afford to
 abandon its leaders, getting them into office as an end in
 itself and then forgetting about it. Power, i.e., the control
 of information and resources, the ability to carry out
 decisions, must pass through the political leader to the
 people of the community, and must clearly identify his or
 her goals at the outset and stick by them (allowing for
 flexibility based on new information).
         Prior to the UF student government elections, a
 wannabe politician came to Freedom Coalition seeking our
 support. When we queried him about his position on the
 rights of bisexuals, lesbians and gay men, he told us:
 "That's too controversial. I'll take a stand on that after the
 election." But, we asked him, what about the next
 election? And the one after that? There is always another
 election. An aspiring public servant unwilling to make his
 or her views clear publicly before the election is certainly
 not going to take a stand after the election, because
 politicians are always seeking re-election. A man or
 woman who cannot take a stand, who has no clearly
 stated personal and political goals, cannt be trusted. It is
 leaders who speak out and actively work for change who
 deserve the support of the left. And while some people
 may disagree with me on this, I also feel that wannabe
 politicians not willing to put in time building a
 movement--empowering and mobilizing masses of
 people--cannot be trusted, because they will never
 understand sacrifice for political reasons or the practical
 meaning of democracy.
         With all this in mind, I submit the following reasons
 for an oppositional left to participate in electoral politics
 in student governments and in city politics:
         1) It gives us a soapbox, another forum to spread
 ideas and fight for change. Potentially, student
 governments can be used to express student views on
 subjects both inside and outside the university, to add to
 the babble of public opinion and influence events that
 concern students. Student Government at UF does this
 anyway. SG "leaders" lobbied hard in the Florida
 legislature to prevent budget cuts that would decimate
 the state university system. There is no reason why SG
 couldn't be used as a vehicle for other student concerns.
 It also gets the left out of the activist/ hippie/ punk
 subcultures and brings our ideas and practice into contact
 with different kinds of people, enabling our leaders to
 mingle politically with other leaders.
         2) It gives us access to certain kinds of information
 and resources (power). It is important to recognize that
 the system is the system because it controls access to
 resources--technological, financial, and material--and
 information about how our society is run. While it is
 necessary and desirable for communities and for people
 on the left to have their own resources and strengths, it is
 sometimes necessary to break down the wall of the
 system to get a piece of what is taken from us everyday
 in the form of taxes, Activity & Service fees, and labor.
 Any money or labor it takes from us, belongs to us.
 Which brings me to the third reason to get into the
 system:
         3) To implement programs to make people's lives
 better. We all, including conservatives, know that poverty
 and racial injustice won't be eliminated without a radical
 restructuring of our society, but people don't want to wait
 until after the Glorious People's Revolution to eat; they
 want to eat right now; they want health care right now. It
 is critical for the left to provide those things and do it in a
 way that empowers people to make further changes. At
 UF, we need child care services, feminist rape programs,
 less bureaucracy, more quality professors and smaller
 classes. These things will only be provided by individuals
 inside the system working in tandem with people
 marching in the streets and confronting the
 bureaucracies.
         4) We need to be inside government to prevent
 things from growing worse than they already are. Elijah
 Tafari, Minister of Education for the Royal Order of the
 99, once explained it this way: Grassroots political activity
 is the offense, demanding change from people who will
 never give up anything voluntarily. Left politicians and
 sympathetic officials are the defense, preventing the
 right (and other undesirable forces) from completely
 taking over the apparatus of power. A strong progressive
 presence in UF student government could have prevented
 the destruction of the UF Campus Organized Against Rape,
 which occurred last year. Recently, a strong progressive
 presence in the form of PLAN and certain Action Party
 senators with grassroots pressure from the Freedom
 Coalition and Environmental Action Group, succeeded in
 preventing EAG from being zero-funded by student
 government.
         It should be noted here that an independent
 popular movement and strong grassroots organizations
 are essential even when supposedly "left" politicos are in
 power, since no ideology or social program makes a
 person immune to incompetence and abuses to power.
 When the establishment left's primary goal is to
 consolidate power for a privileged elite, then it should be
 considered the right and must be defied.
         5) To bring women, minorities and marginalized
 cultural viewpoints into positions of power and visibility,
 as a means of attaining greater social equality and
 disrupting a system that doesn't want them.
         6) To reveal contradictions within the system. The
 system rarely obeys its own rules--or rather, privileged
 elites within the system routinely ignore the rules they
 intended for everyone else. Publicly calling attention to
 this problem reveals the fundamentally oppressive
 nature of our political system, the fact that it functions
 for elites at the expense of entire communities. It is the
 job of left politicians to call attention to every hypocrisy
 and inconsistency in the system, including the hypocrisies
 of other "left" officials, and do it to demonstrate the way
 the current structure allows this to happen.
 
 We Can Win
         Participation in the system is not necessarily an
 affirmation of its faults and values; participation can and
 must be a challenge to the status quo, and a means
 toward achieving social justice. The electoral campaigns
 of the left, such as UF's PLAN Party, must do what I
 described in the first section of this paper: Negate the
 status quo and affirm that another way does exist. We
 don't all have to agree what the other way is, so long as
 specific principles are agreed upon, and each participant
 has a willingness to experiment and discard notions
 which are proven unworkable and ineffective. Student
 and local governments, even under the current structure,
 have great potential to realize some of the promise of the
 ideals of participatory democracy. Electoral campaigns
 must personify, exemplify and radiate that human beings
 are not sheep, that advertising and connections are not
 substitutes for ideas and experience, that the greatest
 power is in community and not in isolation. We need to
 be constantly out there, communicating ideas, feelings,
 experience in the language of the people we are talking
 with. We must use campaigns to build coalitions, to
 establish common political space and personal
 relationships, and to articluate what we truly want for
 this world. We cannot measure success by the number of
 offices we win, but by the number of people that are
 mobilized and by the programs made into reality. With
 this kind of campaign, we can win.
 
 Prairie Fire is the Progressive Student Journal at the
 University of Florida, and is published by the Freedom
 Coalition. They can be reached at: Prairie Fire-Freedom
 Coalition, 738 NE 2nd Street, Gainesville, FL 32601
 
 --- 30 ---
 
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