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Voting is for suckers, Ralph Nader is a fraud, and the UAW is an arm of management
Ohanian Comment: I argue with Dave about voting. I always vote--though never for the major party candidates. I just feel it's important to register that public complaint that I choose "Other." But I agree that all this election hoopla is a very expensive diversionary tactic to distract people from the fact that we have only one political party and that's the corporate party. We are at the stage in the attack of public schools when we need to realize the truth of this statement: Nothing has ever changed in this country except through mass movements. Teachers need to stop hoping their unions or their professional organizations will come to the rescue. They need to take to the streets.
by Dave Stratman
Nothing has every changed in this country except through mass movements--the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement. The role of the electoral process is to get people off the streets and into the voting booth.
Ralph Nader's role is to keep people from organizing against the system. Here's an example. I was visited last week by a young woman canvassing door-to-door for MASSPIRG, the Nader-sponsored Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group. She was asking for signatures on a petition to get more recycling. I said, "With the US making war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with the banks looting ordinary Americans to the tune of $24 trillion, with Social Security under attack and the country being run by psychopaths, why the hell are you spending your time on recycling. We need a revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and create real democracy." She agreed with me but said that this was the only job she could get.
I told her some of the history of Nader and the PIRGs. Nader began Public Interest Research Groups back in 1970-73, when the student anti-war movement was at its height. There were student strikes and sit-ins against ROTC going on all over the country, and students were confronting the university administrations' complicity in the war effort. Nader's plan was to get students to stop confronting the college administrations and to get them to drop the anti-war movement for something nice and tame that wouldn't challenge the system. So he set up Public Interest Research Groups, starting with campuses in New York and Massachusetts. The PIRGs were funded--get this--by a kind of dues check-off system; that is, every student was charged $1 as part of his tuition and fees; this money, to be administered by the college administration, was then used to fund campus PIRGs.
The students recruited to the PIRGs then acted like good boys and girls. They worked with the college administration on such burning issues as "Bottle Bills"--i.e., cleaning up the environment by requiring a deposit on soda and beer bottles. Nader's role was to domesticate dissent. He and his PIRG recruits worked with college administrators to try to marginalize radicals--anyone who persisted in organizing against the war or challenged the university's role in legitimizing capitalism. Nader is all about saving capitalism, not condemning it and certainly not overthrowing it. (If you watch some of Chris Hedges' videos, you'll see he is into the same thing. In his October 15, 2010 he says "The alternative to liberal values is nihilism." That's BS. Most people are not liberals and their values are superior to "liberal" values any day. Hedges cautions, "We must always remember that we are not trying to take power." Huh? We're not? So then we have to let power stay in the hands of war criminals and psychopaths?)
--The UAW has been an arm of management for years, and it didn't just start with selling out Delphi or Caterpillar or pension rights. What was "jointness" all about if not getting workers to identify with the company and compete against other workers? Why did UAW staffers break the 1973 Dodge strike with baseball bats and pipes? What was the 1950 five-year contract all about, if not to bind workers in conditions that the UAW would manage? (for more on these questions, see
How the Unions Killed the Working Class Movement and
Fight to Win: A Strategy for Working People [pdf]
The fact of the matter is that working people have been betrayed by the institutions that we thought were our own: the unions, the Democratic Party, even the churches and synagogues. No voice comes from these to rally the people against the rulers. We are on our own.
We need to begin afresh. We need to look at our real situation, the whole ugly reality of it. We need to look at ourselves and realize that our power never came from the UAW or Democratic Party or the other institutions that claimed to speak for us, but from our own solidarity and values and fighting spirit. We need to imagine and fight for an alternative to capitalism. We need to build small groups that can grow into a powerful revolutionary movement. We need to challenge capitalist power, plans, and goals with the power and goals of working people. We need to break the stranglehold of Wall Street and the war profiteers and corporatocracy on our lives and create a new society.
— Dave Stratman
NewDemocracyWorld.org
2011-01-07
http://newdemocracyworld.org
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