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Jake's avatar

I opened my email and saw “Hamilton Nolan” with a subject line of “You Patsy” and I was immediately like “Oh god, what’d I do?”

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Larry Goldbetter's avatar

Thanks for this piece. Reminds me of Hoffa/Nixon, though there are no Kennedy's breathing down the IBT's neck. We need to go a little deeper into that social function of elections in capitalist society. There is virtually no mass discussion now of what elections actually are, how they mask the dictatorship of the capitalist class, what the workers’ direct action alternative to elections is. Yet the quick spread of anti-genocide encampments in universities, like the rise in strikes and union organizing, shows that direct action is again on the agenda. That direct action in itself tends to unmask the electoral trap, the con-game of elections: how could the young people facing cops and thugs and expulsions and jail in the anti-genocide encampments bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden, who has presided over the exterminist assault on Gaza? The 1960s civil rights and antiwar militants faced the same fraud of the electoral system: how on earth could we vote for a Democrat after what we’d seen them do in Vietnam? And since Vietnam U.S. imperialism has just gone from bad to worse. So we need to revive mass discussion, deep critique, of elections as a system of capitalist rule.

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