The New Party has been running candidates and winning elections.
What do you think of all this?
Allowing new options to enter the political system is—in general
—a good idea. I think the right way to do it might be the New Party
strategy of targeting winnable local elections, backing fusion
candidates and—crucially—relating such electoral efforts to ongoing
organizing and activism. A labor-based party is a very good idea too.
Since they have basically the same interests, such parties ought
to get together—it isn’t a good idea to scatter energies and
resources that are very slight. A possible step might be to create
something like the NDP [New Democratic Party] in Canada or the
Workers’ Party in Brazil—big organizations that foster and support
grassroots activities, bring people together, provide an umbrella
under which activities can be carried out and—among other things—
take part in the political system, if that turns out to be useful.
That can progress towards something else, but it’s not going to
overcome the fact that one big business party, with two factions,
runs things. We won’t break out of that until we democratize the
basic structure of our institutions.
As John Dewey put it about seventy years ago, “Politics is the
shadow cast on society by big business.” As long as you have highly
concentrated, unaccountable private power, politics is just going to
be a shadow. But you might as well make use of the shadow as much
as possible, and use it to try to undermine what’s casting the
shadow.
Didn’t Dewey warn against mere “attenuation of the shadow”?
He said that mere “attenuation of the shadow will not change the
substance,” which is correct, but it can create the basis for
undermining the substance. It goes back to the Brazilian rural
workers’ image I mentioned earlier—expanding the floor of the
cage. Eventually you want to dismantle the cage, but expanding the
floor of the cage is a step towards that.
It creates different attitudes, different understandings, different
forms of participation, different ways for life to be lived, and also
yields insight into the limits of existing institutions. That’s typically
learned by struggle.
All these things are to the good. They only attenuate, that’s true,