Who Are the Poisonous Weeds of 'Democratic Dictatorship'?
The gang over at Every Day I Wake Up on the Wrong Side of Capitalism have brought up an interesting discussion about presidential elections and Chris Lighfoot's connection to the antiparliamentary perspective of 'ultraleftism' through his recognition that every party that could possibly be elected seemed hell-bent on eroding civil liberties as dramatically as possible:

While I completely agree that to claim there are no differences between the parties are false, it’s still true that arguments of the form, “you must vote x to keep out y,” are always illegitimate. They collapse political activity to ‘realist’ opinion, and so effectively always amount to a capitulation to the ‘y’. This is true even for the worst values of y; voting Labour to keep out the BNP is a capitulation to fascism, because it does nothing to address what makes the BNP popular in the first place; the logical strategy, in such a case, would be for Labour to move as close to the BNP as it can get away with (triangulation). This isn’t to say campaigning for the lesser evil is wrong, but it can only be justified in the context of a wider political campaign – calling for an ‘anyone but BNP’ vote may well be the correct thing to do as an element of more general anti-fascist politics, as there was a case to be made for Anyone But Bush as an anti-war tactic. What’s important, though, is that support for the lesser evil be an element of a campaign that, in the end, challenges the lesser evil as as much as the greater.





Sailors at Krondstadt rebelled against Lenin's nationalization of the previously decentralized and democratic soviets.

The question for me here, as is apparently similarly at issue in the UK right now, is how can one engage the 'Anyone But Bush' tactic, which I succumbed to last election, without ultimately validating the authority of the so-called 'lesser evil' in the process as suggested - I mean honestly, I am not so sure that Kerry was all that much of a 'lesser evil' in any case, and while I wouldn't deny that Nader is, as we learned in 2000, he has almost zero chance of ever being elected in this country, so really I have to ask, why bother at all? To explore this question more carefully, I found myself returning to early 20th century radical political history, particularly since my studying Badiou and Zizek this year, two thinkers I appreciate very much, has also meant going back through some of the writings of Mao and Lenin, two thinkers I have most certainly never appreciated. What I discovered there was that the ultraleftists of their time, like the Kronstadt Sailors, Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek and anarchists in general, are all dismissed in pretty much the same way as their contemporary equivalents are by liberals in the United States today - they are quite simply outside the realm of thinkable thought. Mao for instance, defending the New Democracy in his Question of the Intellectuals, insists that against demands for more participation in decision-making processes, "we must help our young people understand that ours is still a very poor country, that we cannot change this situation radically in a short time", while in the liberal-pluralist sounding Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend, he argues further (even while supposedly being 'anti-dogmatic') that while "we are against poisonous weeds of any kind..we must carefully distinguish between what is really a poisonous weed and what is really a fragrant flower". The criterion that he provides for such a distinction (the objectively correct 'fragrant flowers' are those that unite the population, support the existing structures, encourage political centralization, strengthen the Party apparatus, etc., while the falsely Rightist or Leftist 'poisonous weeds' do not), echoes precisely the totalizing mindset that has always underpinned state power, even that of our own electoral system, in which a supposedly 'free market' of political ideas contend, which is why Mao's self-descriptive terminology of 'democratic dictatorship' throughout his writings sounds like such an incredibly appropriate label not only for Maoist China and Leninist/Stalinist Russia but also the United States, particularly as it has emerged since 2000.