Chomsky makes two

Chomsky makes two assumptions. (1) Kerry then Obama were really the “lesser evil” and (2) that there is something to be gained by choosing an admitted “evil”. Both are questionable. We have the record of Obama as president of his “lesser evil”What ruling class politicians will actually do once elected is impossible to predict and for Chomsky to claim providence even with a history of statistics on the matter is simply not very credible. Chomsky is claiming what bourgeois politicians say have some relationship to what they do.  But politicians may say anything they wish but once elected, they may do whatever they please. There is no requirement that they tell the truth. Democrats with Obama at the helm, at one point had a super majority in Congress and accomplished little.  Arguing fo a Democrat vote on the grounds that things may be marginal better strikes me as valid as newspaper pundits devising mathematical schemes to improve your chances of winning the lottery, you still remain a highly probable loser! This is the illusion of choice. The Democratss are there to pacify us. They are not there to bring around any change to the way government is done what-so-ever. They are there to flick a few crumbs to keep us from uprising and that’s it. And those throwaway crumbs are the basis of Chomsky’s case.We are living in a period of reaction, and the “real choices” are all reactionary. So we should be unrealistic and utopian and we should advocate what we really want, regardless if it makes us “ineffective” or dreamers. That is our basic function: to develop alternatives, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. The best we can hope for is to use this as an opportunity to regroup, in order to get the working class in a stronger position to start from when the boom returns. All we can do is to try to negotiate the best redundancy terms possible and try to resist as effectively as we can the increased downward pressures on wages and working conditions (for which we need collective organisation and action, even within the existing trade unions). As to what revolutionaries can do, at the moment being so small a minority, we can’t do much more than keep on arguing that the only way-out is to replace capitalism by a system based on common ownership (instead of class ownership) and production solely for use (instead of production for profit) and to keep on urging workers to self-organise themselves democratically to bring this social revolution about. A working class that can’t defend itself is also a working class that is incapable of making a revolution. We all know the Debs quote…if we support what we don’t want – just guess what we will get.Chomsky said  “Those who prefer to ignore the real world are also undermining any hope of reaching any popular constituency.”Well, since half of Americans already ignore the elections anyway, that leaves us with quite a potential popular constituency to work on.Chomsky has also said  “The smart way to keep people passive & obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”That’s virtually the entire function of the Democrat party.Your reply seems to me to be a bit moralistic. Politics as charity and that one wing of the business party are supposedly more humanitarian and virtuous than the other.We should treat people as grown-ups and state our position honestly declaring that  no-one you vote for is going to change your life for the better. If you want a better life, you’ll have to fight for it. Aren’t we serious about abolishing wage-slavery?And what about our own Party’s integrity, attacking  the person  we just finished telling people to vote for. What a way to earn people’s respect and trust. Even Lenin got caught out with that one by publically saying Bolsheviks should support the Labour Party like a noose around its neck on the gallows …or whatever the actual quote was.