The most frequent approach to creating this space has been to run third-party presidential campaigns.

Although there was an era (pre-New Deal) when this was a useful approach, that day is gone and is not coming back anytime soon.

The Electoral College makes it futile.
The chokehold corporate money has on the process makes it futile.
The unbreakable media blackout of third-party campaigns makes it futile.

In every U.S. presidential election, we always have at least four or five independent left candidates. In the present day, none of them ever achieve anything, none of them gain any measurable support, and none of them succeed anymore at building greater support for their ideas. Universally in the U.S., these campaigns are considered ridiculous.

Ahd the bulk of the Democratic Party electorate, the group that would have to be won over to a third-party campaign, will never make that break as long as the Electoral College remains in place. This is because all of them know that the result of such a break could only mean permanent powerless in the face of people like Bush and Cheney.

There has to be another way.

And it is perfectly possible to be a sincere leftist and seek another way.

For myself, I think the answer lies in a combination of several strategies:

1)Using the initiative process to bring in campaign finance and electoral system reform, such as initiatives(where possible)calling on particular state legislatures to support abolishing the Electoral College. A movement for these goals is an unavoidable precondition to any third-party presidential campaign.

2)Non-party grassroots mobilization to force the existing parties to change the political structure(as worked, when nothing else would have, in the civil rights movement). Such a movement would include LGBT voters, unions, the Rainbow, environmentalists, the antiwar movement, and activists for health care and other progressive issues.

3)Use of new media(YouTube, the Internet, et al)
to push the electoral reform/democratization agenda. This is a low-cost or in some cases no cost method of communication.

4)A non-candidate campaign modeled on the "Other Campaign" led by Mexico's Zapatistas, who toured the country bringing the issues the presidential candidates were ignoring into national attention.

5)The convening of local "Social Forums" comprising all the groups in point 2 to draft more detailed alternative programs, which they would then present to their communities for discussion, in petition campaigns to demonstrate broad support of the alternative programs, and possibly also as a continued series of local initiatives.

These are some components of a workable long-term program of building a larger and broader U.S. left. These have a chance of succeeding. And these do fall into the category, without the wasted effort of third-party presidential campaigns, of independent class-based political action, since they have as their clear goal the building of a large left movement that could force change from below.

A movement is what must be built. The party membership of those in this movement is of secondary importance.

[ 16 April 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

This is a movement(working for abolition or modification of the electoral college, PR for Congressional elections, removing the 435 seat size limit on the U.S. House of Representatives)that can be built from below, without having either to form a new party or without having to be subservient to the existing ones.

(They can have an impact at a more local level, even at the level of the Senate or House of Representatives.)

Thus, when speaking of Presidential politics, you can:

1. Support McCain

2. Support Obama

3. Support Clinton

4. Maintain complete political irrelevance.

The idea that anyone should give up and support third world movements is really pathetic. It's just a flight from reality.

It is almost impossible for Westerners to have a clear idea of what they support when they support a third world liberation movement. Consequently, revolutionary tourists of this sort are usually greatly disappointed.

But we are discussing here the dynamics of US Presidential elections.

Perhaps you are saying that, because the US is a "plutocracy", it is fine to just sit things out or join a group which can't elect an alderman in the whole country.

But, as usual, you have no actual programme, other than CAPITALISM BAD, COMMUNISM GOOD.

"If you don't vote either Liberal or Conservative, you are dooming yourself to political irrelevancy."

But people around the world have since watched helplessly as U.S. politics shifted the center of U.S. politics to the far right. Leftists around the world watched helplessly as NeoLiberal nonsense was forced on Latin America and Eastern European countries with a human toll mounting since the doomed perestroika and failure of capitalist reforms in the FSU, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua and so on. It was a terrible defeat for workers around the world. What we're observing now are human evils growing stronger which the Communists and their allies held in check for over 70 years in the former Soviet Union.

This has led to support for democracy itself collapsing in many of those countries, as it is now permanently associated in the minds of millions of Eastern Europeans with austerity and misery.

Who knows what will happen next to those tragic and unjustly impoverished nations?

In the end, this still leaves us with the necessity of building a movement that is fully democratic and genuinely socialist(that is, with power held by the workers and the people rather than by a centralized unaccountable vanguard).

There will need to be a new structure for the left, a new way to build socialism.

It will have a lot of characteristics of anarcho-syndicalism, and a significant measure of direct democracy.

And there will have to be a consistent standard of human rights and defense of freedom of expression. The Leninist model failed because, while its social benefits had some attraction(insuffecient as they were) it always created pointlessly militarized and repressive states.
It quickly reached a point, in the West, where it ceased to be possible to make a case to Western workers and voters that they'd be better off under a Leninist system. You couldn't win people over to the cause if you couldn't guarantee that they wouldn't end up living in a police state.

The leaders of the Party in those countries never understood that they'd have made themselves far more secure from "subervision" and "bourgeois devationism" if they'd sent the Red Army home and actually focused on building a humane, nonrepressive socialist model. The CIA, Radio Free Europe, Reagan and the rest wouldn't have been able to lay a glove on them then. No, it wouldn't have been a "socialist paradise", but it would have been clearly and unchallengeably superior to what "The West" had on offer.

They should have trusted the masses. In chosing not to, they forced the masses to stop trusting them.

[ 17 April 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]