Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 00:35:49
From: Mitchel Cohen <mitchelcohen-AT-mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: Nader must pull out of the election!!


At 12:15 PM 10/22/2000 -0500, Sandi & Scott Spaeth wrote:
>At 05:52 AM 10/22/00 +0000, Mitchel Cohen wrote:
>
>>Sorry -- I refuse to vote for the evil of two lessers ever again.
>
>How do these arguments keep ending up on the anarchy list where government 
>is recognized for what it is regardless of who sits in the oval 
>office?  I'm no more of a mind to submit to Nader than to Gore or Bush or 
>Chuckles the clown.  This constant barrage of Nader propaganda is getting 
>tiresome.
>
>cheers,
>scott

Anarchists and anarcho-marxists are against the wage system, but accept
wages and support efforts to organize workers to increase wages, minimum
wage, working conditions, etc -- while at the same time exposing the
exploitation of the whole set-up. We're against government-run health care,
but still fight to keep the corporations from privatizing it.

There is a difference between government and the State. We oppose the state
as either an historical mechanism of domination in its own right, or as a
coercive instrument of class forces wielded against the working class and
colonized. This does not mean we don't fight for certain laws to better our
condition and the conditions of everyone, even as we seek to overthrow it.
The relationship between reform and revolution is complex, but it doesn't
disappear by wishing it out of existence.

Unlike the other candidates, Nader is an expression of vast radical social,
political and economic movements from the bottom-up. He may not be the best
articulator of the ultimate goals of anarchism, but neither is he in the
same categories as Bush and Gore.

If people on the anarchist listserve think that all of this is irrelevant,
fine, I'll take it elsewhere. (We'll wait to hear, first.) NOT voting,
however, as a PRINCIPLE is, in my view, wrong. Not voting should be a
TACTIC we employ to implement some larger strategy. The self-righteousness
of limiting these concerns, indeed, the attempt to IMPOSE A LINE
(supposedly an "anarchist one") on fellow anarchists and anarcho-marxists
is a dangerous precedent and wholly outside what anarchism is supposed to
be about.

Mitchel Cohen