Responses to questions

Part of an ongoing debate on the USA. Click here to read all the contributions

I can't promise to be writing new responses right up to the actual conference debate, but here are some to Duncan's latest questions, deliberately brief.

1. Viable means capable of life, as the dictionary says. A viable working-class candidacy is one from a working-class party which, although maybe weak as yet, promises further life and development, and a candidacy sufficiently well-run to have scope to contribute to that. As distinct from one from a party which is only notionally and formally "working-class" (the PSL in the November 2020 election?), or a candidacy done so dimly as to be more likely to damage development than help it.

2. The Democrats are a bourgeois neoliberal party, and the DSA must seek to build an independent workers' party to push the Democrats aside. Exact next tactics I do not attempt to prescribe. But then no-one else in our debate does either, and with good reason, I think.

3. I didn't introduce the word "pressing" as a criterion. Mark did, in a motion that Duncan voted for and I voted against. The motion didn't always and everywhere reject voting for bourgeois lesser-evil candidates, but said in the particular case of the US presidential election there was "no pressing reason". Mark was clear that the first part of why he saw nothing "pressing" was that Biden was sure to win, and maybe by a large margin. Duncan rejected that aspect of the "no pressing reason" criterion.

Only he can say what other aspect he relied on. As far as I can see, it seems to be that Trump (unlike Marine Le Pen) was after all definitely not a fascist (or quasi-fascist, etc.), so if a small balance of left-wing votes (a 0.32% swing, as it turned out) tipped the presidency to Trump, it would be bad, but not nearly as bad as Le Pen winning. Or not as bad as the conservatives beating the Progressives in a run-off election for the German parliament before 1914. Dangerous, but not in a "pressing" way.

A line that voting for bourgeois candidates when there is a "pressing reason" to do so, and not where there is "no pressing reason", is surely too vague. But the vague criterion is chosen by Duncan's side of the debate. Not by mine.