Was he a socialist all along?
Ralph's got a good segment on integrating worker cooperatives with technology on his show this week. I learned about the National Cooperative Bank, which has apparently existed for thirty or forty years. There's a good place for coops to get loans after all.
It's always been hard to determine Ralph's politics because he focuses on issues like a laser.
Look, it doesn't take a genius to see that him and virtually everyone, even in socialist parties, are socdem (make capitalism egalitarian and fair and all that).
He got a lot of socialist attention when he put a Workers World Party guy (Camejo) as his VP in 2004. Socialists *love* dog whistles like that.
Like when socialists got all excited about another socdem: Sanders. After viewing *really* old videos of him praising Castro and other stuff like that.
I'm not really shocked since the Green party has become much more socialist/anti-capitalist lately
Nader was never really in the GP, distanced himself from it in 2004, and the GP even ran a guy *against* him (Cobb) in 2004 and '08.
I've never understood why he did that. Did he really think he wouldn't get the GP nomination? His influence in building the Green Party by simply running on their ticket can never be understated.
It's worth mentioning I distinctly remember him saying something like "the major issue shouldn't be about capitalism vs socialism"
There's a lot of "beyond left and right" thinking among socdems, hippies, New Agey people, activists etc
Everyone has a different story as to why Nader broke up with the GP. Some say it's because Nader wanted to run an "anti-campaign" and the GP didn't want to do it. Some say it was pressure from Dems to not run Nader. Some say Nader was too demanding, egotistical, and didn't want to go through the party process.
But one thing is clear in hindsight, Nader wasn't a party guy. He didn't spend the 80s and 90s attending Green Party meetings every month. He was just someone the GP liked, and they found it better to run someone who was a celebrity and outside their party in the 90s.
Meh, the Green Party is about exactly as strong before Nader as it was after Nader. I have a spreadsheet of candidate perfomance of the Green Party in my state, and nothing changed post-Nader besides a lot of Dem hate.
There were smatterings of people elected as Green Party people before Nader, and it's the same smattering today.
What would really *change* the Green Party wouldn't be a celebrity, but an actual revenue source. For example… unions.
His latest book actually starts off by examining the history of concentrations of power before capitalism. The second chapter begins by heaping praise on Eugene Debs. Somehow he manages to still avoid naming the problem as being the capitalist production arrangement. I think he intentionally avoids the elephant in the room in order to get more people on board fighting for specific issues.
Greens are definitely on more state ballots than ever before and it's been steady growth since 2000.
Howie Hawkins and Bruce Dixon have been arguing for this for a long time.
I'm talking local candidates, which are the backbone of any party. The same number of local candidates got elected before Nader than after Nader.
Presidential ballot access is a stupid way to measure party strength. That would have made the reform party strong (which it obviously wasn't).
he definitely knew what was up
Yeah, but existing unions are literally now just really pathetic, anti-democratic, capitalist suck-ups. It'd take new unions to fund the Green Party or Socialist Party USA or whatever.
rebuilding unions is definitely not easy but anyone who thinks it's not necessary is also delusional.
If the capitalist class wasn't scared of unions they wouldn't have hunted them in the fucking streets last century
I really think you're underestimating the importance of presidential campaigns. They are essential for maintaining ballot access which is an unbelievably time- and resource-consuming process to achieve for third parties. It's the whole reason leftelect.net exists.
The Green party doesn't need to be funded by unions, it should be funded directly by dues-paying members. Considering all the activism the Greens engage in, it could very well become a union in that process.
Never said they weren't important. Just saying that, looking at the evidence, the presidential campaigns for third parties in the last few generations are just acts of self-preservation, not a way to increase local success.
You are very naive. I'm not a third party hater, but dues don't raise enough money in the 21st century to be competitive outside very close knit communities (which are very few and far between). Most third party candidates, in parties with dues or not, self-fund an enormous amount. Stein and Nader self-funded an enormous amount as well.
And no, the Green Party is not large enough to become a union anywhere except maybe a town or two in California.
But a deeper explanation as to why you aren't going to see Green Party unions is the fact that it's really just an environmental party that happens to be more leftist than the Dems. Lost of conservatives in the Green Party and they have no mechanisms to kick them out.
I'll add to that this this is only true in about 3/4ths of states with Green parties. A good quarter or so of state Green Parties are some combination of conservative or capitalist. The Green Party is just the Democratic Party without big money and more environmentalists, no more, no less.
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He touted that book as like "let's run Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey for president" "enlightened Billionaires are the only ones who can transform national politics because their class has made it impossible for other classes to make influence"
yeah he bought into the whole "independently wealthy heroes vs evil corporations" meme
a shame too, he could have really done some good beyond the whole seatbelt thing
HIs book about Libertarians needing to join up with lefties was also a stupid ass book and strategy.
Wealthy right-wing BIllionaires actually get things done. Lazy fucks like Soros don't get anything done. I watched a panel with Nader where he was trying to convince CEOs sympathetic to his message to direct money to worthwhile causes.
And the "lefty" Billionaries were like, "we are, we're really pushing the marijuana issue"
Maybe that's why so many states have legal weed now, but such a small, and arguable worthless progression in the grand scheme of things.
This, they are nearly all FDR New Deal type socdems, thought I must same of Nader's rhetoric and explanations cut it pretty close to revealing that he may be hiding a socialist side. I'd say he's much closer to being an actual socialist than Bernie.
I must say*
Who the fuck would care if he was a secret socialist beyond some paranoid Republican?
And no, he isn't a secret socialist. He gets a lot of activist cred, because he did a lot of highly successful activist work.. That's where most of his leftist attention comes from.
In case you missed the last 80 years or so of US politics, it wasn't terribly fashionable to be a socialist, especially during Nader's prime years.
Is he /ourguy/?
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I'm going to pull a Noam Chomsky here and say it doesn't fucking matter if he's a secret socialist or not, it's the issues on the ground that matter.
And if you are wondering about the revolutionary potential of Nader, you are delusional if you think an 82 year old man has just been dog-whistling the whole time, and would shed all pretension at an old age and reveal his "true self". That thinking just reeks of desperation.
By age 82, there would have to have been some point he outed himself as a socialist. But instead he's spent his entire life trying to make capitalism less lethal, not destroy it. He's not a "slick entryist" you delusional fuck.
The 2000 debacle with Nader "stealing the voters" from Al Gore (you see, people are property) got me into researching voting systems. At first I was enthusiastic about finding examples for election reformers in history, but when the examples increased more and more, that had a non-monotonic effect on my enthusiasm. It soon became clear the bigwigs of the "Democrats" actively oppose making elections more open.
Christ, that book.
? I suppose that is meant as a reply to post .
Nader is obviously an FDR socdem blended with hippy environmental activism, good dude, but probably not a socialist. Bernie, on the other hand, was unquestionably a deep red commie in his younger years (read extensively and wrote about Marxism, stayed in USSR and Israeli kibbutz for extended periods, organized unions and protests with quote and verse socialist rhetoric), but it's an open question as to whether he's softened during his career in politics, or is merely hiding his powerlevel.
Isn't that true about the vast majority of leftists tho?
It's true of most people
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Socialists jumped on his campaign before the Clinton cartel (Wikileaks showed their heavy involvement with that Univision debate) tried to paint him as an extreme authoritarian by airing that old video at a debate. Sanders defended a few things about Castro, but lambasted his influence as authoritarian and undemocratic.
Sanders wasn't advocating a dictatorship of the proletariat or
this nigga woke.
Oh yea, they have little to no interest in opening the political arena. Even those that do, once they get in power, think… "hey we're in power, why open the playing field to more competition?".
Now that peripheral politics even is become more right-wing than left wing, Republicans seem to be doing more lip service to open elections than Democrats.
Did you miss the part before that video, where they literally aired the old video during the debate just to get him to comment on his past views?
Or is your knowledge of the 2016 election confined to webms?
This. Ralph Nader is probably the slickest entryist in American history.
If he were a radical leftist and not a socdem, he wouldnt have been for intervention in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. He wouldnt support Israel's war in Gaza. He woudnt pick "Israel, Turkey, and SAUDI ARABIA" as the primary countries to deal with ISIS. These are outright reactionary positions. Nader is much closer to a being a revolutionary socialist than Bernie was in the last 25 years.