A Nader/LaDuke Campaign and Movement-Building.

• Author: Glick, Ted

[Ralph Nader is a candidate for the Green Party nomination for US President. -Editor]

Fundamental, systemic change becomes possible only when large numbers of people, millions, tens of millions, collectively demonstrate that they will not tolerate the old system and are prepared to support something new. The forms of action that this broad mass of people take will vary, but in ways as small as speaking up publicly to neighbors and friends, to more bold actions like civil disobedience or militant direct action, a lesson of history is that the only way substantive, revolutionary change takes place is through the emergence of such a popular movement.

We need such a movement in the United States. And as the first year of the new century gets off the ground, there are abundant signs that such a movement may well be in its beginning stages. "The battle in Seattle" is the most significant manifestation of this new reality. It is also seen in the 50,000 people, primarly African Americans, who came together in just a few weeks to demonstrate in Charleston, South Carolina on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend against the flying of the confederate flag on top of the capitol building. And it is seen by a number of indications, Seattle being one of them, that students are on the move, from the growth and local victories of United Students Against Sweatshops to the emergence over the past year of SURGE and STARC, two other national student networks, to the thousands of young people who marched to shut down the School of the Americas in Georgia in mid-November.

It is within this political context that, as this article is written, a Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke Green Party campaign is beginning to emerge onto the national political scene.

This is another hopeful development, one that is badly needed. Without it, we face a year of political rhetoric from the Democrats and Republicans, as well as a likely Patrick Buchanan Reform Party candidacy, that is, at its best, centrist and another dose of false promises, and more often downright reactionary and hostile to pro-justice, environment, human rights, peace and labor positions. If there was no Nader/LaDuke candidacy, there would be NO progressive voice on the national political scene answering their lies and propaganda and, make no mistake about it, that would affect us all.

When there is no public expression of our set of politics during one of these every-four-years political games we are subjected...