For Immediate Press Release: A. F. Markin Will Not Run For President In 2016

For Immediate Press Release: A. F. Markin Will Not Run For President In 2016    

From The American Left History Blog-June 2015

“Apparently the perennial third-party presidential candidate Mister Allan Frederick Markin, although he takes pains to make it clear to everybody that since childhood he has always gone by the moniker “A. F.,” is the only politician in America, or at least who is not inside the Democratic or Republican Party, who has not thrown his or her hat, or tried to throw his or her hat,  into the ring this election cycle for a chance at the brass ring, or Hillary Rodham Clinton’s big target. He must be a rare bird.”-John Stewart, WDJA News

When asked by a reporter at the press conference held in New York City where he has always made such announcements about his political plans about the possibility of endorsing Hilary Rodham Clinton for President to keep that office out of the clutches of the bastard Republicans A.F. Markin who had just announced that he would not run for the office this cycle, quoted one of his favorite old time bluesman, Skip James, a man who had many problems with wine, women and song in his time -“I’d rather be the devil that to be that woman’s man.” When pressed further by a reporter from the Detroit Globe he simply stated “Enough said” as he left the microphones. Laura Perkins, The Chicago Patriot-Ledger        

Routers 24/7 Media Flash: A. F. Markin, long time anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist activist and the evil genius behind the blog American Left History, has announced today that under no conditions will he be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. In prior election cycles he has run for the office as an Independent Social-Democrat (2000), the Rainbow Left Coalition (2004), and after a fierce nomination fight on the Green Wave Party ticket (2008, although in that case he waged an opportunistic low-level campaign because according to one disappointed campaign worker Markin did not want to ruin then Senator Barack Obama’s chances at the White House expecting some kind of job offer for doing so. To once again prove that opportunism does not pay, especially for so-called principled socialists like him and Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, he was never offered any position in that administration).

In 2012 Markin got what he called at the time “religion” and sat out the campaign although without any thoughts of not ruining the chances of that “miserable sell-out bastard Obama” (Markin’s harsh words not apparently due to the failure to get an appointed job but because Obama had hood-winked everybody with any sense in 2008 that he was another garden variety Democrat hustle wars and sacrifice to a jaded public). Rather because he had read an obscure document from the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 (Vladimir Lenin’s old-time operation to create world revolution established in 1919 and which went out of business in 1943) in an obscure left-wing socialist newspaper which stated that socialists should not seek, not even run for, the executive offices (President, Governor, sheriff) of what they called the “bourgeois capitalist state.” Chastised, thoroughly chastised by that obscure odd-ball reference he is again sitting the 2016 election cycle out.    

At the press conference held in New York City’s Best Eastern Hotel making the announcement Markin, paraphrasing the great 19th century Northern Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman (hero of “Billy’s bummers” traipsing through Georgia and its environs and scourge of the rebels) stated that “if drafted I will not run and if elected I will not serve” in that post. He, however, did not rule out the possibility of running for some legislative office like the United States Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. –Josh Breslin, Portland Free Press

A.F. Markin commentary on the American Politics Today website expanding on his decision not to run (originally posted on the American Left History blog on June 6, 2015):     

“I know that the long suffering readers of this blog have been waiting breathlessly for me to announce my intentions for the presidential campaign of 2016. Wait a minute! What kind of madness is this on my part to impose on readers who I am sure are still recovering from the shell-shock of that seemingly endless and mendacious 2012 presidential campaign. Well… Okay, as usual I want to, for good or ill, make a little point about running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state now that I have gotten ‘religion’ about the necessary of radicals and revolutionaries, even garden variety socialists like me who in the past has run for such offices to get out the socialist message and because during election cycles you at least have people half paying attention, NOT to do so. I think this point can really be driven home today now that we have a ‘progressive’ Democratic president, one Barack Obama, as a foil.

I have detailed elsewhere in a more scholarly journal (Political Affairs Today, June 2012) the controversial and checkered history of running for executive office of the bourgeois capitalist state in the international workers movement, and especially in the Communist International in its heroic days in the early 1920's, surrounding the question of whether radicals and revolutionaries, on principle, should run for these office. I need not repeat that argument here. (See also June 2012 Archives, "If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve-Revolutionaries and Running For Executive Offices," American Left History blog, dated June 15, 2012). I have also noted there the trajectory of my own conversion to the position of opposition to such runs.

Previously I had seen such electoral efforts as good propaganda tools and/or basically harmless attempts to intersect political reality at times when the electorate is tuned in. Always under the assumption made clear during the campaign that, of course, if elected one would not assume the office.

In any case, I admit to a previously rather cavalier attitude toward the whole question, even as I began to see the wisdom of opposition. But having gone through the recent presidential campaign and, more importantly, the inauguration and installation of a ‘progressive’ black man to the highest office attainable under the imperium I have begun to wipe that smirk off my face.

Why? I have hardly been unaware throughout my leftist political career that Social Democratic and Communist (Stalinist/Maoist varieties especially) Party politicians have, individually or in popular front alliances with capitalist parties, wreaked havoc on working people while administrating the bourgeois state. I have, in particular, spent a good part of my political career fighting against the notion of popular front strategies as they have been forged in the past, disastrously in places like Spain during the Civil War in the 1930s and Chile in 1973 or less disastrously in France in the 1980s. However this question of the realities of running the imperial state in America really hit home with the coming into office of Barack Obama.

Certainly, Obama did not have, and in the course of such things could not have had, any qualms about administering the bourgeois state, even if such toilsome work contradicted his most basic principles. Assuming, for the sake of argument here, that Obama is not the worst bourgeois politician, progressive or not, that has come down the pike. Already, after a few short weeks in office, he had escalated the troop levels in Afghanistan. He was from the get-go most earnestly committed to bailing out the financial heart of the imperial system, at the long term expense of working people. Where is the room for that vaunted ‘progressive’ designation in all of this? Oh yes he has said he is against torture and illegal torture centers but look at the still open Guantanamo and other evil deeds when a few documents about the nefarious doing of the CIA were rolled out by Congress. That, dear readers might have passed for progressive action- in the 17th century. Jesus, is there no end to this madness in taking grandstanding kudos for stuff that Voltaire would have dismissed out of hand. So the next time someone asks you to run for President of the United States (or governor of a state or mayor of a city) take the Markin pledge - Just say NO!