I'm Running for Mayor of SF - Please Help me Get on the Ballot

what's up with calling yourself an anarchist and then running for office?

so, are you an anarchist *except* when you're trying to get elected?

i don't get it.

food for thought...

Voting for the First Time: A Conversation With Utah Phillips
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041025/crane

hey.. at least Josh Wolf isn't running from an 'Anarchist Party' :p

It's clear that he's running with the intention to put issues on the table... and thank god he is 'cus Newsom has no real opponents.. meaning without Josh Wolf, Chicken John, and a few others, the issues won't be discussed.

I'd rather have an anarchist run for office to make a point than silently not vote. If you're not gonna vote.. pass out flyers about why .. how you don't want to reinforce a flawed system. But when you don't vote and remain quiet about it, people just assume you're apathetic.

There are many ways to get issues out there - running for offices, creating a 'don't vote' campaign, etc. Folks are doing both in SF. Pick what you wanna do .. just do SOMETHING.

Thomas explains how "Chicken John" is the perfect foil for the SF Chronicle and others who do not wish to see progressives get ahead:

"The Chronicle, in essence, is using Rinaldi as the embodiment of Newsom's opposition, belittling all challengers by undermining and dismissing their platforms as the "bad joke" Rinaldi's candidacy represents."

Electoral politics is a psychologically sophisticated scam hustling voters into thinking they have a real say in how they are governed. The right to vote is intended to keep us mystified, atomized and passive, and is amazingly effective in keeping us from taking effective action against the private sector elite. Nothing fundamental can be changed by atomized individuals, and supposed small gains won by working and poor people in elections are inevitably eroded away to nothing by those who really hold power. The only source of positive social change has always been direct action: working class people acting together on the terrain of daily life, where we work and where we live, and fighting for what we need against bosses, corporations and the rich -- outside of and completely against the conventional decision-making institutions of this society.

Democratic ideology is the central element in a bodyguard of lies maintaining the power of the capitalist class. The market economy rules as an absolute dictatorship over life on earth today. You cannot vote your way around that fact. Market forces cannot be resisted by voting. Regardless of what they say, anyone who runs for office or attempts to hustle working people into voting is trying to fool us into thinking that we have a stake in the existing state of things. Any form of participation in electoral politics by working people short-circuits the emergence of what we really need; a mass political culture that will be independent of and irreconcilably antagonistic to the market and the state.

In strikes, riots and a thousand other forms of action the working class must use violence against the dictatorship of the market. The class struggle isn’t a peaceful process -- might makes right. Only large-scale, conscious, organized action can bring working and poor people victory in the class war.

Utah Phillips is a tedious left-liberal fleabag who should have been packed off to the self-managed glue factory years ago -- his whinny, objectively pro-capitalist moralizing isn't even worth spitting at.

Josh Wolf is just another ineffectual liberal dolt. The only possible, ever so slight impact his cretinous electoral campaign can have is that it will serve as the latest in an endless series of excuses for left-liberals who like to call themselves anarchists to indulge their submission to US capitalism in November.