HRP Regards Split With Rainbow Party As Not Serious
HRP Regards Split With Rainbow Party As Not Serious
By Jody Vellucci
(News Staff Reporter)
The Human Rights Party (HRP) doesn’t foresee any negative effects from the Rainbow People’s Party (RPP) decision to split from the HRP until after the November election.
“We have no way of knowing what effect it will have,” said City Councilman Jerry De Grieck. “My guess is it won’t be that great. The RPP constituency will still vote for the HRP candidates and support our platform.”
The RPP announced its split from the HRP in the Sept. 1-15 edition of The Ann Arbor Sun, the RPP’s newspaper. Written by John Sinclair, chairman for the central committee and the central staff of the RPP, the statement blamed a lack of unity for the split.
The HRP responded to the article in a statement released Sunday.
"There never has been any formal alliance between us,” De Grieck said. “They are always welcome to come back as individuals or as a caucus within the HRP. We do have severe political difference between the two parties.”
David Sinclair, assistant chairman, declined comment on the effect of the split.
“I don’t know,” he said. "I prefer not to speculate. The split was based on principle
not on the possible effect it would have on the election.
John Sinclair, in the statement, blamed a lack of commitment to the people in the
community as another reason for the split.
“We believe these people have no real interest in dealing with the problems people in this community face in their daily struggle for survival; we believe that abstract theoretical questions are more important to them than the question of people’s control of the political institutions in this county, and we feel very strongly that these people are more interested in controlling the Human Rights Party and making it reflect their own narrow preoccupations than they are concerned about building the HRP into a strong mass community organization with a mass base and an active program of practice, carried out through major electoral offices for bringing about concrete social change in this community,” he said.
Sinclair said there must be unity on the question of the HRP’s constituency.
“We feel that in order for there to be unity within the HRP and between the HRP and its constituency in the Ann Arbor Rainbow community, there must at least be unity on the question of the party’s actual constituency, and that elements within the HRP which insist that the party’s constituency is comprised of ‘liberal Democrats’ must be conclusively proved wrong, through practice, so that the party can move ahead in the future to build itself up into the powerful progressive force it could be,” he said.
Sinclair said later that the RPP’s dissatisfaction came out in the open at the convention showing strong support for a Democrats.
“We were particularly concerned that we run someone for sheriff, and we expected them to have an analysis showing strong support for a sheriff's candidate," he said.
“Instead they had a defeatist argument, saying the party young people. The liberal has little support in the community except by the liberal Democrats.
"The April elections showed we had strong support by the young people. The liberal Democrats aren't the people we want to represent.
“We feel that the principles and platform of the HRP are in the interest of all the people in the community — the white people, the black people, the poor people and the young people. Everyone except the rich people.”
Sinclair said they expected to work with the HRP after the November election.
“We are hoping the people who were swayed will see they were wrong after the November election and will relate to a wider view about what the HRP should be. Then we can work together,” he said. “This isn’t a be-all or end-all thing. We live here and we intend to work here and live here for years and years.”
In its statement Sunday, the HRP said it was answering the Sun article “both to correct the inaccuracies in the articles and to encourage debate on the issues which have been raised.”
The statement said there were basic political differences between the two groups.
“RPP’s primary constituency is ‘freaks on the street, students in the public schools and universities, the rainbow merchants around town, rock and roll bands, community service workers, (and) brothers and sisters who work for the honk one way or another in order to insure their survival.’ RPP believes in a youth and cultural revolution, one which is happening here and now and which involves smoking marijuana.
“HRP disagrees with this philosophy on several points. First, we feel that it is an age-chauvinist position, writing off the older and elderly as useless to fundamental social change.
“HRP sees social change arising primarily from political and economic forces,” the statement continued. “We see our constituency in terms of its social class. Labor, organized and unorganized, and oppressed groups—women, racial minorities, gays and students—are the people in society whose interests and power give the capability to achieve social change.”
The HRP disagreed on the issue of a sheriff’s candidate. In the statement, it says the convention voted Aug. 20 to run for sheriff only if it had an acceptable candidate.
After interviewing two prospective candidates Aug. 24, the party voted “almost unanimously" that it had no acceptable candidate and no one, therefore, would run. Two others had previously decided against running.
The statement also said the does not consider the "liberal Democrats” its constituency.
"Steve Burghardt, our state representative nominee, did not say our party’s constituency is ‘liberal Democrats.’ What he, and many others who are concerned about keeping HRP open, said was that we must recognize that many people who have voted and might vote for HRP are in fact ‘liberal Democrats.’ That does not mean that we try to sound like liberal Democrats with a different name, but rather that we seek to persuade them in a reasonable way that the Democratic Party cannot meet their needs or provide for their concerns. We question RPP’s usage of the word ‘ultraleftist’ in this context.
“In order to bring about fundamental social change, we must seek to bring together all those victimized by the American social system and unite them to change that system. This requires a broadly based constituency and a party that is open, not exclusionary.”