Re: AUT: Re: Palestione, Israel and other ghettoes

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott,

The notion of a military bloc which is not also a political bloc is what I
think is absurd.  I think that your understanding of Kornilov and August is
quite wrong, even on Trotsky's terms.  What's more, it led to something the
opposite of workers' power.  In practice, Trotsky and Lenin worked to render
the soviets and the factory councils (whatever their limitations pace
Harald's comments in the past) mere shells relative to the Party-led state
apparatus.  So no, "seizing power for these Soviets will not 'strengthen'
the working class."  "Seizing power for", aka seizing state power and as
representing the working class at that, will take a revolutionary struggle
and subordinate back into the separation of the political and the economic.
It will undermine a revolutionary struggle from inside, which was not, btw,
counterposed by me to a reformist 'option', but by you.  the whole phrasing
even suggests that it will be the state, not the soviets, which will run
things.  After all, why else are we seizing power 'for' the soviets?

Nowhere am I arguing that if workers' revolution is a possibility should we
restrain our position to a 'bourgeois democratic' demand.  I was working
through the problem in reference to Harald's point and trying to raise the
idea that we should not make a fetish of any 'demand', and rather focus on
maximizing the self-activity of our class.  If the overthrow of the PA/PLO
and the kicking out of Israeli forces is really on the plate, great.  Are
there independent organs of workers' power springing up in Palestine?  If
so, then the real disagreement between us arises: you say "national workers'
state", but I say that is already defeat being organized internally, not
because it may be geographically limited at first, but because it would
sanctify this limitation and codify it with a state apparatus.  As I said,
it is not a question of "The armed working class versus standing around with
daisies."  Rather, it is "worker's state" versus the control over that armed
force by directly democratic working class organs, subordinate to no party,
and the immediate struggle against the separation of social power and social
production and the way in which social reproduction is organized.  They are
opposite conceptions and practices.

I don't know the extent of the situation in Palestine and I have little or
no trust in Trotskyist sect triumphalism.  And as I made quite clear, the
issue is what the Palestinian workers feel they can do and what they want.
If that is a separate state, we are obliged to warn our class of a suicidal
option.  If they want to overthrow the PA and the Israeli occupation, then
we should be talking about what else is possible and the promotion of
self-organization and self-control at every level in that process.  You may
have noticed in the past that Harald and I disagreed on this rather
vigorously in relation to Algeria.

As for East Timor, my argument was not whether or not Australia's
intervention was good.  Rather, the central issue for us is not immediate
amelioration of suffering, but the extension of our class'
self-organization, unity and power as the as the only way in which people's
desire to end their misery and suffering can be realized.  However, it is
not impossible to imagine a situation where 'imperialist' intervention might
not actually clear a space by reducing the level of immediate repression,
however unlikely.  I know more than a few folks who found the US gov't
intervention against the Teamster leadership in the early 1990's opened a
space for radicals by eliminating such policies as breaking activists' knees
and killing them, even if this was not the intent of Carey or the US state.
There were also many Albanian workers who, regardless of their distrust of
the US, viewed its bombing of Serbia and the driving out of Serbian forces
as beneficial.  One should at least wonder why and not assume that the
Albanians were just a bunch of tools.  None of us would have supported US
intervention, I hope, but we would have had to explain to a lot of Albanians
why it was no solution.  It was a question of what it offered, not a
question of wanting state intervention, which is always for reasons not our
own, but which is not always guaranteed to work out as the state wants it.
Therefore, I was posing a question about the basis on which we assess
whether a situation works in our favor or against us, regardless of whether
or not it involves the amelioration of suffering in the immediate.

Your comments on the SACP are really out of touch with what the SACP
represented.  They were no less a bourgeois party than the ANC and did what
one would have expected them to do.  And as you never quite seem to get, no
party can call for soviets/councils/etc.  Either the working class creates
its own organs in the course of the struggle or it does not, and it is a
question of us understanding what forms those organs take, which simply is
not likely to be uniform across the world in each struggle.  That is
fetishizing councils aka councilism.  Neither the SACP nor any other party
could create what the working class did not bring into existence because
those organs are always spontaneously created according to the struggle.  We
can fight to clarify, strengthen, link them, and so on, but we cannot create
them out of our will or party line.

Finally, that is the first time I have seen a call to boycott elections
called "overthrow the current regime and establish organ of workers' power."
This might be a nice after the fact self-justification, but it is also
amazingly disingenuous.  Lots of people call for the boycott of elections.
And even if they did put forward the actual call to overthrow the regime and
establish organs of workers' power (and I admit to having problems with this
whole telling people what to do thing since they never do them because they
heard our 'demand'), I doubt it would have been more than mere luck.  As has
been said, "Even a clock which has stopped tells the time correctly twice a
day."  Solidarity UK's old position papers really made the point in stating
that other workers vote or don't vote for reasons nothing like that of
pro-revolutionaries and we should not be confused on that matter.

Cheers,
Chris




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