Re: AUT: ANSWER and the liberals

[Chris Wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,
> This is one reason I tried  to emphasize in the ongoing
>  discourse here,  mainly with Chris W. and Harald
> on the pol-ideological struggles of communists, etc in
> todays mass motions against the war in the US to oppose
> these trends inside the movement itself -openly . .  I would
> also aver that this is difficult work , dare i  say that doing this
> work with some better effect can only be done seriously  with Pol.
> Organizations of revolutionaries,  based  on those who want
> to struggle for workers controlled society.  To try to
> carry on a counter-struggle  against the DP liberals and state-caps
>  without  Pol Org.  is like trying to swim the Atlantic Ocean, & to
> wait for 'spontaniety' to provide the workers  solution is to believe in
> religious miracles
>
> Of course the question is what kind of Organizations
> are politically necessary fro workers to advance -- in
> this we have a lot to deabte.

Actually, Neil, we agree on the need for political organization, for a
communist organization.  I am trying to address this latter question,
though: of what kind? To do what?

To challenge the bourgeois organizations, indeed?  But how?

To try to recruit?  To try and sit in coalitions mostly only attended by
these people?  Or to do something different?

My argument has been that fighting them requires something different.
Without wholly agreeing with "Facing Reality", I nonetheless think that
some important idea of what we should be doing is contained therein.
And it will amount to something truly unique that no one else is doing.
What makes our intervention important is that we can do stuff and say
stuff that workers can find nowhere else.

The limitations of the Facing Reality ('record and recognize') approach
is that it is far too convinced that a) socialism is already here, which
is a bit different from the 'communism is the real movement of the
class', though a long way towards that idea and b) that the document
never really deals with the fact that in concrete situations, members of
such an organization should have concrete ideas to propose if they are
actually involved in those concrete struggles.  A communist worker on
strike at her workplace can say something about specific ways to go
ahead that I think that an organization with no one in the strike  has
any business saying.  However, that organization could provide means for
the workers who wanted to to voice their opinions and ideas and provide
information about the company and other struggles and such that the
workers might otherwise not be able to do.

At the same time, I am also fond of the SI and of doing that kind of a
journal.  After all, an organization should not only 'record and
recognize', but has to rigorously take up the critique of popular (that
is not only what is pop, but what is at the forefront, what is
fashionable) ideology.  The failure to take up a critique of
structuralism or post-structuralism or a host of other things (Raoul
Vaneigem had an interesting list in one of the issues the Situationist
International magazine that is still quite relevant) in a rigorous way,
rather than counterposing 'Marxism' VS. Structuralism.

I am not sure if the perspectives are compatible or if something else
entirely needs to be done.  I think that they are compatible, and that
there are deep simlarities on certain issues between Facing Reality and
the SI: defense of the council form; critique of what is outdated or
wrong in Marx, the Marxist tradition, anarchism, etc; refusal to tell
workers what to do; refusal to be recruitment-oriented; refusal of
militantism, which the SI takes up better, but which is present in some
form in the Facing Reality document (and contradicted by James' own
notion in his stuff collected in Marxism in Our Time, which has all
kinds of crap in it); and so on.

Cheers,
Chris



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