The Militant and Elian's Rescue - I

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    It is hard to express the feelings I experienced upon looking at the
Militant's web site Saturday afternoon and seeing the latest issue finally
posted under the banner headline, "INS Assault in Miami Strikes Blow at
Working Class."

    Not that the headline was unanticipated. For months I have watched with
growing apprehension as my erstwhile ex comrades of the U.S. Socialist
Workers Party distanced themselves from the fight to free Elian González. On
a couple of occasions in recent weeks I've drafted commentaries analyzing
the SWP's evolving position; I did not circulate them broadly (not even as
"broadly" as this list) because I did not want to in any way contribute to
an open rift between Cuba and one of the groups on the American Left that
has gone out of its way to identify itself with the Cuban Revolution. I did
not believe this would be in the interests of either Cuba or the communist
movement in the United States or internationally.

    Now, of course, the issue is moot: under the heat of the actual class
struggle, the  position of the SWP leadership has evolved. The SWP, like the
gusano mafia, the right wing talk show hosts, the bourgeois civil
libertarians, the Republican politicians, and the editors of the New York
Times, is campaigning against what the lead sentence of the Militant's lead
article calls "a brutal attack on democratic rights."

    Since the SWP and the Militant have a certain following and authority
among a broader layer of activists, I think that now it is unavoidable to
take up the Militant's arguments explicitly and broadly, partly because (as
I'll explain in a later post) there are real good reasons why many people,
including supporters of the Cuban revolution, have been taken aback by the
WAY Elián was rescued, viewing it as an unnecessary and ominous display of
force.

    This first post isn't going to deal directly with those issues but with
some suggestions as to what's led the SWP leadership to this position.

    It seems that what is involved is an adaptation to some specific layers
of the U.S. population. The Militant editorial itself suggests this:

    "Millions of working people feel nothing but outrage at the rulers'
trampling on our most basic rights and political space, our livelihoods, our
very life and limb. The regressive burden of the bourgeoisie's tax policies;
the inevitability of banks and government agencies foreclosing on small
farmers squeezed by the ever-increasing weight of giant monopolies; the
brutal indifference to human life symbolized by the deadly police assault on
the Branch Davidian compound in Waco?if the only voice working people and
worse-off layers of the middle classes hear speaking out against such
indignities are those of reaction, if no angry and determined working-class
voice is heard pointing a class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren
song of fascist demagogues will gain an ever more receptive ear."

    This is an orientation to what one might call the "Buchananite
proletariat." If you look at the laundry-list of "outrages" and
"indignities" every single one  coincides with issues demagogically raised
by the Buchananites, and some are constant themes of the right (taxes,
WACO). Of course the Militant takes them up from a socialist angle.

    Now this isn't meant to imply that the Militant has become Buchananized
or undergoing a left-to-right transformation like that of the Lyndon
LaRouche sect. But when the Militant clearly and openly explains who it is
they're trying to reach and why, it is worth noting.

    This orientation flows from the Militant's and the SWP's view that the
United States is going through a profound economic and social crisis, which
is giving rise to rightist bonapartist figures that are trying to develop
embryonic fascist movements.

    In the SWP's view (as best as I understand it) this crisis is due in
large part, or has been significantly aggravated by, the defeat of U.S.
imperialism's in the cold war. The SWP believes the U.S. lost the cold war
because of the continuing existence of what most people would call
"socialist" regimes in Eastern Europe (including East Germany) and the
breakup of the Stalinist bureaucratic castes who misruled those countries
and exercised a negative influence over the world workers movement until a
decade ago. In the Militant's view, it would take bloody counterrevolutions
to re-establish capitalism for example, in East Berlin, and since that
hasn't happened, East Berlin is still what most people call "socialist"
(although the SWP insists on the traditional Trotskyist terminology of "a
worker's state." Actually, East Berlin isn't by itself a workers state, it's
part of the East German workers state, but I hope people see what I mean.)

    Now, just as under the impact of the crisis of the 20s and 30s, a layer
of the masses were driven in despair towards fascist demagogues, so, too, is
that happening today in the United States, that's what the comrades think is
going on. The comrades basically agree with the perception that the ruling
class is on a jack-booted thug rampage, and a huge amount of the editorial
is dedicated to drawing up what even I will admit is a quite impressive bill
of particulars.

    As long-time followers of discussions on the SWP on this list will know,
I believe the comrades are largely living in a parallel universe, or, to put
it another way, that they are cocooned within a reality distortion field.
So, for example, in analyzing East Germany I would start from the FACT that
capitalism has quite evidently been re-established, and not only isn't East
Germany a workers state, it isn't a state at all. The comrades however
insist that what I would say is quite evident before our eyes cannot really
be the true, hidden essence of things because the conditions for a
capitalist restoration (bloody counterrevolutionary defeat of the working
class) has not been met.

    I would say something quite similar about their analysis of an extreme
economic, social and political crisis in the United States. The comrades
insist, and have insisted for decades, that it is happening or is about to
happen, and point to things like Jesse Venturaism and Buchananism as proof.
I don't see it, and I believe there is a different explanation for those
phenomena.

    It IS true that for quite a few years now, figures like Perot and
Ventura have gotten a very significant hearing in the political arena. It
seems like every election brings some new "savior" out of the woodwork, and,
of course, Buchanan has turned running for president as a demagogue into a
lifetime career -- and not an unprofitable one.

    I believe this is due to a crisis of the legitimacy of the bourgeois
political institutions in the United States, not a broader socio-economic
crisis, as the Militant seems to feel. Long experience has convinced working
people that it doesn't make any difference who you vote for, whether
Democrat or Republican, and that there is no relationship whatsoever between
what the people you vote for say while campaigning and what they do when
they're in office.

    Further, the U.S. government and judicial system has become such a
complicated web of overlapping jurisdictions, contradictory mandates, layers
and layers of judges and administrators and boards and courts of appeal and
zoning boards and municipal governments piled on county governments piled on
special districts, federal mandates and regulations, piled on state
governments and boards, and so on all the way to Congress, the Presidency
and the Supreme Court, that one cannot say with any certainty what it is the
government does or does not do, what is or is not allowed, and who has final
say.

    Put on top of that the shameless whoring of politicians from the two
major parties, who OPENLY sell themselves to the highest bidders, and
blatant insincere pandering like Gore around Elián and McCain around the
rebel flag, and you get the current state of American political affairs.

    Thus, told by the media that they have an extraordinary opportunity to
have a greatly disproportionate influence on who the major party candidates
might be, five out of six of the rock solid conservative upstanding citizens
of New Hampshire don't even bother to vote in the presidential primary
despite supposedly hotly contested races in both parties.

    For its part the bourgeois press pretends the vast majority of us who
don't and won't vote don't even live here. They shamelessly doctor the
results of their polls to exclude the 50-80% of the people that "just say
no" to the current round of electoral cretinism and tell us stupidities
like, 40% are for Bore, 40% are for Gush, and 20% are undecided. That's
bullshit and everyone knows it. The real story is that 50% won't vote, 20%
now favor tweedle-dee, 20% tweedle dum; and 10% claim they're still trying
to make up their minds. In their coverage, they interview "real people" and
get "M-O-S" (Man On the Street) sound bites. Somehow, even in a place like
New Hampshire where people who REALLY intended to vote were as rare as a
snowflake in mid-July, every single "real person" interviewed was for one or
another candidate or was still on the fence but absolutely decided to cast a
ballot.

    What you never hear on TV is what people really say around water
coolers: things like, "don't vote, it only encourages them," and "if God
wanted us to vote he would have given us candidates," things like that.

    The REAL state of affairs is revealed in more specialized and more
honest polls the news organizations sometimes commission for their own use
in an effort to figure out what to do about their declining ratings or
readership. These consistently show that the bourgeois press is saved from
the shame of being the LEAST trusted institution in the United States only
by the U.S. Congress. Basically though,the ratings for credibility of ALL
major institutions range from the high teens or low 20s (Congress, the
press) to somewhere around 50% (churches).

    Given this situation, it isn't hard for ANYONE to get a hearing provided
their message is carried fairly widely by the news media and they denounce
the government, or the rich, or "monopolies," or the news media, or any
number of other real or imagined bette noirs. But that doesn't mean there's
a fascist movement in the making, not by a long shot.

    This crisis of legitimacy of the bourgeois political institutions has
its roots in the Vietnam War and its "credibility gap," systematically
widened and deepened by the Watergate scandal and further confirmed by
things people see the politicians say and do. Distrust of the government and
the bourgeois press is now I believe a permanent feature of U.S. political
life, part of the "national character," so to speak, handed down from father
to son just as party affiliation used to be.

    For the bourgeoisie it is not a very good thing because when a big
social crisis explodes, they won't be able to call on the moral authority of
the courts or Congress or government in general or the press or even to a
large degree of the churches to help them through. But until then, I just
don't see this phenomenon, and the political space it creates for demagogues
in the electoral arena, being transformed into the breeding ground for a
fascist movement.

    The truth is the U.S. government and political institutions are quite
stable as things stand. The labor movement is quiescent, as it has been
really since the late 1940s, and especially markedly so since the late 70s.
The imperialists have been able to maintain a basically stable standard of
living for much of the working class, and significantly improve it for the
more petty-bourgeoisified layers, thanks to their super-exploitation of the
third world and --I believe-- to the lucky break of a technological
revolution that's led to significant advances in labor productivity, the
fruits of which the capitalists have pocketed almost to the last penny.

    There are extreme social tensions and contradictions in the country, as
shown by the 2 million people in prison and the almost daily, random
assassinations of Blacks and others in major cities by police forces. The
contradiction between what IS and what COULD BE, especially for the least
privileged layers of the working people, disproportionately immigrants and
people of color, is extremely violent and could explode into a major social
crisis at any time.

    There are hints that a new wave of radicalization might be starting to
develop, but if so it is a great distance away still from being a mass
phenomenon.

    Yet, despite all that, in the broad, historic scheme of things, the news
from the U.S. today is that all is quiet, as it was yesterday, and the day
before.

    The SWP has an extremely difficult time accepting this idea. Since the
mid-1970s, it has been projecting a major working class explosion in
reaction to a ruling class "offensive" against the rights and standard of
living of working people.

    The "offensive" is real enough, but over the years it has become clear
that it is a very cautious, measured, chipping away at the edges, not the
broad scale assault the Militant has been writing about. This is especially
true of the past 8 years or so, with U.S. imperialism reaping the fruits of
its victory in the cold war (not nearly what it anticipated, but every
little bit helps) and the technological revolution I alluded to earlier.

    So in essence what we're talking about is a group of comrades who are
profoundly disoriented in terms of what the world is like and what the
political life of the country is like. This makes them susceptible to all
sorts of impressionistic fantasies, some of which I'll explore in the next
post, and it also accounts for the shrill, ultimatistic, almost
"Marisleysist" tone of their editorial on Elian's rescue.

Jose



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