Forwarded from Nestor (response to Jared)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jared Israel wrote:

"It does my heart good that at last some Leftists are opposing imperialism
sufficiently strongly that they get attacked as sectarians. Hallelujah! All
praise Mine and other "sectarians" for they have brave hearts and have not
been seduced by fellowships and grants and positions in NGOs and whatever
into backing whatever phony "Civil society" and "democratic" lie the
Imperial beasts use to justify taking over and destroying target countries."

It is always decent to heal or strengthen someone´s heart, so I will throw
in my two cents. I am as sectarian as Mine on the East Timor issue, as well
as in Rwanda, Congo, Yugoslavia, and, er, Latin America. I have just read
on today´s newspapers that Bush is thinking of employing in Cuba the same
tactics that gave such a good result in Yugoslavia, namely to flood the
island with dollars, hardware, software, and NGOs which should generate a
"new consciousness" in the Cuban young generations. Not a matter of chance
that the Cuban ambassador was present at the Second Belgrade Forum this
year...

The examples Jared gave, following his paragraph abobe, are quite
illustrative. My only comment would be that it is by no means a phenomenon
of our times to see honest "progressives" and "Left wingers" supporting
imperialist interventions in the Third World, and then falling into silence.

This is not only a matter of being duped by an intelligent move of the
imperialists, however. There is also a theoretical blind point. I have been
thinking of posting a long comment on this some of these days, but this is
the moment to send a forerunner.

What these leftists miss is the concept of "national movement". In a sense,
it is not their fault, in the sense that this concept and category has been
little theorized in the concrete countries where it was put to succesful
action by the masses and the revolutionaries (1). I wrote "category",
because in formations that are subject to the iron heel of imperialism
"national movements" are much more than a singular, circumstancial alliance
of different social classes and groups.

A national movement is a complete plexus of both material and ideological,
even theoretical, forces, which are _not_ alligned together by the
_negative_ pressure of imperialism, on the contrary they coalesce by the
_positive_ necessity to drag the country up from the barbarism imposed on
it by the "civilized" and on towards civilization as a product of the local
traditions and aspirations.

Without this category, it is hard to define whether "nationalism" in the
Third World is "bourgeois", "petty bourgeois", "peasant" and so on. The
hegemony of these classes is discussed, sometimes by the force of arms,
_WITHIN_ the national movement, which, as seen from the imperial center, is
basically a bloc that must be crushed as such.

Leftists in the core countries or in minor imperialist countries, absorbed
by the dialectics of class versus class struggle in formations where
national revolutions have been accomplished or have been bestowed from the
very beginning by the conditions of European expansion, find it hard to
cope with this strange thing, this inter-class body of struggling masses
which at the same time _is and is not_, expresses and superates in
practice, class struggle.

Imperial powers, however, don´t get confused in this regard. They always
know that in order to defeat a Third World country they must defeat THE
NATIONAL MOVEMENT as a whole, and that the ways to do it depend on which is
the hegemonic class within that movement. Thus, they can easily depict the
situation in the target country in "class" terms, and they can easily
co-opt Leftist people who try to impose on the realities of the
semicolonial world the basic oppositions that are valid, in a DIRECT way,
at the core.

As Antonello Gerbi exposed once, when the Europeans reached America they
thought that our lions, which lacked the long and majestic hair that
African lions could boast, were weaker than those in the Old Continent.
Well, the fact is that we did not have lions, we had cougars. This is the
point.

N O T E

(1) Some of these works, particularly those by Cabral and Neto, have been
translated and have deserved some diffussion. But neither of these great
African revolutionaries have dealt with the situation where the national
movement is revolutionary although not under a non-proletarian leadership.
Thus, even these extraordinary inroads into the understanding of this
phenomenon are, in a sense, biased.

I would like to stress the basic idea that underlies Jared´s position,
namely that national movements in the periphery deserve full support from
Leftists everywhere ALWAYS, that is even when they are not led by conscious
Leftist groups.

Lic. Néstor M. Gorojovsky


Louis Proyect
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