Armand's "socialist" Sorelianism

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My first and last on this issue. Lou has already asked me not to turn
the list into a cockpit whenever specimens such as this one come to
the fore. But what can I do if they are always givin me a new
opportunity to show why the Argentinean working class doesn't trust
socialists?

Armand Diego has begun what I presume must be an attempt at debate
with my positions. Let the attempt be welcome. I would also like to
add "let the ad hominem arguments (so usual when someone shows that
there are no robes on the King) be spared", but some of them have a
political significance, and as such I will have to deal with them.
That is, politically. Sorry, I am not to blame for the kind of
demagoguery that passes for "left" among mainstream Argentinean
progressives.

Armand writes that after reading me he

"read some disillusion in his words.  And I understand ... he
felt left outside the crowd."

Isn't it wonderful? First of all Armand interprets my words, and then
he explains his own interpretation as if _his version_ was _the
truth_. I dare him to show a single word in my postings where
disillusion can be found. In fact, I could not have been
disillusioned, because I had no _illusion_. I guess Armand is
speaking of my "La alianza trágica" posting, which is in Spanish. On
that posting, I simply state that the May Square of Thursday last had
no workers among its components, thus becoming a broadly defined
"petty bourgeois plus unemployed / homeless" mobilisation. I will
outline the general ideas of that posting so that cdes. who cannot
read Spanish can benefit from this debate.

On that e-mail, I stated that this class composition brought in two
basic problems, the first of all that there was no possible backbone
to a movement with such a composition. This is no problem in itself,
but it becomes a problem when, as it is happening today, many
"leftists" --and I am also thinking of many "left Peronists", not a
few union leaders included, in the general definition-- tired of the
rejection they permanently receive from actual workers _as a class_,
have turned to these social groups as their new model of
revolutionary vanguard.

The second problem is more serious: such a class composition, in a
country that is falling down to pieces, is prone to "tragic" forms of
political consciousness. Black and white, unmediated, moralistic
views of politics and life which can't generate a concrete conception
of reality, and which can at most be a spasmodic answer to police
brutality. As it will be shown below, Armand is a wonderful exponent
of such a cast of mind. I understand his rage at my own positions.

I pointed out that during the march the generalized slogans were
against the "maldita policía" (that is, the "f*king police") and
similar ones. Not a single step ahead in political consciousness. One
of the most vocal shouters of this intellectual void, by the way,
were the Morenoite MST group, who came into the square, as usual,
with their large (almost Stalinist!) loudspeakers, booming on us
their empty chatter as they always do (to the annoyed boredom of most
of the common, flesh-and-blood people who don't need the MST to
remind them how terrible the cops can be!).

Armand, unfortunately, does not seem to be able to rise above
vulgarity and arrive at some decent philosophical level, thus he
states that he sees in "What he [Néstor] calls the "tragic alliance"
on the streets ... some bitterness at the fact that tens of thousands
marched against the crimes at Pueyrredon bridge". This is of course a
silly distortion, perhaps my fault for offering vintage wine to
people who are used to low quality beer.

And it is also a stupid attempt at slander, either voluntary or not.
Armand supposes that I "would have preferred that his loved CGT
(rebelde) of Mr. Moyano would have done something, but they did
not."  Which is a triple lie.

First of all, I am not a member of the rebel CGT. I am unionized, as
a matter of principle, and the union I belong to is a CTA union;
there is a non-CTA, rebel CGT union acting at my workplace, but since
they are a bureaucratic group of nothing doers, I am with ATE, the
CTA union. It is up to the MTA and the rebel CGT to do whatever they
like to do. I am not hired by nor sentimentally attached to any union
leadership, it is not a matter of personal love.

It is simply a matter of political, historical and class analysis:
the Moyano group is -with all its enormous frailties, and partly
because of them- the best representation of the core tendencies
within the Argentinean flesh and blood of the working class. I am not
a worshipper of the working class, so that I can clearly see the many
problems with the rebel CGT. But I will defend it against petty
bourgeois anti-Peronist charlatans due to what this group has of
valuable.

Maybe Armand supposes that this is a display of "love". This speaks
more about his own cast of mind than about mine...

Second, the rebel CGT actually _did_ something: Schmid and Piumato,
members of the General Directoriate of the rebel CGT -who would not
move without agreement with Moyano and Palacios- were present at the
press conference of Raúl Castells (whose people on the square by the
way outnumbered many of the "leftish" sects) where Castells declared
that when confronted with the murders, we were all on the same side
[BTW: When, during Wednesday evening, I -the angry and bitter anti-
piquetero "Gorojovski" (final "y", Armand, please)- prepared the
incorporation of my own group to a column on the square, my first
reaction was "of course we MUST be there, these dead are OUR dead".]
Piumato and Schmid offered the solidarity of the MTA, while the group
of CTA took a wavering position, and their ally D'Elía adopted a
horrible one where he felt it was more important to separate himself
from the MTD than to express the solidarity of the whole movement
(his agreement with Duhalde on some subsidies seems to have had
something to do with his determination...).

And, thirdly, in fact the MTA _ did_ debate whether they should
appear on the square or not. An important fraction, led by Schmid and
Piumato, held that the rebel CGT _had_ to be in the square, while
others said that this was not convenient. What really matters here,
however, is _the reason_ for such reluctance (a mistake, in my own
view, but this is MTA's problem): they feared that those "leftists"
that Armand admires so much would probably have begun an intolerable
provocation against Moyano and the CGT, which would have certainly
finished in a political debate by the fists and clubs.

_This_ is why the mistake was made: not because the rebel CGT was
against the mobilization, but because they did not want to become the
kernel of its transformation into a battle within the camp of the
people.

On the other hand, why does Armand need to change the subject of my
posting, to substitute "my beloved Mr. Moyano" for the working class,
whose absence on the Square (and not Moyano's) was my concern? He
does this, probably, due to two reasons:

(a) because he knows in his heart that the Argentinean working class
is best represented by Moyano than by the self-appointed "left" -a
bad omen in his own view, but something he can't state as bluntly as
his likes stated forty or fifty years ago when they spoke of Peronism
(Moyano can be blamed as anything _except for_ not being Peronist, it
is hard to find a more "Peronist" man in Argentina today) as a
"Fascism of the working class"-, and

(b) because he needs to raise to an undue height the class
composition of the Square; since he attempts to be a Marxist, he
cannot oppose _the working class_ to a "more revolutionary" class
alliance. But since he doesn't care a shit that the Square was devoid
of actual workers and in fact he feels that the revolutionary elan of
Argentina lies in those members of the petty bourgeoisie and the
piqueteros who gathered in the Square. Since he can't say this in the
opne, he needs to oppose _Moyano and his gang of bureaucrats_ (not
the workers themselves) to those who he says that I call "the middle
class and the lumpen proletariat (with other terms, though)".

This last "interpretation" of my analysis is straightforwardly
_slanderous_. It profits from the ignorance of Spanish by many
members of this list. I have never spoken of "lumpen proletariat". In
fact, I seldom use this ill starred phrase. I wish someone translates
to English my posting in Spanish so that everyone can see the level
of bad faith that Armand's "translation" implies.

Much to the contrary, what I said was that the unemployed could be
somehow assimilated _to the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class_
in the sense that neither was directly involved with direct
productive activity. Isn't Armand distorting my ideas a bit too much?

His distortive work goes on. I sent a posting commenting that it had
been shown that it was not CIA operatives or local intelligence units
who had murdered Diego Santillán and Maximiliano Kostecki (as I had
assumed from the scant information I had gathered by that time), but
the policemen. My first opinion was that since the police chief in
charge of the operative had not denied that his troops had ilegally
stormed the Izquierda Unida site and private homes, thus assuming
entire responsibility for a brutal and illegal action that could take
him to process, I thought that he was not lying when he stated that
his people had had nothing to do with the murder in the railway
station.

It was known, afterwards, that he had been present during the murders
(and perhaps committed one of the murders himself). What does this
have to do with the general political direction of my thought, with
my concern with the absence of actual working class in the square?
Armand unduly extrapolates my honest posting where I admit that my
first guess was a wrong one, and tries to shrink the stones into
fresh water. "Ah, at last I caught this lousy Moyano-lover in a
trap!", he seems to be saying. But he has not. He simply has
witnessed the ways of a serious politician.

Armand takes this public recognition of a _factual_ mistake as the
recognition that my whole view of the political situation is wrong:
"He said "at the end I was wrong."  And he was, and
the instinct of the marchers were right.  Zamora was
right.  The photographer of Pagina 12, a Zamora
supporter for all we know, was right."

_Página 12_ is owned by the avowedly capitalist, bourgeois,
conservative and reactionary  _Clarín_ group. One of the specialities
of this group is to bribe "progressive" journalists' union leaders in
order that they accept the destruction of workers' conquests within
the media they control, among others _Página 12_ .  This particular
newspaper exists in order to feed the mind of the "leftists" with the
cheapskate moralistic food the oligarchy and imperialism is always
serving for them (what a lesson of politics, in fact!) One of the six
photographers on the railway station belonged to _Pagina 12_, and
described what had happened there accurately. It is obvious that what
_Pagina 12_ publishes (the declarations by the photographer included)
has nothing to do with the interests of the working class and, at
most, with profit. There is no ideological issue at stake. It simply
has to be admitted that this man had a privilege over my poor
perceptual abilities which has nothing to do with his belonging or
not to Zamora's party. He simply _was_ there and told to the
newspaper he works forwhat he saw. The newspaper's owner decided that
it would be allright that this were released. Full Stop.

On the other hand, there were six additional photographers there.
Each and every one, no matter their political  leanings, saw and
documented the same things. What does that to do with the respective
political visions of the photographer, Zamora or yours truly is a
mysterious issue, isn't it?

[There's more to this issue of the photographers, yet, that does not
enter the visual field of moralistic "leftists" such as Armand: one
of them, who works for the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, appears on the
snapshots that were displayed on _Clarín_ and which, by the way, are
online. Duhalde (yes, Duhalde himself!), while watching the pictures
of the events at the station, saw this man who was staring, probably
stunned, at what was going on. And Duhalde immediately tried to spot
this photographer in order to ask him to testify for what he saw. I
know this because Duhalde had been informed that this witness
belonged to the _La Nación_  newspaper, and he _phoned to _La Nación_
PERSONALLY_ asking to speak with the man. Life is a little more
complex than what sectarians such as Armand imagine.]

Let us go ahead with the dissection. According to Armand, I call
"this situation and this movement "tragic" because at the very end
[my] formalism doesn't allow [me] to see that is the form that is
taking, the unpredictable composition of the first batallions what
[I] can't understand.  This is not taking the predicted course.

The murderers were the cops, the one in charge, was
the one who pulled the trigger.  It is now known that
the cops targeted the leaders, they went after the
leftists, the Trotskyists, the Communist Party
activists, the unemployed organizers, the "scum."
There was no "provocation" from the demonstrators, was
coldly planned and plain murder."

There are many things on this planet of ours that I do not
understand. But the twisted ways in which the minds of our "leftists"
work are not among them. Decades of political struggle have taken me
to a slightly bored understanding of this senseless verbiage. So that
I will try to explain to others what does the above mix of slander
and mantra mean.

I never wrote nor said that the demonstrators had _staged_ a
provocation (these delicacies, I leave for the D'Elías). Much to the
contrary, I said that _the police_, and the state as a whole, had
staged a provocation. Moreover: on previous posts I warned that the
whole mood of the government during the last days was a provocative
mood ("we shall tolerate no more road blocks" was the menace).

What I _did_ say (and Armand does not want to hear) was that the
Coordinadora Aníbal Verón cdes. _put themselves into the trap, caught
line and hooker, and went to a battle on conditions chosen by the
enemy_, and that this mistake, this cruel and fatal mistake, is
directly linked with the silly idea that the new revolutionary
movement,  "the unpredictable composition of the first batallions",
as Armand romanticizes, runs along people who issue declarations
where they state, day by day and minute by minute, what their
political activities will be in order to get to power and revolution
as soon as possible.

These are not serious people (not the cdes. in the piquetero
movement, who are basically excellent people whose "political
guidance" is thousands of fathoms below them). Only assholes such as
Matzkin, Juanjo Alvarez or José Genoud can take them seriously -or
pretend to take them seriously- as preparators of "revolutions".
Might I recall to Armand's mind (or perhaps illuminate him  on the
issue?) that Lenin threw Zinoviev and Kamenev out of the _Pravda_
when they publicly disclosed that the Bolsheviks were going for state
power through mass action on a precise date? What  kind of serious
revolutionary acts so stupidly as these guys did in the Gatica
Stadium of Villa Domínico, establishing a detailed timetable of
actions and deploying them in public? What kind of "new batallion"
can form under such conditions? Why do you think, dear comrades, that
the actual workers of Argentina consistently turn their backs on
these chatterboxes, if not because it is so obvious that at best what
they take us to is to martyrdom, but never to a serious action?

Afterwards, slander goes on:

"In his second post, Nestor implied that there was
something the demonstrators did at Pueyrredon bridge
that brought about the tragedy.

Gorojovski at first could not believe it.  He talked
about "wrong tactics" without understanding, because
maybe does not fit in his rational mind the fact that
the murders were planned long before they actually
happened."

If the murders had _been planned long before they actually happened_,
dear Armand, why on earth did the policemen allow the media to stay
at the railway station? This stupid Satanization of the police and
this transformation of the complex dynamics of class war into a
simple war between the Good and the Bad side is precisely what I call
the "tragic mind". In the end, I must thank Armand for proving such a
perfect specimen, and for making my analysis of the Argentinean
"left" so much the easier.  For the sake of brevity, I will spare the
cdes. a thorough dissection of most what follows, save for some
mistakes and misrepresentations. Armand says that "the multitude
yesterday were a mix of the radical left, the middle class
desperados, the lumpemproletariat, the workers who came individually
because their leaders did not dare to come."

At best, this is a misrepresentation. Firstly, either Armand does not
have the slightest idea of what a "lumpenproletarian" is, or he
believes anyone who is toothless and wears rags is a
"lumpenproletarian", and, second, there were _no_ "workers who came
individually". What there appeared in the Square (a Square that does
not deserve such a lengthy debate, by the way) were mostly state
employees unionized in ATE, who forced the hand of their reluctant
leadership. But they were not "individually" represented, they
followed their respective union banners, save for the squalid groups
of ultra-leftist "Trotskyist" groups linked to the MTS -(or PTS, I
reckon to have lost track of their sucessive avatars) not to be
confused with the MST-.  I know one of these "independent" workers
group myself, the  "Trabajadores del INDEC" group: they act in my own
workplace and don't have the courage to present themselves as who
they are. They have this funny tendency to sign all their
declarations as "Trabajadores del INDEC", that is "INDEC workers",
but it is obvious that they dupe nobody. Save for Armand, it seems.

[Praise -slightly overtoned- to Zamora and Ripoll snipped, because
they behaved as _tribuni plebis_ in the best tradition (Zamora in
particular). What can't be allowed to pass on uncommented is what
follows:]

"Mr. Gorojowski said what the government is saying,
more or less ... "there is a conspiracy against the
government, all this would bring about darker forces,"
[...] There is no conspiracy.  It is the chaos of a ruling
class that is disintegrating."

Such a nonsensical stupidity!!!!!!!!! The government was saying that
_the Left wing of the piqueteros_ were in a conspiracy against
Duhalde. What I said was what everybody (but for the "Leftist"
charlatans) knows in Argentina, and this is that Ruckauf -who is a
member of the Government- and Menem act in agreement with the
American Embassy in order to generate a chaotic situation, a
hyperinflation which will impose a dollarization, and of course all
this needs a replacement of Duhalde for Menem. I also said that
adventurous stupidity by what I would call the "piquetero widows"
such as Armand does not but help them in their purposes.

Armand's answer is an abstract void:  "the chaos of a ruling class
that is disintegrating". What should we do as regards that
disintegration, Armand? Provided there were a single, unified, ruling
class in disintegration (BTW: there seems not to exist imperialism in
Argentina, does it?), the only thing to do, according to you, is to
hit, hit, hit, hit and hit again until Duhalde falls. After that,
surely, we shall be able to get to power in a much easier and
smoother way. Where are the actual means to realize these wonderful
goals, is a mystery unfathomable. What is by no means unfathomable is
the following, characteristically petty bourgeois (don't European
members of this list, German ones in particular, find some old
Fascist overtones in it?) assertion of Armand:

"Courage is replacing intellectual savvy or even organization"

This is the ultimate petty bourgeois "thinking". It has had multiple
forms in Latin America for decades, it has taken and is taking
thousands of rebels to martyrdom, hundreds of struggles to defeat,
scores of countries to nothingness. Two different formulations of the
same suicidal credo come immediately to my mind:

"Ni golpe ni elección, revolución" (Neither coup nor election,
revolution!;
1969, the Partido Comunista Revolucionario, attempting to jump from
the
Cordobazo to a national socialist revolution forgetting that the
basic will
of the masses was the simple desire to vote for the leader they had
chosen
to love and respect, Perón).

"Ni votos ni botas, fusiles y pelotas". This one belongs, if I am not
remembering wrongly, to the Montoneros. It translates as "Neither
votes
nor boots, guns and balls". The similitudes with Armand's exposition
above
are appalling.

And, of course, Debray's "Revolution in the Revolution" where a good
biceps was much more important for a revolutionary than a good set of
ideas.

Thank you all for the patience. But also thanks to Armand, for giving
me
such a wonderful opportunity to explain why is it so difficult to
generate a
socialist revolution in Argentina. If _this_ is socialism, any worker
tends to say, let us remain capitalists!

Hugs to all,
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

**********************************************************************
*

Compañeros del exercito de los Andes.

...La guerra se la tenemos de hacer del modo que podamos:
sino tenemos dinero, carne y un pedazo de tabaco no nos
tiene de faltar: cuando se acaben los vestuarios, nos
vestiremos con la bayetilla que nos trabajen nuestras mugeres,
y sino andaremos en pelota como nuestros paisanos los indios:
seamos libres, y lo demás no importa nada...

Jose de San Martín, 27 de julio de 1819.

**********************************************************************
*
******


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.