Re: New Politics

["Alex LoCascio" <alexlocascio@xxxxxxxx>]

The late Marty Glaberman said that everyone
has their own CLR James.  Even the Cultural
Studies and Post-Colonial types seem to.

The retroactive assimilation of James by the
Shachtmanites, however, is rather curious.

Both James and Marty had an appreciation for
Cuba, and the former also had a positive assessment
of much of what was happening in China at the time.

Ken Lawrence, a Johnsonite of some esteem, refers
to himself as a reformist with regard to the former
German Democratic Republic, a position with which I
agree wholeheartedly.

James's emphasis on the self-activity and culture
of the American working class also seems to put him
completely outside the Shachtman universe on such questions.
The Shachtmanites had a rather admirable commitment to
labor union reform, i.e. replacing rotten bureaucrats with
good bureaucrats, but like all who fail to break fully with
much of the baggage of Trotskyism, they continue to see the
working-class as an object of struggle rather than a
self-creating subject.

In any case, it all goes to show what utter nonsense labels
like "State-capitalist," etc. are when trying to assess
somebody's politics.  And for what it's worth, James's
analysis of the worker's bureaucracy in works like
"State Capitalism and World Revolution" and "Facing Reality"
is in my eyes indistinguishable from that of a "worker's
state" partisan like Ernest Mandel.



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