RE: EuroGreens, Camejo, and Iraq

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

Eli writes: "Even if it weren't connected to the economic problems of
the country and California, which it clearly is, it would STILL be the
business of the Governor of the largest state in the union to use the
power of the office to denounce this criminal war. Evidently Camejo
doesn't see it that way."

I, too, was disappointed that Peter did not find a way to address the
Iraq issue in the debate. But as the debate was structured and actually
proceeded, it would have meant Peter dragging it in by the hair, so to
speak, because as Eli notes neither Arianna nor anyone else even
mentioned anything like this, which would have given Peter an opening to
address the issue.

But Eli seems to be willing to draw all sorts of extensive conclusions
about Camejo's politics in this regard; I do not. I don't believe
Peter's position on imperialism has changed for four decades or more,
since he was at MIT when Fidel was running around the Sierra Maestra
mountains or a couple of years later, when Fidel was in Havana and Peter
was cutting his teeth as a political agitator demanding "fair play for
Cuba." 

No, I haven't known him *that* long (Walter comes closer, and perhaps
Louis), only since the early 1970's. But listening to him in the debate
and to his earlier speeches that were posted as MP3's on his web site a
year ago, it is the same Peter I first met. Even the jokes were the
same, only updated and refurbished for the California situation.

But, at any rate, I'm fairly comfortable in thinking he hasn't changed
over the past 10 months. Opposing the build up to the Iraq war was a
significant part of his last gubernatorial campaign in November; I know
of no reason to imagine he has suddenly changed. I believe he should
have tied in the Iraq issue in the debate; I hope he does in the future
debates, but I don't think the fact he didn't do it explicitly is proof
positive he's become a reformist sewer socialist.

The because my impression of Peter's overall performance, despite the
Iraq issue, which isn't a small one, nevertheless could not be more
different from Eli's appreciation that he was "coming across as a
technocrat with a progressive approach to solving California's economic
problems." 

What struck me was how, unlike every other candidate, including Arianna,
whose formal positions on the "governmental form" of every labor and
social question (or just about) were identical to Peter's (8-hour day,
drivers licenses, prop 187, etc.), Camejo consciously sought to
introduce a class perspective. 

The one point that differentiated him from Arianna was his willingness
to denounce how the tax system favors the rich and raise the demand that
the overall tax burden on rich people be raised by around 2/3rds, if I
heard his figures right (from 7% to 12%) as the way to close the budget
gap. Arianna wanted to raise liquor and cigarette taxes, socalled "sin"
taxes. As an inveterate sinner, a smoker and drunkard, I take that sort
of proposal as a personal attack.

And I think there was absolutely nothing wrong in Camejo using the idea
that the rich should pay as much as someone trying to subsist on $15,000
a year. And he used it precisely the right way, not in the "full
socialist program" way we used to in the SWP as an introduction to
"demanding" a 100% tax on rich people as the next step, but in
explaining to regular people, working people, that the reason the rich
don't even pay as much in taxes as we do is that they own and control
the Democrats and Republicans, which is why we need our own party. 

This is, in a sense, even a lower-level demand than the one raised by
Communists more than a century and a half ago in the Manifesto for a
*progressive* tax structure. Yet I think the way he framed the question
of "fair" taxation (his term) was entirely in keeping with the spirit of
the Manifesto. A progressive tax is strictly a bourgeois demand. And it
is easy enough for even garden variety bourgeois liberal, to accept
raising the state tax burden on rich people to, say, 15% and lowering it
on working people to 10%. What you won't hear them say is what Camejo
drove home as the moral of the story -- the need for regular people to
organize their *own* party against those of the rich and the
corporations.

Because he really did use his "fair" tax plan to explain that working
people need to BREAK form the two party system and create their OWN
party not dominated by the rich and the corporations. If you read the
Manifesto, that's exactly what the comrades who adopted it enjoin us to
do ("formation of the proletariat into a class" etc.). It's in chapter
2, the first couple of pages of which people should read, re-read,
study, analyze, relate to what Marx and Engels actually DID throughout
their political life, and in general not try to go beyond it, until and
unless they understand that it wasn't written for the situation 155
years ago, but for the one today. 

Camejo "stayed on message" on those two points, tax the rich and
political independence, and one other: identifying with and speaking for
the most exploited and oppressed of California's laboring masses, the
undocumented (mostly Latino) workers. He championed, not just their
immediate demands but adhered to THEIR viewpoint, like in his 15-seconds
(all that was allowed under the rules) on the drivers license issue,
which he used, not to me-too signing the bill to restore the drivers
licenses, but instead to tremendous effect, by saying there were all
these white people from Europe who had come over as illegals but it was
okay, they, too, should be allowed to drive. And that to even discuss
whether the people who had been here for 20,000 years should be allowed
to drive was ridiculous.

In those 15 seconds, he totally went beyond, not just the framework of
bourgeois politics, but of borders, nation-states, and everything else
that's gone on for half a millennium and that has resulted in today's
situation. He told it like it really is, and in a way that identified
with, and gave voice to, the most heart-felt grievances of the
nationally oppressed Latino population, who are the descendants and
continuators of the native peoples of this continent, against everything
European colonialism and its continuators and descendants have been
doing for the last five hundred years in general, and the recent denial
of drivers licenses in particular. 

This was, as I view things, from the point of view of projecting a break
from the bourgeois parties, of paramount importance. And, given the kind
of campaign that Peter and his friends are trying to carry out, this was
the single most important point he could have made about the situation
in Iraq. 

On Iraq? Yes, on Iraq. Because we talk about connecting the dots, making
people see the war abroad is just an extension of the war at home. But,
eventually, in the last analysis, the battle against U.S. imperialism
must be fought and won HERE, it is only here that it can be defeated.
And defeating it here means empowering those who literally have nothing
to lose but their chains, not even their drivers licenses. It means,
further, the revolutionary movement adopting THEIR outlook on things.
And it isn't so much a question of program, demands, ideology, theory,
analysis but of STANCE and TONE. Of telling the bastards where to get
off. 

The kind of thing that makes at least some of us identify with Malcolm's
"chickens come home to roost" statement, or Fidel's  defiant "History
will absolve me" or James P. Cannon's open letter to the U.S. government
on the outbreak of the Korean War when he denounces them as scoundrels
and says they make him ashamed of his race, which he used to think "was
as good as any."

And as this item shows, whatever one thinks were Camejo's weaknesses,
clearly he was in no way pandering or playing to the "lowest common
denominator" but rather, and transparently, consciously so, relating to
the actual inchoate resentment of the class and the oppressed Chicano
and other Latin American peoples and seeking to give it a clear
political direction to that sentiment towards a break with the two party
system, toward political independence.

And he did so within certain constraints: staying within the formal
bounds of a gubernatorial election debate as a "serious" candidate. 

These are untried, untested waters for us, for our movement, for the
Marxist movement in the United States. Two, four or six debates from
now, we may look back at this effort and find all sorts of ways in which
as a candidate he could and should have improved his presentation. I
think at least here there is broad agreement he should have figured out
a way to bring up Iraq, as he was doing in the last gubernatorial race
(and for all I know is doing so again in the current one, though not in
this debate). But for now, let's cut him some slack. 

And I would say something else.

If this were some Latino leader who had never had anything to do with
the Marxist movement, just sprung up and ran against the two party
system and started saying a bunch of these things, and getting the kind
of response Peter is getting, I believe radicals in California would be
ecstatic. If there was some point the candidate didn't make, I think
they would be looking for ways to amplify and supplement what was said
in the debate by the Latino candidate, and not attack him.

Peter and his friends in the Greens are trying to do something
completely different from and, in a way, counterposed to, radical
campaigns we are used to. He is not trying to win a dozen or a hundred
more people to socialist ideas in general or "the" party in particular.
He is instead trying to transform sentiment among millions of working
people into motion. That is an *entirely* different proposition from
*explaining* a full socialist program, and it requires a very different
political stance and tone. 

To put it in the terms of Marx's experiences I referred to earlier,
Peter and his friends are, I believe, NOT operating in January 1848 mode
(writing a communist manifesto, trying to win 2 more artisans in London
and a College professor in Brussels to that perspective) but in June
1848 mode (publishing an "organ of democracy" imbued with a proletarian
spirit "which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its banner," as
Engels put it).

Except, of course, that by the spring of 1848, the stupidity of
continuing to work within the narrow, Marxist-revolutionaries-only
framework of the Communist League could not have been more obvious, as a
monster revolutionary upsurge had engulfed Germany and France. 

Whereas today, what we see is widespread sentiment among working people
and promising signs that suggest at least a sliver of the masses are
beginning to go into motion in the direction of a political break from
the bourgeois two-party system. 

I think revolutionary Marxists should hail Peter and his friends for
having seen this development, and for trying to relate to it, and,
frankly, cut them a bunch of slack in experimenting on how best to do
it, including room enough to make what will seem to almost everyone on
this list clear mistakes.

If his performance was weak on one or another aspect, then let's go out
and strengthen it, and in discussing the things that were said in the
debate, also include in our propaganda those additional aspects, without
running down or undercutting what was otherwise a very righteous,
right-on intervention by the comrade. 

I repeat, if we were talking about some leader who had "sprung up out of
nowhere" in the Latino movement, who said everything exactly the same
way that Peter said it the other night, we would all (well, almost all,
I think DMS is still hanging out here) hail it and applaud it and not
give that candidate and his friends a bunch of grief about "almost
criminal" and missed opportunities and the rest of it. 

Well, guess what folks. Peter IS that leader --or is trying to be that
leader-- and we should *respect* that. If we're not willing to condemn
Fidel for his "unsocialist" Moncada program, or Hugo Chavez for his
"bourgeois-democratic" constitution, then let's give Peter a little room
to do it HIS way, and not adopt a hostile stance towards this pioneering
effort.

José



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