Was Lenin So Blind? Reply to Nestor

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I started to write a long and detailed reply to Nestor's arguments when I
was swept up in a sort of  deja-vu-- and then I realized that I had in fact
written just such a reply to just such arguments as Nestor employs 34 years
ago to my SDS comrades who were convinced of the "bourgeoisification of the
working class" and were all for throwing "grit into the cogs" of the
imperialist machinery while the "wretched of the earth" fought the real
revolutionary battles against capital.

Nothing Nestor says was wasn't said at the SDS convention in 68 (and
probably the Flint War Council),  printed in New Left Notes, argued by Bill
Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, even Mike Klonsky et al

While Nestor can better turn the phrases, the content is the same-- and, I'm
sorry to say, just as superficial.

So let's save time and make this short and unsweet-- in short sentence form.

1. Lenin's work on imperialism was primarily polemical to answer Kautsky's
mythology of homogenized unconflicted capitalism.  Lenin's analysis of the
mechanisms and details of accumulation is mistaken, incomplete, awkward, and
inadequate.

2. Lenin's rentier state does not exist.  Moreover, no mechanism for bribing
the working class by distributing profits from more exploited areas has been
discovered or described.  Indeed, in this period of supposedly unchecked US
imperialism, working class conditions have worsened-- as they did concretely
between 1973 and 1993.

3. To use a phrase like "bourgeoisification of the working class" may be
cathartic to the individual using it, but it is certainly not analytic.  If
the working class is not or no longer or permanently unrevolutionary then it
is necessary to dispense IN TOTAL with Marx's analysis of capital  and
replace it with some other because Marxism is of a whole; the class
structure and struggle is the logic, the very substance of commodity
production which manifests itself in overproduction, reproduction, technical
advance and decline, destruction of values, and the necessity-- necessity
requiring, meaning AGENT-- of revolution.


4.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but the revolutions created by
"wretched of the earth" have not been able to reproduce themselves on the
necessary scale to either ensure their own survival or overthrow the
mechanisms of international capitalist expropriation.  Those revolutions are
unwinding, some more slowly than others, as we speak.


5. To suggest that the best or most the advanced arenas can contribute is to
support other struggles, to decry and "curb" the crimes of the "advanced
bourgeoisie" is to argue implicitly for abandoning any effort to generate a
class based struggle in the advanced arena-- it is to argue for a program of
moral protest over one of class power, thus ensuring the failure of
revolutionary struggles everywhere.

dms




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