RE: SWP says 'don't vote' on Prop 54 in California

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

>>The logic of the Vote No on Prop 54 forces is to rely on governmental
bodies, instead of relying on ourselves and our own capacities, of
organizing ourselves in struggles independent of them.<<

I don't know what Joel Britton's been smoking, all I know is I want some
of it.

Seriously -- insofar as that is possible in evaluating such an asinine
stance -- this is stark raving sectarian lunacy of the purest water, a
textbook exposition of anarchist stupidity on the state. With a few
strokes of the keyboard making demands of the state is transformed into
its opposite, relying on the state and placing political confidence in
it. 

"The logic" of the SWP position is to oppose things like the rescue of
Elián González, the six year old Cuban boy kidnapped by his great uncle.
Which, come to think of it, the SWP did.

Like that position (and despite all the super-r-r-revolutionary bombast
about how they're going to "put an end to capitalism," I guess by
preaching and plant gate selling it to death), this position reeks of
adaptation to backward sentiment among some layers of the working
people, sentiments that, of course, do not originate there, but rather
are transmitted from the bourgeoisie.

"As we build a revolutionary workers movement that can fight for a
workers and farmers government that will put an end to capitalism
-?which breeds racist oppression and discrimination of all types?- a
'color-blind' society will then become possible."

This is at best quite primitive and quite useless utopian preaching.
But, politically, it is reactionary. What working people need to hear is
NOT pipe dreams about the supposedly "color blind" society of the
future. U.S. society "after the revolution" is not going to be a color
blind society, not in the slightest. That's because the *only* kind of
revolution that is *possible* in the United States is not the "color
blind" "revolutionary workers movement" that the SWP fantasizes about,
but a movement that has at its center the fight against racism and for
self-determination by Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and others
suffering national oppression. 

Without those *national* movements, there can *be* no revolutionary
struggle in the United States, for class exploitation here is
inextricably intertwined with national oppression.

It is striking that this statement comes in the midst of a campaign by
the bourgeois media and politicians to develop a much stronger and
conscious colonial-settler mentality among the Anglo minority in
California. The majority of the population in California, and the
*overwhelming* majority of the industrial working class in that state,
is now "southern" in the global sense of the word. That is what is
behind this Prop. 54 as well as earlier attacks. 

Again, to spew nonsense fantasies about a "color blind" society in this
context isn't just wrong, it is *reactionary.*

What deserves some attention is the *road* by which the SWP has arrived
at these positions. It has not been an evolution driven by ideology but
rather by its political practice, and in particular by its monomaniacal
perpetual "turn" to the industrial working class and its
hyper-propagandist book fetish, which has largely served as a substitute
for any *actual* political work. 

Despite having developed some of the most advanced understanding among
the Marxist left groups on the national question in the early and mid
1960's, the SWP's practice has led it to completely abandon that
heritage, to the point where it is capable of writing stupidities like
that the civil rights movement of those years was "part of a mass
proletarian struggle." 

That's a load of baloney. There *was* no "mass proletarian struggle" in
the late 1950's or early 1960's. What there was, what really existed,
was a mass civil rights movement rooted in the Black nation, and this
presentation of the question shows just how delusional the SWP has
become in its frenzy to liquidate the national question into simply a
class question, thereby reversing 100 years of theoretical and political
advances by Marxists in the United States. 

And it is simply a lie to say that "The civil rights fighters of the
1950s and 1960s ... didn?t need 'racial' data from governmental bodies
to convince people that something had to be done." Historically, totally
the *opposite* was the case. The careful drawing together of evidence
from government sources that the NAACP and others did in a string of
court cases on the 1940's and 1950's played an important role in winning
the Brown decision in 1954, and similar data continued to play a major
role in the struggles that followed that ruling. Sure, people didn't
"need" the data to know they had to fight. But it proved a valuable
weapon in the fight.

José




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