Abandoning Western Marxism (was: Rebuilding ...)

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

        The problems in the world communist and workers movement did not
come from trying to push "democratization" too far, as Chris Warren
writes, but rather from something that was integral to the decline and
fall of East European socialism, an abandonment of internationalism, of
a true communist spirit.

        Building socialism while imperialism is still dominant on a
world scale can only by done by placing the world struggle against
imperialism at the center of socialist construction: that the workers
must be the true masters of the workers state is necessary but workers
democracy is only possible along that political line. Without it, the
struggle against bureaucratic privilege and abuse and usurpation becomes
a struggle for bourgeois democracy that bureaucratic misleaders in the
workers state have no problem placing themselves at the head of.

        Fidel said you cannot build socialism with a dollar sign in the
hearts of the people, but that also means of necessity you cannot have
workers democracy with a dollar sign in the hearts of the people either.
The forms of workers democracy are inseparable from its class political
content. That is what the ignominious collapse of the socialist bloc,
and the holocaust that has befallen working people in the former Soviet
Union since then, shows. 

        The North-South divide decades ago became the axis around which
the political struggle on a world scale revolved: it was the failure of
East European socialism and the pro-Moscow as well as "Euro" Communist
Parties to align themselves and act on *this* basis that led to their
collapse.

        Marxism, the communist movement, must be rebuilt, but it cannot
be done on the basis of rebuilding "Western" Marxism, and I mean here
not just the Moscow & related varieties but also the Trotskyist and
other currents critical of "really existing socialism" and the parties
it gave birth to.

        Those seeking to build Marxist currents in the global
(political) North will have to struggle to find and orient to the
"global South," not just internationally but within their own countries
in the North. 

        Dissing EcoFemPax movements is easy enough to do, but this does
not advance you even one step. The challenge is not to provide
leadership, but to be willing to be led: that requires understanding
what army you are in, who leads it and what its strategic line of march
is. 

        The revolutionary quality most needed is not audacity but
humility.

José


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