RE: [Marxism] Michael Moore, Wesley Clark and Jose Perez

["Jose G. Perez" <elgusanorojo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Walters write: "This is not to say that opposition to the
anti-"Patriot" act is not  important. It is repressive, allows the for
the curtailing of union activities for example in certain industries,
starts building up the  old "Cointelpro" lists again etc. But we have
a-ways to go to see if this even approaches the lives my own parents had
to live in the 1950s, a LONG way to go."

That is part of what I was saying but the other part is very important,
also. There has been tremendous, massive repression in the United States
in the last 30 years against Black people most of all but also Latinos
and others.

We look at the figures that the U.S. has the percapita (and perhaps
absolute, I forget) highest prison population in the world, but we
forget to add, that this is 2/3rds or 3/4ths not against the "nation" of
nearly 300 million, on which those per capita statistics are based. The
big majority of the repression that is measured by these statistics is
against the Black and (to perhaps a little bit lesser extent, and with
somewhat different modalities) Latino population of 70 million, give or
take. 

In other words, when you consider Blacks and Latinos, native peoples,
etc., the REAL rate of incarceration, of police murders per capita, of
deportations per capita, of beatings per capita, of frame-ups per
capita, of false arrests per capita, those figures are MANY TIMES the
figures for the United States "as a whole" and to look for comparisons
you have to start looking at the historical experience with the
apartheid regime, the colonial-settler entity in Palestine, etc. It is
way, way *beyond* anything "normal" for repression under bourgeois
democracy in advanced capitalist countries. (Perhaps the Basques and the
Irish in the north of Ireland would point out that this in fact more
parallels their situations, but I'm not familiar enough with those to
guess about comparisons). 

Third World communities in the U.S., first and foremost the Black
community, but also the others,  is where all this imprisonment and all
the other forms of repression that accompany it (deportations, beatings,
killings by cops, etc.) is taking place. 

And when you look at all the most egregious and outrageous applications
of the Patriot Act and post-9/11 claims of executive power, imprisonment
without charges and so on, you'll see it is overwhelmingly involving
nationally oppressed peoples. 

What I am arguing isn't JUST that things aren't as bad as they are made
out to be in terms of explicit political repression against working
people as a whole, I am ALSO arguing that the general level of "social"
(as opposed to explicitly "political") repression against the oppressed
nationalities is monstrously high, and that this conscious, systematic,
constant bashing of these communities is what the ruling class is doing
INSTEAD of a lot more targeted, politically fine-tuned repression, and
this is entirely being left out of these "Dean or Clark would be better"
calculations. People like Dean and Clark and Clinton and the rest are
the ones who, together with their Republican brethren, have PUT IN this
massive, monstrous repression of these communities.

And I'm also suggesting that people should think about the political
dimension of this generalized repression against the communities of the
oppressed nationalities, and when talking about fighting "political
repression" or "defending civil liberties" they think in terms ALSO of
defending the teenage boys in the 'hoods and barrios and what threatens
THEIR rights: their bourgeois democratic rights, to assembly, to
association, to speech.

In other words, most POLITICAL repression in the United States today is
not being carried out as such, it is being carried out as a generalized
social repression of oppressed nationalities. White radicals and
liberals feel "freedom of speech" is threatened because THEIR freedom of
speech may be attacked; but if you look at it from a class point of
view, from the point of view of the most dynamic and threatening (to the
capitalists) layers of the working people, THE "freedom of speech" of
this social layer has been toast for decades now, and that has not
changed, not to a significant degree and certainly not *qualitatively*
with Bush, and both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and
conservatives are SOLIDLY united around the prisons not schools program.

I don't view how one votes in a bourgeois electoral farce as a question
of "principle." 

So I would not reject in principle voting for a bourgeois candidate,
even for president, if an argument could seriously be presented that the
election of THIS candidate of a bourgeois party as opposed to some other
bourgeois candidate would significantly enhance the political space for
working people to fight for their rights.

If by some miracle or some rift in the time-space continuum the
Democrats ran someone like a Sharpton or a Cynthia McKinney for
President in November, I'd certainly give the most serious consideration
and carefully analyze whether voting for SUCH a bourgeois candidate
wouldn't be helpful to working people. 

But that isn't happening and isn't GOING to happen. And history shows
that the participation of such possibly acceptable candidates (in
reality they could probably be described as "petty-bourgeois democrats"
in a classical Marxist sense) in Democrat primaries is essentially a
bait-and-switch operation. 

Their role --quite independently of how they think about it-- is
precisely to forestall motion towards a political break with the
bourgeoisie's two-party system, to channel people back towards the Deans
and the Clarks. 

When the argument is made in terms of the patriot act and the Bushites
and repression and so on, there is absolutely NO attention paid to what
in my view is by far the largest and most significant aspect of
political repression in the United States today. 

I'd gladly swap 10 times the level of harassment against the "left" and
"progressives" as pro-Dean, pro-Clark leftists present it, in exchange
for repression in  the Black, Latino and other third world communities
being limited ALSO to that level. 

Dozens of green party people would be prevented from boarding airplanes,
police would arrest many more at demonstrations, there would be ten Jose
Padillas. A dozen anarchist web sits would be shut down. Things like
that.

And there would be millions of young Blacks and Latinos who would be
FREE, free to rise up, demand control of their communities, organize
unions, drive out sell-out politicians, and anything else you can
possibly imagine and pretty shortly tens of millions of white workers
would be following their lead.

That is what the United States is like; that is the real "vanguard" --no
some soi-disant "Leninist" (poor Lenin!) party of the working class in
the United States, as has been shown beyond any possible doubt by the
history of the post-WWII period. That is why repression in the United
States is structured as it is. That is what must not be overlooked in
terms of defending civil liberties, and the possibilities for the
working class to organize itself as a class and take on the capitalists.
And that's what the pro-Clark et al. people on the left don't even begin
to consider, much less address with the tactics that they propose.

José







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