[Marxism] Re: "I hope someone actually answers me"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If Brian reads my post again, focusing on other matters than my failure
to abide by his ground rules for the discussion by asserting the
political relevance of the SWP's abstention, he will see that I did give
my response to his point about Zapatero's refusal to salute the US flag
and his endorsement (which is probably not "cynical" at all) of the flag
of Spanish imperialism.

I indicated that I thought that Spanish revolutionists should be
competent to decide how to differentiate themselves from Zapatero on
this, while taking proper cognizance in the context, which is not
chauvinist warmongering hatred of Americans as the Militant would
suggest, but the FACT of US leadership in the war of Iraq.  Just because
someone doesn't give the response you want to a point doesn't mean that
noone has answered  you.  But I want to stress that I agree with Spanish
revolutionists who accepted as a FACT that Zapatero, unlike Aznar, spoke
as an opponent (for whatever reasons) of the invasion and current
occupation of  Iraq and inspired hopes that troops would be withdrawn.
I agree with Fidel Castro who took Zapatero's statements for good coin,
rather than empty "leftist" denunciations of  them as a cynical
maneuver, and suggested politely that he get on with it.

And if Zapatero decides that the interests of Spanish imperialism,
including the need to defuse domestic protests, call for withdrawing the
troops and does so, I will consider this a victory, not a cynical
maneuver to be "exposed."  Will he?  Time and the struggle will tell.  I
do not, like Steve Gabosch and (for different reasons) the Militant,
regard Zapatero as the greater evil.  (Gabosch because of Zapatero's
cleverness and "demagogy," the Militant because of his alleged
"anti-American" war-mongering, which Aznar -- despite his many
reactionary views and actions -- opposed.

But I disagree much more sharply with Brian's prescriptions for Britain:

"(1) In the November 2003 anti-Bush demonstrations, hatred of Bush
should
have been used to sharpen hatred of Blair, who is a co-leader of the
pack
and not just Bush's puppy; [It must be obvious that pillorying Blair
would
also be the greatest possible weakening of U.S. imperialism.]"

Factually, Brian seems to be deriving his picture of the demonstrations
more from the Militant's jaundiced description than from reports from
other sources, all of which made clear that the demonstrations were both
militantly anti-Blair and militantly for the withdrawal of British
imperialist troops from Iraq.  Of course, Brian is truer to the facts
than the Militant in that he does not portray opposition to Bush in
other countries as a form of hatred of America as a nation or Americans
as a people.  Louis Proyect pointed to some of the massive evidence to
the centrally anti-Blair character of the

It would be good to have a truly mass movement that was united by a
CONSCIOUS common understanding of the character of US and British
imperialism and the relations between them.  It would be good to have a
united mass movement that was consciously united by a truly Leninist
conception of revolutionary defeatism.  If that existed we would be very
close to having a mass revolutionary party in Britain, and probably a
socialist revolution as well.  Of course, that is not the case.  If that
is Brian's criticism, then it is a given of the situation.  We never
succeeded in forging such a CONSCIOUSLY anti-imperialist movement
against the war in Vietnam, and, frankly, we didn't waste much time in
criticizing the movement for that lack, which did not surprise us.

We were pleased as punch that the movement in the United States was
directed against the government, came together for immediate withdrawal,
became more and more sympathetic to the struggle of the Vietnamese
people.  We were pleased that the Canadians, Australians, French, and
other fighters opposed their government's complicity and involvement
(including that of the French government which disagreed with Washington
in a way not so dissimilar from the stance of the French government
today -- there is plenty of complicity to protest in France today). And
we never thought of denouncing those who focused on opposing the war,
and not just their government's complicity, and who attacked Nixon and
Johnson for their leadership in the US war as well as their own
governments for supporting them, as "anti-American" chauvinists paving
the road to a world conflagration.

But I think that Brian also has a flawed conception of imperialism and
imperialist relations today.  He calls Blair the "co-leader" of the war
in Iraq, and demands that the antiwar forces in Britain take this as
their starting point.

There is a tiny flaw.  The statement is false.  The war in Iraq is a US
war, strongly supported by British imperialism, just as the Yugoslav war
was a US war backed by France, Britain and Germany; just as the Gulf War
was a US war backed by a world coalition; just as the Vietnam War was a
US war that recieved direct military support from Australia and New
Zealand; just as Korea was a US war backed by all the imperialist powers
on the UN Security Council.

We cannot demand that the British antiwar fighters base their activities
on the concept of Blair as the "co-leader" if in fact he is not the
coleader but the leader of an imperialism that is subordinate to the US
in the war.  It is unreasonable to insist that they state what is not
the fact.  The actual subordination -- not primarily misconceptions
about it -- is what leads to satiric portrayals of him as Bush's puppy
dog.  Britain is a very junior partner, as Rumsfeld reminded a wavering
Blair before the invasion when he said that the invasion would go
forward whether Britain joined or not.  Take that, fearless "co-leader"!

Inter-imperialist conflict has risen sharply over the last couple
decades, and it was an important factor in the Yugoslav conflict,
Afghanistan, and the two Iraq wars (three, counting the current one).
But there has been no decisive shift to a world in which
inter-imperialist conflict is the pivot of conflict and wars of conquest
and plunder in the semicolonies become primarily interimperialist
conflicts.  It took the world depression to produce the real opening gun
of World War II (the invasion of Manchuria) and the victory of the Nazis
to create a real world march to World War II.  That turning point has
simply not been reached and, in fact, the utterly passive resistance of
the French, Germans, and Belgians to the US war is a clear indication of
this, along with the US ability to construct a fairly broad imperialist
coalition on its side in Iraq (Britain, Spain, Italy, Netherlands,
Australia, New Zealand).

Today, the SWP is forced to justify its absurdly fast running of the
film of history by pretending that the passive opposition to the US
reaching for qualitatively greater hegemony in the Middle East turns the
war into an "interimperialist conflict"  in which the Iraqi people are
doomed (because of bourgeois nationalist leadership) to be helpless
proxies for one side or the other.  The French threat to veto a UN
resolution authorizing the war becomes an "opening gun" of  World War
III.  If Zapatero concludes he must withdraw the troops, I think this
action will be denounced (with reminders that the Militant, of course,
has ALWAYS called for immediate withdrawal) as the opening withdrawal of
World War III, because of Zapatero's supposed appeals to the allegedly
chauvinist American-hatred of the Spanish antiwar movement (i.e., they
don't think kindly of Bush).

In the Vietnam war, antiwar activists in Britain, Canada and other
places focused on their government's complicity  with the US war, just
as the British, Spanish, and Italian, and Australian movements  focus on
getting their troops out today.  But we never called on any of them to
pretend that fundamentally this was not a US war.  We  never called on
them to keep quiet about the role of Johnson and Nixon.  We never called
them "anti-American" when they spoke about such matters.  Make no
mistake, the complicity gave them practical, immediate demands to put
forward.  But nobody ever pretended that the movement in every country
was anything other than  fundamentally a movement against the US war
(allies and all), not just against the complicity of the individual
governments.  The fight against the complicity of the individual
governments strengthened the fight by making it a fight against each
government, but noone ever questioned that the fight was against THE
WAR, not just the complicity.  Reducing the movement to a fight against
the role of the particular allied governments in the US war would have
narrowed the focus and the appeal of the movement, reducing the
internationalism, anti-imperialism, and mass character of the movement.

Brian protests my "rhetorical flourish" in stating that abstention
generates bad politics, not good.  He doesn't agree with this.  He seems
to interpret Joe Hansen as telling him that sectarian views should not
be dismissed because we can learn from the many correct things they say,
and that we should learn to say too.  But that was not Hansen's main
point, I believe, although it is true that the sectarians can be right
on factual or sometimes even on a political point within a broadly
incorrect context.

I heard and read these comments from Hansen, and what I got from him was
something different.  I liked what Hansen said.  It was comforting
because I was an avid reader of the sectarian press, especially the
Workers Vanguard and the Bulletin of the Workers League, which was
sometimes viewed as something of a perversion.  I even read most of the
bulletins published by the Sparts.  I think Hansen's main point had to
do with attempting to understand points of view and methodologies of the
sectarians, and that by doing so and dissecting how they thought, you
could learn some things about the real world they  were distorting or
fleeing.  In the case of the Vern-Ryan tendency, Hansen's outstanding
contribution was his article, "McCarthy--a Bourgeois Democrat?" which I
included in an educational bulletin that Brian helped me put out.  In
the case of Healy, there was Cuba: the Acid Test and later, in the
discussion on guerrilla warfare, "The Underlying Differences in
Method.":  I really find these articles to be powerful contributions to
the discussion of how to think and how not to, as well as to the issues
that inspired them.

I learned something about the Marxist view of classes and class
politics, for example, from thinking about Tim Wohlforth's  classic
justification for abstaining from antiwar demonstrations where students
and middle-class people made up the majority.  "The working class hates
the petty bourgeoisie," Wohlforth declared.

Today, the main sectarian publication I read regularly is The Militant.
And yes, I do learn from doing so.  The arguments they make against the
antiwar movement have sharpened up my thinking on many things where a
certain routinism in thinking had set in.  I have learned a lot about
Lenin's views of imperialism and about the real working-class and
revolutionary attitude toward inter-imperialist conflict.  And about the
stance revolutionists should take toward bourgeois nationalists, like
the leadership in Iraq today.

But I think that Brian is wrong to take the Militant as a source of
information on what is wrong with the antiwar movement.  I doubt there
is any place to really learn that except in the antiwar movement.  The
abstention arises from bad politics, is justified by bad politics, and
the lack of experience in the movement blocks the road to correction and
feeds into more bad politics.  Frankly, the Militant does not know shit
from shinola about the antiwar movement.
Fred Feldman







_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism