[Marxism] Reply to Brian on the Iraqi CP

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brian,

Nobody is saying you cannot state your opinion about the Iraqi CP and define
your position, and I have stated my own view. "Outrageous" ? It sounds
exciting. But it's one thing to state your opinion of what a political party
in another nation does, it's another thing to "tell them what to do"
unilaterally from afar, and to say that one indeed should unilaterally "tell
them what to do", because, as I have noted, that's buying into the
imperialist argument. You then proceed the fudge the issue by saying:

"I once was in an organization where exchanges were limited in time and
place and where personal letters that included political discussion were
denounced as cliqueism."

You don't actually state your political affiliation. We can all be
cyber-radicals and pretend we're changing the world somewhere else with
missives from afar, but, while it's possible to have a real effect with a
post, I don't think that cyber-radicalism is very credible as an active
political stance. Nor is it true that digital cliqueism cannot exist in
cyberspace either.

The distinction between "personal" and "political" which you imply is not
one which I would accept anyway. A disjunction or contradiction between the
"personal" and the "political" arises, when people cannot actually put into
practice what they politically believe in, and by the time you're arguing
grandiosely that you ought to be telling the Iraqi CP unilaterally what to
do, you've created a massive contradiction between the personal and the
political. Here in the Netherlands there are quite a few members of the
Iraqi CP, but nobody on the Left here says that "we should tell them what to
do and what's good for them". You can have a dialogue, you can state an
opinion, but you do so on the basis that these people who grew up there, and
were forced to leave through political persecution, have a better sense of
what's needed and relevant in their country than an outsider. If I may be so
bold as to drag out a Lenin quote with contemporary relevance here:

"Only lazy people do not swear by internationalism these days. Even the
chauvinist defencists, even Plekhanov and Potresov, even Kerensky, call
themselves internationalists. It becomes the duty of the proletarian party
all the more urgently, therefore, to clearly, precisely and definitely
counterpoise internationalism in deed to internationalism in word. Mere
appeals to the workers of all countries, empty assurances of devotion to
internationalism, direct or indirect attempts to fix a "sequence" of action
by the revolutionary proletariat in the various belligerent countries,
laborious efforts to conclude "agreements" between the socialists of the
belligerent countries on the question of the revolutionary struggle, all the
fuss over the summoning of socialist congresses for the purpose of a peace
campaign, etc., etc. -- no matter how sincere the authors of such ideas,
attempts, and plans may be - amount, as far as their objective significance
is concerned, to mere phrase-mongering, and at best are innocent and pious
wishes, fit only to conceal the deception of the people by the chauvinists.
(...) There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that
is - working whole-heartedly for the development of the revolutionary
movement and the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting
(by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only
this, line, in every country without exception. Everything else is deception
and Manilovism."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/ch10.htm
For the sake of completion, I should point out especially that the reference
to "Manilovism" is not in fact about sex, but to a character appearing in
chapter 2 of Nikolai Vasilevitch Gogol's comic masterpiece "Dead Souls", an
easygoing sentimental landowner. In the novel, the main character (the minor
nobleman Chichikov), travels around a backward district of Russia buying up
"dead souls". When serfdom was in existence in Russia (and it wasn't
abolished until after Gogol's death), wealth was reckoned in souls, the
number of serfs owned by an individual, and this also determined the amount
of tax paid. Each census would then re-assess the number of souls owned by a
landowner, and this statistic would determine the level of tax they paid
until the next one. Chichikov was buying the right to the names of the serfs
who had died since the last census, just a liability to their previous
owners, because the tax had to be paid, but no work could be got out of
them. Only some way into the novel does the purpose Chichikov has for these
useless "paper souls" become clear - obviously there is going to be some
kind of swindle. When the first part of the novel was submitted to the
censors, they insisted that the title be changed, because they felt that
"Dead Souls" sounded as though the novel was an attack on the church's
doctrine of the immortality of the soul. After finishing the first part,
Gogol aimed to write about the redemption of Chichikov, believing that his
work would assist the transformation of Russian society. In the face of
opposition from the church, the manuscript of part 2 was burnt, not without
considerable agonising by Gogol. All that remains are some fragments and a
description of parts of the work in the journal of a friend to whom it was
read. www.bibliomania.com/0/0/140/2404
http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/060998.htm

Jurriaan



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