Re: [Marxism] Camejo to speak at CCNY

[Octob1917@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 9/23/2004 6:02:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The essence of it is to preach revolution at the working people, rather than
trying to engage them starting from the current level of consciousness,
which is what Camejo and Nader have succeeded in doing to a  degree that is
unprecedented in living memory if one looks at the campaigns they have
waged.

Camejo and Nader haven't, to my mind, reached out to working people at all.
Their focus has been on a middle class electorate who perhaps voted Green last
time and who are considering voting Democrat this time. I haven't seen Camejo
much around the mass movements against the war, I haven't seen him marching in
the streets, and I haven't seen him around the Million Worker March movement.
This is where the people are at the present time (if by people you mean the
low-waged, uninsured, poverty-stricken and marginalised).


You also wrote:

This ultraleftism has *never* been
his approach, inside the SWP or outside it. The biggest difference between
Peter *then* and Peter *now* is that he has gotten *better* at presenting
core Marxist ideas without an overlay of "socialist" and "revolutionary"
rhetoric and ideological excess baggage that makes the ideas inaccessible to
all but a tiny handful of people.


Are socialists and marxists so utterly defeated and demoralised by the ruling
class that they have to hide their politics behind a smooth presentation of
watered down reforms? Whatever happened to principle, to militancy, the only
thing that will bring any kind of improvement to the lot of the oppressed and
low waged. Go into any oppressed community, South Central or Harlem say, and
start trying to condescend them and see how far you get. People there possess a
consciousness which is much more advanced than that you will find on any
university campus or town hall meeting, which Camejo frequents.

As to 'core Marxist ideas', nothing is more central to Marxism than the
overthrow of the hitherto existing capitalist ruling class and the transfer of 
the
means of production into the hands of the working class.


"When we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our banner was determined as
a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy, but that of a
democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific
proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its
banner.


It is easy to repeat selected passages from the work of Marx, Engels,
Lenin...indeed every socialist and revolutionary thinker there's been, to 
support a
point. However, Camejo's Reform Party is not an avowedly party of the working
class. It is a party concerned solely with participation in bourgeois politics,
with focusing on elections. Elections disempower people by encouraging them
to place their faith in a single candidate. We need a mass movement with a
strong ideological foundation. The Reform Party does not provide that. It is a
party of intellectuals, by intellectuals and sadly for intellectuals.


I don't know the man personally. My comments are based on my own observation.
Trying to mould policies to appeal to the widest possible base is the death
of any socialist or socialist movement. You end up diluting your program,
ridding it of all its principle and militancy, in order to win votes.

Bourgeois elections are a death trap.


Joe
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