RE: [Marxism] Camejo to speak at CCNY

[Joaquín <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Feldman responds to my defense of the Nader-Camejo campaign:
"Actually Marxism is about explaining the need for socialism." 

This sort of nonsense has been preached for decades by countless sects. It
is FALSE that this is a Marxist approach to politics.

One need do no more than consult the Manifesto of the Communist Party to see
the approach outlined by the founders of the Marxist movement is precisely
the opposite.

"The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other
proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of
the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."

There simply is nothing there about preaching socialism at the working
class. 

Instead, as is transparent in the Manifesto, the key is the political
self-organization of the working class. The chief obstacle to this in the
United States is bourgeois political and ideological hegemony exercised
through the two party system, which atomizes working people. 

Reflecting on this approach nearly four decades after writing the manifesto,
Engels recalls the part of the manifesto where what I quoted appears
(Chapter 2, Communists and Proletarians") and says:

"Never has a tactical programme proved its worth as well as this one,"
adding that whenever a workers party has strayed from it, "the deviation has
met its punishment."

And on their practical intervention in 1848, the year the Manifesto was
published, which was a year when revolutions broke out just after the
Manifesto came out, Engels added: 

"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. 

"If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to take up the movement,
adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually proletarian side and
to advance it further, then there was nothing left for us to do but to
preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a tiny sect
instead of a great party of action. But we had already been spoilt for the
role of preachers in the wilderness; we had studied the utopians too well
for that, nor was it for that we had drafted our programme."

The role of "preachers in the wilderness" is precisely the one that Michael
Feldman advocates. Referring to my used of the term "the rich and corporate
elite" to describe those who dominate the two-party system, he asks: "Rich,
corporate, elite, are you scared to use the word capitalist for some
reason?"

Well, to be frank,  I am against using it in popular agitation. "Capitalist"
is not a term in common, everyday usage in the United States. It is part of
the preaching in the wilderness syndrome to use language inaccessible to
most working people.

Michael goes on: "Yes I agree working people need their own party, but
Nader/Camejo aren't running on the same political party in every state."
>From utopian socialist preaching communism at the workers, Michael descends
to electoral cretinism. Nader-Camejo aren't really contributing to the
development of a workers party since they are on varying ballot
designations.

Is it really so difficult to understand that when Marx and Engels in 1848
spoke about the formation of the proletariat into a class, they did not have
in mind U.S. election regulations at the beginning of the 21st Century? 

As this campaign has made abundantly clear, the "party" we are dealing with
here is the Nader Party. Nader and what he stands for as a political figure,
much more than any organizational designation, including the Greens, is what
people see and relate to. I know there are tons of people who are very
critical of reality for being this way; however, that IS the way things are.


Against Michael's insistence on the bourgeois character of the Nader-Camejo
campaign, I challenged him to *prove it.*  He comes back with "Their
campaign speaks for itself. WHERE is their critique of capitalism?"

If you actually listen to Camejo and Nader, I would have thought their
"critique of capitalism," on everything from the Iraq War to the Living
Wage, would be hard to miss. But of course engaging politically around the
specific ways in which capitalism messes over working people today isn't
what Michael is interested in. Like a good idealist, he isn't particularly
interested in the problems of the here and now, except insofar as they help
explain the wrong *essence* of capitalism in general, of capitalism as such.


This is simply one more manifestation of his essentially utopian-socialist,
idealist approach. He wants the campaign to be a serialization of Das
Kapital.

Thus Michael continues, "WHERE is their claim for WORKING CLASS
independence? Is it just enough for you that they are fighting the two party
system that you can disregard your principles? Your tactics must flow from
your principles."

Michael is quite mistaken in asking for Nader-Camejo's "claim for WORKING
CLASS independence," I guess as opposed to some other kind of independence.
The important thing is not bombastic declarations by the candidates, but
that they have found a way to speak to, and give expression and form to
sentiment in the direction of independent political action by working
people. 

I think the choice faced by Nader and Camejo was essentially similar to the
one before Marx and Engels in 1848. The could either "take up the movement,
adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually proletarian side and
to advance it further," or function like a sect. Of necessity in the U.S.
political context this means the same thing that it mean for Marx and Engels
in 1848: taking to the field of practical political activity not as the
workers party of communists but as "democrats," which translated to U.S.
politics today means as "progressives" and "populists." But like Marx and
Engels in 1848, I believe especially Camejo and the grouping around him has
waged a campaign "which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific
proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its
banner."

Michael's assertion that tactics flow from principles is wrong. Tactics
--Marxist tactics-- flow not from "principles," ideas, but from an
understanding of how social forces are moving and evolving in the political
sphere. If you want to put it in an idealist sort of way, Marxist tactics
flow not from Marxist *ideas* but rather from how these "ideas" or
"principles" manifest themselves concretely.

Contrast Michael's statement about tactics flowing from principles to the
approach of the Communist Manifesto: "The Communists ... do not set up any
sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the
proletarian movement."

And, again, a few sentences later, "The theoretical conclusions of the
Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been
invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer."

And in an article written contemporaneously with the manifesto, called The
Communists and Karl Heinzen, "Herr Heinzen imagines communism is a certain
doctrine which proceeds from a definite theoretical principle as its core
and draws further conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen is very much mistaken.
Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles
but from facts," those facts being the development of industry and
capitalism and with it the working class. 

"Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the
position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation
of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat," Engels says. 

Joaquín


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