Re: [Marxism] Camejo and Shawki/ISO and so it goes...

[Octob1917@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 10/30/2004 7:52:52 PM Pacific Standard Time,
mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx writes:
I agree with this completely. Too much breezy and facile one-sided dismissal
is going on here.

I'm baffled by this statement, to be honest. If you could enumerate for me
anything of substance the US Left is doing, or has done recently, to offer any
meaningful resistance to the ongoing assaults by the ruling class at home
and/or abroad I would be grateful. My dismissal is based on empirical fact, 
along
with my experience of revolutionary/socialist organisations and the outstanding
work they are doing in Scotland and in the occupied Six Counties of Ireland.

There is absolutely no militancy here, nobody risks anything, and that in the
end is what it takes. I say it again, the organised Left in the US has
succeeded only in repelling workers, due in large part to an intellectual 
snobbery
responsible for substituting paternalism for solidarity. This talk about
inserting revolutionaries into factories, etc., is just puerile, romantic 
nonsense;
as if that could even be considered given the reality of the present state of
the US Left and its lack of coherence and, again, militancy. Every leader I've
come across is not a worker, rather a professional intellectual, occupying a
sinecure on some university campus or other.

The only hope is a new formation arising out of the nascent MWM movement or
an organic leadership arising out of the oppressed communities. The potential
for revolutionary consciousness is already there, reflected in the amount of
resources and energy the state expends in colonising black and Latino youth, in
keeping blacks on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and in attacking and
destroying anything approaching unity in those communities for fear of where
it might lead.

By concentrating on international issues, the US Left have ipso facto
abandoned the struggle at home. Calling demos around the occupation of Iraq 
while
ignoring the ongoing occupation of Compton and Harlem, etc., is demonstrative of
a subconscious chauvinism and elitism. No white Left group enjoys any
credibility in any black community, not one. Surely it is prudent to ask why?

Until this changes I'm convinced that in this country bourgeois campaigns for
reformists electoral candidates like Ralph Nader will continue to masquerade
as revolutionary work.

Joe
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