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

[Joaquín <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Bunyan writes, "If the State Capitalist tradition is an impediment for
growth for the ISO, why is the ISO, outside of the Social-Dem tendencies one
of the largest groups on the US left (the CP may be larger, I don't know)?"

I don't think it can be reasonably argued that *any* position on these sorts
of questions is an impediment or contributor to growth of a left group in
the U.S. in an immediate way. 

I don't believe the big majority of ISO members have delved deeply into the
historical and theoretical issues involved. It is simply accepted. And this
isn't an issue like tactics in fighting imperialist war or even the national
question in the United States, where the direct individual and collective
experience of a group of comrades provides a material grounding for
discussion. Arguably, those of us who were active in politics for at least a
few years before 1989 have at least some personal feel for what the
existence of the USSR meant in world politics.

But political groups TODAY do (or at least should) have members of their
political committees to whom the struggle against apartheid in southern
Africa and Cuba's role in that is something they have learned about, if at
all, in historical readings.

I happen to be in a group where a whole bunch of people have theoretical
positions akin to those of the ISO. The practical political effect seems to
be vanishingly small. Some of these comrades took a hyper-critical position
on the "crackdown" in Cuba a year and a half ago that others of us disagreed
with. The ISO, if I remember right, took a political position more aligned
with my own than with those in my group who are closer to them on the
historical and theoretical issues.

At some point, groups on the revolutionary socialist left are going to have
to decide to dump a whole lot of these questions as "line" political
questions, because quite evidently they are not, not for revolutionaries in
the United States, and because they lead to a degradation of Marxism as a
theory, a science.

The *scientific* development of Marxism *requires* unfettered freedom of
scientific inquiry. To make the class character of the USSR an article of
faith in a political organization contradicts this. And, yes, the USSR is
what this is all about, and, moreover, the USSR in the 1920's. The
"analysis" of the other countries was simply pouring new content into the
same old soviet molds, no matter how ill-fitting.

In this, we should look to Marx's critique of the Gotha Program, which is a
scathing indictment of theoretical muddle-headedness, like this idea that
EVERYONE on the U.S. left has that Marxists should be for "public"
(state-controlled) schools. 

In his cover letter on the critique, Marx suggests a practical course of
action, that the fusion should have been based on a practical action program
for the new party, not a program essentially expounding a degraded version
of Marxist theory. 

Of course, that was because Marx actually agreed with the FIRST POINT made
in the Communist Manifesto about how communists ought to operate in the
political arena, namely: "The Communists do not form a separate party
opposed to the other working-class parties," whereas we today operate on the
basis that the whole reason for being of our very own Truly Revolutionary
Party is to prevent especially the younger comrades from falling into the
abysmal trap of joining the True Revolutionary Party. 

Things have come to such a pass that in the most recent split, between the
WWP and the PSL, both sides agree that their programmatic political
differences (if any) aren't even worth explaining to anyone else. 

The multiplicity of well-nigh-indistinguishable organizations that infest
the U.S. left (indsitinguishable from the point of view of a
militant/combative/revolutionary-minded worker or student) are a plague that
*needs to be erradicated.* 

And part of exterminating this plague is groups getting rid of articles of
faith about what happened nearly 100 years ago in a country that doesn't
even exist any more. Not because someone's position isn't right (with so
many different groups with so many positions it would be astounding if one
of them hadn't hit on "the" truth, at least by accident) but because these
positions aren't useful. Their practical political import is to justify and
maintain the sectarian division and fragmentation of the revolutionary
socialist left in the United States.

Joaquín



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