RE: [Marxism] Statement on Haiti

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stan Goff answered much better than I could the nonsense about this
"proletarian" movement that Joe and his alter ego have discovered.

I want to focus on something else, which is the political error involved in
Joe's posts, quite apart from their complete counterfactual content. Because
although it is a mistake to say elephants are cats, it is also quite
mistaken to go on and on about the flying abilities of cats even if
correctly spotted.

This political error is the liquidation of the *national* question into the
*class* question.

*Even if* it were true that these goons were proletarians of the purest
water, factory wage workers every one, the line projected by Joe and Aduku
would STILL be wrong.

In the latest post, signed by Aduku, we are lectured that "This group of
6000 'ex-soldiers' are the only group of workers in Haiti that have
formulated and put forward an explicitly proletarian demand - a demand for
back pay... Every other group is talking about 'democracy' and 'elections'
and the 'restoration of Aristide.'  This is the only group that shows the
merest glimpse of a proletarian agenda."

The counterposition of an economic demand to demands for democracy,
elections and the restoration of Aristide is not "a proletarian agenda" but
a bourgeois-imperialist agenda. It is a particularly striking example of the
kind of thing Lenin called imperialist economism. 

In particular, Joe and Aduku forget that the MAIN oppressors and exploiters
of the Haitian toilers ARE NOT the members of the local ruling class but the
imperialists, or if they do not forget, to them it is a distinction without
a difference. For them the struggle is class against class 24 X 7 X 365 and
it is above all an economic struggle.

In their simple-minded enthusiasm for economic demands, Joe and Aduku
lecture us that "We begin with a few basic propositions, as we must, in
conducting these sorts of discourses, if we hope to gain any clarity. The
Haitian population is divided into social classes," and so on until they get
to "We posit, also, that contending class interests is the motor of the
class struggle and that unending class struggles is the very essence of
politics."

This is, however, a false basis for a political analysis in this case. Joe &
Aduku's statement that the class struggle is the very essence of politics
might sound like quite orthodox marxism, but it is not, as they use it is
economic reductionism. What needs to be highlighted is not that class
struggle is the essence of politics, but that the essence of the class
struggle is political.

And looking at the field of *politics,* we will notice something immediately
about the world we live in, something that has been true for a very long
time: that it is divided between a handful of rich nation-states which
dominate, oppress and mercilessly exploit the vast majority of the world.
Please note that since we ARE in the field of politics here, I talk not just
about classes or groups or corporations but STATES.

The imperialist epoch has brought national oppression to unheard-of heights
of cruelty and savagery, and therefore the response to it takes not just the
form of "class struggle" but of *national movements.* 

To be sure, these national movements arise from the class struggle, but they
are not simply reducible to it, which is what Joe and Aduku are trying to
do. Once national movements arise --and they are inevitable if for no other
reason than the exploitation of the vast majority of humanity comes packaged
this way in national forms--, these interact with the class struggle in
complex ways. It is completely insufficient to draw a line between all
"capitalists" and all "workers," or even all toilers and all exploiters. We
must ALSO see the line between oppressor nations (and their states) and
nationally oppressed peoples. And we must understand concretely at each
stage how these lines interact.

I believe a study of post-WWII history shows that revolutionary movements
have arisen overwhelmingly in the colonial and semicolonial world and
overwhelmingly have presented as national --NOT class-- movements. I think
the reasons for this aren't hard to understand. National movements are by
their very nature directly, immediately and inescapably *political,*
whereas, at first blush, the sphere of the struggle between workers and
bosses seems to be the economic one. Moreover, in many cases the economic
struggle finds political expression in the national movement, because the
most cunning and ruthless exploiters of the toilers of the colonial and
semicolonial world, and the ones who dominate the entire system and in whose
benefit it operates, are the imperialists. 

Thus working people will fight for national liberation and true independence
of their nation state because of quite evident class interests. They fight
to make the state *their own* to defend their interests. And it may well be
that they do so, for a time, together with even bourgeois layers, and even
under bourgeois leaderships. This does not mean that these workers are
fighting against their own interests, or that the national movement's
struggle against imperialism looses its progressive character, but as the
struggle deepens, there is likely to be a differentiation within the
national movement. 

The working out of this dialectic between national and class movement in
oppressed nations goes through the working class achieving its independence
as a class and the political consciousness that it must constitute itself as
the leading class of an embattled nation. There is a fusion of class and
national consciousness because this corresponds to the reality of one
national section of the working class seizing control of its nation state in
order to defend itself against its main enemy, imperialism. (Let me hasten
to add here to avoid false polemics that there is nothing automatic about
this tendency and it isn't the only, and often not the weightiest, influence
at work.)

You very much see this fusion of class and national consciousness and
identity in Cuba, and the same sort of dialectic as unfolded in Cuba is now
unfolding in Venezuela. But if you look at the Cuban revolution in the 50's
and early 60's, and the stages it went through, you will see that the July
26 Movement started as a plebeian youth movement for national salvation, to
rescue the nation from the degradation into which it had been sunk under
pro-imperialist rulers. And in the first instance the immediate platform of
the movement seemed aimed not at all at imperialist domination itself, but
rather than its symptoms. Despite this it was a profoundly anti-imperialist
platform because at its core was the fight to create a government that would
act in the interests of Cuba and particularly "los humildes," the
underprivileged majority of the Cuban nation. This meant a genuinely
independent government.

The movement championed many of the most heart-felt demands of different
layers of the toilers including the working class, but it did not present
itself openly and explicitly as a working class movement any more than it
did as an anti-imperialist one, even though it is beyond question that it
was both, because the unfolding of this dialectical process eventually laid
bare its character with complete transparency. Yet as the process unfolded,
there was no talk of socialism, communism or the dictatorship of the
proletariat. And even the expropriation of the bourgeoisie AS A CLASS,
decreed in October of 1960, was presented and motivated primarily as a
defense of the nation against a social layer that had proven itself to be
anti-national and unable to adapt itself to the new Cuba. 

The local rich and the imperialists denounce this as a fiendishly clever
communist plot. "They promised one kind of revolution, even as they were
making another," they complain. "The revolution was supposed to be national
and olive green, not communist and red." But the reality is that as a
genuinely independent government arises and consolidates, it comes into
increasing conflict with both the imperialist and local capitalists, who are
tied to the imperialists in a million ways, and are therefore subordinate to
them and become a thoroughly anti-national class. Thus the protagonists of a
revolution that is genuinely for national liberation or salvation can only
come from among the popular classes.

And today we see the same kind of dynamics unfolding in Venezuela. Hearing
some of my Venezuelan coworkers and supervisors complain (I should note that
I am in a work setting with highly privileged professionals) takes me back
to my childhood in Miami in the early 60's. 

Now, some distinguished Marxist writers (like Marta Harnecker) stress how
*different* the "unipolar" world of today is from the Cold War world in
which the Cuban revolution emerged. This is undoubtedly a very true insight,
and it is very important for the Venezuelan revolutionaries to take this
into account in shaping their tactics and for the rest of us to understand
in order to be able to appreciate the Venezuelan process. But at the same
time, we must be conscious that at the most fundamental level, the world has
*NOT* changed, and the kind of imperialist exploitation and oppression that
drove the Cuban masses to defend themselves by seizing power and eventually
wiping out the capitalists as a class by expropriating them is also driving
the maturation of the revolutionary process in Venezuela. 

Now, this is a simplification because there are a number of classes involved
and even the working class in a place like Cuba back then and even moreso
Venezuela today is not purely and strictly a hereditary proletariat but is
interpenetrated with other social layers. But we don't need to get into that
level of detailed analysis here for the point I am making, which is that you
can't arbitrarily decide, as Joe and Aduku want to do, that the "class
struggle" will override or trump the national movements of oppressed nations
like Haiti. That is not how things have worked in the past, that is not how
things are working now. The political character of the resistance to
imperialism and especially the forms in which it presents are determined by
the forms of the oppression and exploitation.

Movements for national salvation or liberation or independence by oppressed
nations are not detours, they are the super-highway to socialist revolution
even when the signposts on the road do not say "this way to socialism."

Joe and Aduku's attempt to eliminate the national struggle from their vision
leads to such complete and catastrophic political disorientation that they
wind up imagining right wing paramilitaries are some sort of proletarian
army, as Stan Goff noted. It also leads them to express themselves in ways
that I believe are inappropriate on this or any other list.

Finally, I want to touch on some of the wording in the Statement on Haiti
and other posts that I found both offensive and politically reactionary.

Especially in the case of the United States, national oppression is very
much interpenetrated with the social construct of "race." The opposition of
the Congressional Black Caucus to the Haiti coup and the role played by some
of its members in exposing it, is an expression not of the fact that they
are Democrats but that they are Blacks, part of an oppressed nation forged
in the crucible of racism. There are undoubtedly countless contradictions in
the positions and statements of these figures that flow from that duality,
but I believe it is radically false and politically retrograde to say that
people like Maxine Waters are just puppets, that they are simply "Democrats
in Blackface," as one of these posts says.

One aspect of this is that the democratic right to vote and be represented
is something Black people in this country fought for and died for. They view
the presence of these Black people in Congress as a conquest, as *their*
representatives.

Another aspect of it is that it is simply NOT TRUE that the CBC is composed
of just plain vanilla Democrats whose positions are pretty much the same as
the mainstream of that party's politicians. You're certainly NOT going to
convince anyone in DeKalb County, Georgia, where Cynthia McKinney's return
to Congress (after being ousted two years before by a
Zionist-Democrat-Republican cabal) was greeted with genuine jubilation among
the most conscious and combative people in the Black (and also Latino)
communities.

And the idea presented that the overthrow of Aristide is a matter of
indifference to us is complete political windbaggery. Contrary to what the
formulations of these posts suggest, Aristide was not *imposed* by a U.S.
invasion, he was *elected* by the people of Haiti in what the popular masses
viewed as their own victory against the legacy of the Duvalier regimes. 

One last detail. I guess it should not surprise me that someone who is so
lost in space as to consider right-wing paramilitaries to have been some
sort of proletarian liberation army has absolutely no clue about Stan Goff
or his history. 

If you Google Stan Goff and Haiti together you will get 19,500 hits on the
main web search; several hundred in the newsgroup search; 10 in the picture
search; 6 in the news search; and several dozen in the Froogle search.

If Joe took himself and what he says a little more seriously, he would have
taken the precaution to check to see just who this Goff guy is, and not
write something as silly as that Joe is sure his information is more
reliable than Stan's because it comes third or fourth or fifth hand from
Aduku who in turn has "direct lines of communication with comrades in the
Caribbean" unlike "Stan ... who must get his information from the Democrats
and the bourgeois media."

Actually, what Stan Goff wrote about Haiti in response to Joe was based on
his own observations and first-hand information. For the record, Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of
Haiti," and was in that country as recently as three months ago.

Joaquín



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