RE: [Marxism] RE: Statement on Haiti

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Lil Joe" writes:

>>Joaquin is obviously a Maoist (Stalinist) living in the 60s, when there
were 'national liberation movements' fighting 'imperialism' in the jungles
of Asia, Africa and Central America. Since then these 'nationalists' have
come to power, and are doing the business of the IMF and 'imperialists'
neocolonialists....

>>Mao wrote "On Contradiction" and called it 'dialectical materialism' to
justify in pseudo-Marxian language the nationalism that the bourgeoisie has
used from the very beginning of nation-states to hoodwink the masses.<<

Since I've never seriously studied "On Contradiction," I will abstain on
whether what I laid out coincides with what Mao wrote or not. On the other
hand, the only writing by Stalin that I've ever seriously studied is the
1913 pamphlet on the National Question. I believe that what I wrote does NOT
coincide with what Stalin puts forward in that pamphlet; but what Lil Joe
writes does to a significant degree.

Then again many if not most people in/around the Trotskyist movement
consider the Stalin pamphlet on the national question quite sound, pointing
out it was written at Lenin's instigation, under his supervision and
expressed the position of the Bolsheviks and their wing of international
revolutionary Social Democracy on the national question. Which is true.

What is not widely appreciated is that Lenin and the Bolsheviks CHANGED
THEIR POSITION after 1913. They did so because they came to a new
understanding of the epoch they were living in, the imperialist epoch,
including seeing that "the national question," rather than being a leftover
from the rise of capitalism, was being posed in a new way by the rise of
imperialism.

In the epoch of nascent capitalism, "nationalism" was an expression in of
the need of the emerging system to consolidate large socio-geographic spaces
within which to operate. The war for independence of the U.S. was a
quintessentially bourgeois nationalist revolution, and it is no accident
that, although it took some time to sort it out, the final form of the state
was a quasi-federal republic with no internal barriers to commerce and trade
and that this republic was aggressively expansionist, incorporating
ever-growing parts of North America.

The epoch of imperialism is characterized by capitalism having brought
pretty much the entire world into its orbit; by the division of the world
into a handful of "developed" exploiting nations and a big majority of
"underdeveloped" countries and colonies whose capitalist development is
blocked by the existence of the imperialist countries and their penetration
into the economic space of the "underdeveloped" countries. Under imperialism
there is a constant struggle between the imperialist powers for economic
space in the "underdeveloped" countries and a built-in tendency --I think
history shows this-- towards an immiseration of the masses in those
underdeveloped countries by imperialism's need to intensify that
exploitation.

The existence of the Soviet Union, with all its defects, and the socialist
bloc in the post-WWII "Cold War" era placed limits on the rapaciousness of
imperialism and created space for oppressed nations to break from the direct
colonial yoke. But I think there has now been sufficient time since then to
judge the inherent tendencies of capitalism without such "unnatural" (to the
system) restraints and counter-weights.

What was it that brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to a new position? The
First World War and the mass betrayal of socialist principles by the mass
parties of the second international firmly focused Lenin on the
characteristics of this new *stage* of capitalist development, and a new
theory of nationalism and national movements. It is laid out in various
polemics starting in 1915 and especially in the draft thesis on the national
and colonial question he drafted for the Second Congress of the Comintern
which can be best understood by looking also at the Congress of the Toilers
of the East held in Baku, which was an attempt to apply the new position.

At the heart of the new position is a distinction between the nationalism of
the oppressors and the nationalism of the oppressed. The former is
reactionary; it is the expression of the rapacious need of imperialist
countries to find, steal or conquer new markets and sources of raw material.
The latter --the nationalism of the oppressed nations-- is the answer to the
former and to oppose the former one must support the latter.

It will be objected that our ideology is not nationalism but Marxism. That
betrays a complete misunderstanding. It is not a question of ideologies but
of *movements.* And what history shows is that in the colonial and
semicolonial world, there is no road to the independence of the working
class movement outside of or counterposed to the national movement.

It will be argued that China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and a number of other
examples that could be cited are all defective; the leaderships were this or
that; the outcomes far short of our dreams. Yet there are no others. After
October, there are no examples of anti-capitalist revolutions successful
enough at least to get to the expropriation of the capitalists as a class
save those born out of national movements. And there are no examples of
successful revolutions in this sense in the advanced capitalist countries
*at all.*  Nor is there any evidence of one about to emerge, whereas in
Latin America, for example, one can point to a number of countries where
political instability and popular struggles have been on the rise in the
past decade: Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, to
name a few.

Joe's position that it is always "class against class" is not a Marxist
position despite its pretensions. It completely abstracts from historical
development, replacing a concrete analysis with eternal verities. Thus we
have the category "nationalism" which "the bourgeoisie has used from the
very beginning of nation-states to hoodwink the masses." 

He replaces an understanding of historical development, including how these
influenced the evolution of the thinking of the Marxist movement in response
to it, with a belief that these movements and ideas which have shaped the
world are little more than parlor tricks of the rich "to hoodwink the
masses."

But what are we to say of "democracy," then? Isn't this this something that
"the bourgeoisie has used from the very beginning of nation-states to
hoodwink the masses?"

At any rate, this method of setting up categories and pigeonholing various
phenomenon, without bother to examine the social forces behind them, is not
Marxism but sterile and dogmatic idealism. "Nationalism," you see, is always
eternally and invariably bourgeois.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the instance case, Joe's
method has brought him to identify with the right-wing paramilitaries that
destabilized the Aristide government on behalf of the imperialists. 

But it is quite striking how little guidance Joe derives from his method
even in judging posts and posters to this list. In his missives on Haiti, he
imagined Stan Goff was someone who got what little he knew about Haiti from
Congressional Black Caucus press releases. So little did he suspect there
was anything more that he didn't even bother to google Stan's name and
Haiti, which would have disabused him from his conceit.

In my case it might have been a little different --this pen name is of
recent vintage, before a year ago my posts appeared under a different
moniker-- but even in the relatively brief career of this name he would have
discovered that a) I was a former long-time member of the U.S. SWP; b) I
have long been associated with this list and c) I am currently in
Solidarity, certainly those three data points should have been enough to
dispel the idea that I came to the positions I hold from assiduous studies
of Stalin and Mao.

And if he had been particularly diligent he would have seen what the true
source was for the more nuanced approach I urged be taken towards Black
Democrats in particular (more nuanced than Joe's at any rate). It comes from
Trotsky's discussions with CLR James and other SWP leaders where he says
under certain circumstances it would be justified to support a Black
candidate for public office who was a Democrat, explaining that the SWP was
supporting him as a Black person on the basis of the democratic right of the
Black community to representation, and not as a Democrat. This would have
helped his see that his castigating me as a Maoist and Stalinist would
likely be taken by the more informed members of this list as ignorant
name-calling devoid of serious thought.

Joaquín


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