[Marxism] Re: [laborpartypraxis] RE: Statement on Haiti

["Aduku Addae" <countrybwoy@xxxxxxx>]

My brother Joe,
My comments to this Joaquins mumbo jumbo is in the square bracket in blue.
See below.
Respect,
Aduku
-------------------------------------------------------

From: Joaqu?n Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [Marxism] Statement on Haiti


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. [The "national question" is irreducibly 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. [What! Just so? Categorically? No argument? Is this
some goddamn papal edict? ]

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. [Lenin? Lenin is the
paramount bourgeois ideologist].

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. [Absolutely! It is objectively so for
all classes].

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. [At the base of the class struggle is the economic
struggle. The essence, then, of class struggle is economics].

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. [Essence is not revealed
by apprehension of superficial characteristics. We have to go beyond what we
notice immediately to grasp the inner-workings - the essential qualities].

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.*  [ This is a rehash of
the old "popular front line" which subordinated the interest of the
proletariat to that of the 3rd bourgeoisie.   The class struggle is it.
Period! The proletariat in the 3rd world must rise up against the
bourgeoisie in a bold bid for control of the state, ultimately to
expropriate the expropriator].

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. [Is this guy serious? No, it is not
sufficient to draw a line between all toilers and all exploiters. It is
necessary to ACT to expropriate bourgeois property!]

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. [At "first blush, what the heck is this
guy talking about?" The struggle of the working class has but one aim -
economic liberation. The working class wants to be liberated from wage
slavery. Period. End of story.]    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. [That moment has come and gone, if there was such a
moment. As far as I am concerned there never was such a moment. The struggle
is Capital against labor and has always been that! Workers must create their
own organizations for their own self-liberation. There is no cause, no
basis, for compromise with the bourgeoisie.]

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.) [The so-called dialectic between the national and class movement
is that the proletariat smash the bourgeois state and impose its own class
rule.]

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. [ And since this Joaquin brings up Cuba, the
so-called dialectic of  class and national movement is that the Cuban
working class smash the Cuban state, which is based on an economy of wage
labor! This is the dialectic! The only fucking dialectic worth speaking
about!!!]



I'LL LEAVE THE REST OF THIS CRAP FOR JOAQUIN TO GORGE HIMSELF ON.

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.

Joaqumn



----- Original Message -----
From: "Lil Joe" <joe_radical@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 5:12 PM
Subject: [laborpartypraxis] RE: Statement on Haiti


>
> 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.
>
> How can one respond seriously to someone who oppose
> the concept of cosmopolitan proletarian revolution,
> including Haiti, whose statements amount to
> irrational dismissals as 'nonsense',ad hominems
> about 'alter-ego', and discussions about elephants
> and flying cats as his premise statement, and more
> pious rejection and righteous indignation about
> the 'national question' and 'race' being dismissed
> by me and Aduku because we don't buy that Maoist
> 'dialectics' of "primary and secondary contradictions.
>
> In order justify the betrayal of the Chinese workers
> and poor peasants to the interests of the Chinese
> capitalists, and landlords, 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.
>
> Samuel Johnson said rightly: Patriotism is the last
> refuge of scoundrels, and it was scandalous the
> betrayed the Chinese proletariat in a popular front
> with the Kuomintang by coming up with demagogic
> crap about the 'main enemy is imperialism and that
> therefore the 'contradiction between Chinese workers
> and capitalists on one hand, and serfs and the
> 'enlightened gentry on the other, requires that
> in the interests of the 'united front against Japan
> workers cease making demands on capitalists, and
> serfs dutifully pay rent to landowners.
>
> Rather than answer Joaquin point by point about my supposed
> 'nonsense' of calling for workers revolutions as
> opposed to subornation workers to the nationalist
> bourgeoisie of the '3rd world', I demand that he
> explain to the group how it was that Clinton and
> Powell placing Aristide in power was "anti-imperialism"?
> I suppose he thinks of the mercenary firm that was
> Aristides well paid Praetorian Guard working for
> a mercenary firm based in California was Aristides,
> in Joaquin's opinion, Haiti's 'Red Army'! This
> is the same firm that supply mercenary 'contractor'
> to US in Iraq killing Iraqis.
>
> Joaquin needs to stop tailing Maxine Waters,
> Aristide and other representatives of Capital,
> or doesn't he know that the Democratic Party
> of Maxine Waters and John Kerry is a capitalist
> class party? One last thing, does Joaquin also
> support Maxine Waters and the CBC support
> for financial and military support for Israel?
> I say that the 'duality' that Joaquin sees
> in Democrats in Black Face is in his own mind,
> Waters and the CBC positions on Haiti, their
> support for Clinton's bombing of Afghanistan,
> Iraq and Sudan and Clinton's placing Aristide
> back in power are all consistent.
>
> The spectreof the American 'left' sucking up
> to Black Democratic members of the government
> in the name of fighting racism is indeed
> sickening. It is rather racism to oppose
> me and Aduku calling for workers power
> rather than campaigning for the parties of the
> class enemy, and that includes the democrats,
> no matter how many Blacks they get to
> enable such as Joaquin to work for the Democrats,
> masquerading as 'working with the Sista'
> as though the color of her skin determine
> her class position. But, let me tell ya,
> Maxine is not a home girl, she's a member
> of Congress calling Black poor folk in
> Haiti Thugs, denouncing them for defeating
> cops and freeing political prisoners, and
> refusing to lay down their weapons. This
> is the position the Democrats are taking,
> this is the position Maxine Waters is
> taking, and this is the Democrat that
> Joaquin endorse and defends.
>
> Lil Joe
>
> ===========================================
> Message: 5
>
> From: Joaqu?n Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: RE: [Marxism] Statement on Haiti
>
>
> 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.
>
> Joaqumn
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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