Re: [Marxism] Antiwar "leaders" can't break reformist habits

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven L. Robinson" <srobin21@xxxxxxxxxxx>


> Not so much "fat and lazy" but, rather, obedient  to those donors who pay
> for the sinecures. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Those who have more to lose than their chains, will seldom unite: they have
a world to lose...

Yet, to give just one little example, Noam Chomsky is a tenured professor at
MIT, and gets regulary called by the NYT one of the most brilliant
academicians in the USA. And his ABB digression aside, the guy is far from a
sell-out. He might yet be, for better or worse, the most important radical
polemicist alive today in the USA.

I believe facile, machineist explanations for the failures of the liberal
left (there is such a thing as a liberal right, mind you) in the USA are
doomed to failure.

It is a combination of many factors, including in many cases economic
pressures, that leads to the inefectiveness of the movement as a whole.
Sure, there are some sellouts, but I be damned if the Bolsheviks didn't have
the share of their own, and I know for a fact that the Cubans had them by
the truck loads. Even Chavez has had to deal with desertions (not to be
confused with former loyalists who nevertheless support El Proceso) Yet
these were (and in the case of Venezuela, are) by and large popular and
sucessful movements.

It follows that sell-outs are an inevitable part of the struggle, much like
state repression or lack of clear leadership.To blame any single of such
factors is in fact to self-justify our own failures as communists and
revolutionaries.

I believe the biggest single problem we have is ourselves and how we carry
our struggle.

The RCP-USA marched with the KKK in Boston and until very recently was more
homophobic than the Republican Party, the SWP killed itself by sending
pampered intellectuals to do factory work for which they were ill prepared,
the CPUSA is an apendix of the far-left of the Democrats (and in some cases
its the party of the liberal petty bourgeoise "minorities"), the WWP
believes there is still a cold war, the ISO has more turn-over than
McDonald's and the rest are either sects who listen and talk only to each
other or are to small to have any real impact (ie the SParts &Co on the one
side, the two FRSOs on the other). Not to mention left-nationalists
groupings of all ethnic backgrounds, many of which highly idealized
diasporic notions of their former lands or hold counter-productive and
anti-c racial separatist ideas. Or the SP and DSA, who remain essentially
caucuses of the Democratic Party, even if the SP has the Debs Caucus which
is full of revolutionaries.

(Sure, there are a lot of positives things going on. The ISO is the only
dynamic left force in the Teamsters and in colleges, the anti-war movements
owes its early sucesses to the WWP's incredible organizational abilities,
the RCP's NION was an incredibly succesful example of how to organize
political opposition etc etc etc. But positive things are said all the time.
Those aren't helpful. It is in *honest* criticism and self-criticism, in
particular because they are so scarce, that the true lessons can be
learned.)

I do believe the bulk of our problems stem from an inability to fit
ourselves into the body politic of the USA, due not to our claudication in
the face of liberalism, but to our left and rigth deviations, our inability
to swim with the fishes. We interpret swiming with the fishes to either mean
let ourselves be carried with the current, or fight the current until it
inevitably wins.

Yet, I believe, we must be like salmon. We should swim in the sea with no
special concern for the current, until when the time is right, we decide to
push hard against the Columbia, step over the dams, and move the next
generation forward. There are dangers in this task, but it cannot be
completed if we keep on swim placidly in the sea, or if we keep on swimming
against the current outside of the breeding season...

Hey, it evens makes a nice acronym for yet another group... S.A.L.M.O.N,
Social Action and Liberation Movement of North America. hehehehehe.

sks


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