[Marxism] "Those stupid masses!" (or: rrubinelli has swallowed the bait)

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Respuesta a:"Re: [Marxism] A clarification on Peronism, Zionis"
Enviado por:rrubinelli
Con fecha:9 Apr 2005, a las 17:42

[I had prepared a very long answer to rrubinelli's position re.: the 
national question.  But Joaquín Bustelo has made all of us the gift 
of a crisp and elegant rebuttal of rrubinelli's economism, so that I 
will just refer to the political issues involved and considerably 
reduce the length of my original contribution.  I would only like to 
say here that I  somehow take exception to J.B.'s contention that 
there is NO necessary relation between the national question and the 
rise of capitalism, but this should be debated on a different thread.

In order to give to my posting a readable format, I will make some 
not so crazy initial assumption.s.  I will assume that rrubinelli is 
male, so that from now onwards, I call him Mr. Rubinelli.  Not an 
arbitrary assumption:  it is us men who tend to make more blunders.  
And it is us men who are most cocksure and convinced of our own 
mistakes.  I will also assume he is an US member of the list, though 
I am tempted to brand him South American and even Argentinean for 
reasons that will appear below.]

This is my final last word, because I am too busy now to  write long 
postings again on issues that I (and I certainly was NOT the only 
one) have dealt with once and again on this list.

My answer, then:

Thank you, Mr. Rubinelli, at last you swallowed the bait!  You were a 
slippery eel, but at last we caught you.

Please, dear list members, read what follows (all remaining parts of 
Mr. Rubinelli's "Marxism" are ancillary and subsidiary to what I am 
stressing here):

> Nothing you have
> presented grapples with the essential problem, the subjugation of
> class struggle inside a faux national struggle, which has really been
> the shoals upon which " liberation" has beached itself.
>

The whole building is grounded on this assertion:  that the 
"essential problem" is the falseness of "national struggle" (please 
pay attention to the difference with what J.Bustelo has seen, viz. an 
economicist approach; no, it is more than a matter of approach, Mr. 
Rubinelli believes the whole thing to be, in the end, a _lie_) .  Of 
course, this begs the question, and if this were a simple matter of 
logics, we would rest our case here.  

But the fact is that we are not merely talking of logics.  The fact 
is Mr. Rubinelli _ does not see that he is begging the question_, 
then there is a very good chance that his unawareness of his own 
deeds might well betray a social fact:  that  it is not _he_ who taps 
his keyboard but some mysterious social force that "acts behind his 
back and uses him as a mouthpiece".  

That is, that he is not conscious of what he is really saying.  So 
that let us give him the benefit of a long posting, longer at least 
than I could afford today.

Politically, what these "Marxists" teach to workers in the Third 
World is:  "Be socialist!  Keep workers strictly separated from any 
other class oppressed by imperialism!".  In the worst situations, you 
have what I would today call the "Zanón outcome", a whole plant, 
taken by the workers, isolated from the real developments of local 
politics, risking a terrible defeat and an appalling repressive move. 
 Martyrs, never heroes.
 
The most serious in the fold to which Mr. Rubinelli seems to belong 
don't balk at saying that this "imperialism" issue is a bourgeois 
deviation (a "faux struggle").  Since capitalism is evil and wicked,  
it has embraced the whole globe,  bourgeois rule is exploitive and 
miserable, and since the whole world has gone capitalist, then only 
socialist revolutions count.  

Those revolutions, then, that take place in the Third World., must 
pass the "Marxist's" litmus test.  If narrow and nationalist, then 
"Poopy, don't touch it, yeeech".  Nationalism is a red herring, only 
socialism counts.  This has not brought Mr. Rubinelli and his likes 
too far into the way to revolution.  I am sorry to say that, most 
usually, it has usually pitted them against nationalist regimes, yes, 
but in close company with imperialist plant managers, foreign trade 
businessmen (that is, smugglers),  financial gurus (that is, gamblers 
and parasites), ignorant academics, corrupt journalists, absentee 
landowners, reactionary priests, "meritocracies" of oil companies, 
the US (and other imperialist countries') Embassy, and the whole host 
of ruling classes in a semicolonial country.  

This sorry show would be amazing, were it not tragic:  once and 
again, the immaculate Socialist Marxists side with such an unhealthy 
bunch every (and I mean it: _every_) time some "reactionary" and 
"bourgeois" regime attempts to loosen the noose with which the 
international system has caught the country, every time some 
"reformist" regime "demagogically" rises salaries, or every time some 
"militarist dictator" puts an end to servile conditions in the 
countryside.  Those are mischievous presents that the bourgeoisie 
makes to the workers, in order to keep them in line with the 
necessities of capital, not of labor.

Yes, every time these things happen you will find a purely socialist 
group yelling against the "shoals of nationalism" that will bring the 
revolution to a bad end, attempting to alienate the masses from this 
"faux because national" revolution, and thus giving Leftist coverage 
to their (unexpected?) partners operation against the "bourgeois" 
nationalists in power, so they can bring the country down to heels 
again.  

This kind of empiric test should be enough to move those sincreely 
interested in socialist revolution to reconsider such a line and its 
consequences.  

But the Rubinellis don't reconsider.  Perhaps there is something we 
can't see, perhaps all those classes that oppose "nationalist" 
regimes are frontally against capital, like Mr. Rubinelli, and it is 
only he who realizes it[1].

Or...

It is Mr. Rubinelli who can't understand why is it that the above 
happens.  In fact, the problem lies much deeper than Mr. Rubinelli 
believes.  Class struggle does not operate, in his formulation, as an 
opposition between "bourgeois" and "socialist" ideologies.  It 
operates in the very fabric of Mr. Rubinelli's mind, to an advised 
observer it appears adamantly (but perception is an _active_ function 
of mind, and data don't get into consciousness by and of themselves) 
in Mr. Rubinelli's starting point, in that idea that "national 
struggle" is "faux".  Please look at the thing in its barebones 
clearness:  "faux", not "mistaken".  False, not wrong.

This idea, moreover, this way to understand this issue, is the "A" in 
the "ABC of the Left Wing Sepoy ".  We Argentinean Marxists know it 
too well, because if I am not wrong, it was the Argentinean  Sepoy 
Marxists (and the Uruguayan Sepoy Marxists) who invented the whole 
thing first, quite early in the history of our socialist thought and 
practice.  There were reasons for this to happen, which I don't have 
the time to explain here.

But now let us try to help Mr. Rubinelli, and this is the only offer. 

Let us assume, for the sake of mental health, that Mr. Rubinelli 
considers himself a  Marxist and not an Illuminist or (worse) a 
Positivist.  Then how would you explain, Mr. Rubinelli, that social 
and historic facts (ideas _are_ facts) that move hundreds of millions 
of persons are a "faux struggle", that is, to put it in a single 
word, a lie?

How do you explain that something so real that takes the form of a 
mass movement is a "lie"?

Allow me to remind you (or perhaps to inform you)  that what Marxists 
do with ideas (and ideas are only worth the fuss if they take a grip 
on millions) is not to declare them "lies" or "truths", but to 
_understand_ them in their historical and political meaning, which is 
always an issue of class struggle.  When confronting some idea that 
somehow grabs the minds of millions of persons, what a Marxist tries 
to do is to find out _what do these ideas mean_ for the millions who 
hold them as valid, thus uncovering the _material force_ that these 
ideas represent.  Even when a Marxist finds an idea the expression of 
a "bourgeois" ideology, what a Marxist does is not to dismiss it as 
false, but tries to find out where is the "truth in the lie", so to 
say, in order to put your -sorry- quite elementary and Aristotelic 
prose into something nearer to dialectical thinking.  This is the 
only way to approach them and to combat them, if necessary, among the 
masses that we are so eager to revolt (or to revolt with).

For example:  most citizens of imperialist countries tend to believe 
that "Third World nationalism" is simply a reactionary opposition to 
the progress of civilization.  There are even "Marxists", like Tom 
Nairn, who have exposed this wonderful proposition in "Leftist" 
verbiage [2].  Of course, I don't agree with that majority of 
citizens in the First World.  But I would never think that those 
people are stupid.  

Further probing into a concrete example, these people believe that it 
is important to convince the Iraqis that we are all living in a 
"world one" where things would be marvelous were it not for the 
Iraqi's stubborn tendency to consider themselves owners of "the oil 
of the world" that lies beneath the soles of their shoes.  Mr. 
Rubinelli's method would imply that we must think that these fellow 
countrymen are "mistaken" and assuming a "faux struggle".  Mine, 
rather, would tend to start by the statement that if they (even 
working class) think the way they do it is because there must be some 
very concrete class (and national) interest that they consider worth 
defending.  Politics is not a matter of discovering "false" 
statements and debating them from the High Chair of Wisdom, but a 
matter of unravelling the concrete truth that underlies the formal 
"lie", and operating on that truth.  "False consciousness" is a 
double edged sword, which in inept (or worse) hands does more harm 
than good.

The example above was not innocent.  Since almost everyone agrees in 
that the method of Rubinelli should not be applied to the First 
World, it helps us in our task to sink the wedge deeper in the wood.  
Now, let us go to the "national struggle" in the Third World.  This 
(or ideas that are structurally their representation in a mystified 
way, such as some forms of religious nationalism) is, admittedly, an 
idea that many (let us say some billions of citizens of the poorest 
corners of Planet Earth) tend to find attractive, in spite of poor 
Mr. Rubinelli's efforts.  It should be given adequate treatment, 
concretely by "unravelling, etc., etc., etc.", thus allowing Marxist 
politicians to open up a complex array of options tending to insert 
themselves in the _concrete, material_ movement of the historic 
subject of Marxist revolutions, the workers _such as they actually 
are_.

Most of the Third World workers (peasants, small entrepreneurs, 
intellectual elites, etc., of course, are not important for this 
conception of "Marxism") are far from sharing Mr. Rubinelli's 
rejection of patriotism as a faux struggle, and tend to be furiously 
patriotic as against, for example, the Marine Corps landing on their 
shores.  What do the Rubinellis do, then?  They tell these billions 
of human beings that they believe in a lie, that this lie does not 
consult their interests, that this lie serves other people's 
interests, that these people are their class enemies, in the end, 
that these lies have been imposed on them, and that THEY ARE STUPID 
ENOUGH TO BELIEVE IN THOSE LIES (capitals for emphasis, sorry). That 
is, in the end:  people do not pay attention to us because people are 
simply a bunch of stupids that we must enlighten and educate.

There is a single word that can describe this attitude.  The word is 
"pedantry".  And if one probes deeper and traces the history of this 
pedantry to its roots, one finds out that it is certainly a social 
and not individual feature:  it is the self-defensive pedantry of the 
middle class intellectual who has to serve Capital in order to 
survive but morally revolts against the hand that feeds him or her.  
A _social_ and not _individual_ fact, it opens up the way to the 
Rubinellis of this world to innocently fall into their basic mistake: 
they never begin by asking the _first_ question not only of a Marxist 
but of anyone seriously trying to influence the ways in which 
millions see the world (and politics is, in more senses than one, 
just that).  

This question being  "_Why_ do millions and millions and millions the 
world over not only believe that they must defend themselves -risking 
their life if need be- of "foreign" intromission, that is in a 
'national struggle'?".  The self-defensive pedantry of the Leftist 
Sepoy gives an answer to this question even _before_ it is posed, ant 
thus it is NEVER posed.

Because there are two basic, and possible, answers,   

(a) They are imbeciles, duped by an almighty and cunning national 
bourgeoisie into a false and hopeless alliance with their own 
exploiters, who, of course, are the local representatives of capital 
tout court.  This is the end result of Mr. Rubinelli's way of 
thinking.

(b) They know something that the Rubinellis don't know.

The Rubinellis choose the first answer, and thus at the crucial 
moments in history they can easily stand by the most reactionary 
forces whenever a national, popular, revolutionary government gets to 
power.  This ideology shares the derision in which the rich of the 
Earth look upon the billions who toil down there in the Abyss. The 
mould in which it is cast reflects the dependent condition of the 
Rubinellis, and their hatred for those who they ultimately serve.  
And it emasculates their "Marxism" of any serious social consequence 
(save for defeats for the workers who share their views, but have to 
confront the bourgeoisie and the imperialists at the very ground of 
class struggle in the workplace)

As I said on a previous posting:  sowing dragons in sterile soil is 
little rewarding.

A final coda:

Some years ago, when Argentinean politics was in the doldrums, I 
merrilly dedicated hour after long hour to teach Mr. Rubinelli's 
equals the ABC of Marxist -yes, Marxist- revolutionary politics in a 
Third World country.  

Things have changed.

As many know, at the cost of three dozen of dead and hundreds of 
wounded, and thanks to popular upheavals in the streets, it is 
already three years now since Argentinean politics has begun to move 
ahead again (and I am completely sure that my own activity has had 
something to do in the whole thing)  [3].  

This has consequences.  I am not a chatterbox, nor an academic.  I am 
a militant, and thus I can't dedicate too much of my time to 
electronic debates with people who sit on a tall chair and consider 
themselves above the stupid masses.  

But if Mr. Rubinelli wants to learn something, then he might plunge 
into the archives of this List. Beware, however, Mr. Rubinelli:  a 
willing reader -taking the red pill, like in The Matrix- is required 
in order to understand ideas that run frontally against systemic 
reproduction.  Thus, I am not sure that even after long months of 
ingurgitation of such a material Mr. Rubinelli would understand.

But,. these caveats offered, I insist: he can have a good 
introduction into the Marxist intelligence of the national question, 
the consequences of the uneveness of global development of 
capitalism, and what does it mean "to struggle against one's own 
bourgeoisie" in a country that lives in asphyxia with the noose of a 
foreign, imperialist bourgeoisie, around its pale, bloodless neck.The 
archives of this list drip blood, sweat and tears (mine or of my 
occassional opponents) around these issues.  But this happened before 
December 2001.  Maybe if Mr. Rubinelli can go and see what do the 
list's archives say on these issues, this can be of help.  But now I 
will not answer him any more.

So long, Mr. Rubinelli.  I honestly like the company of dragons.  
Talking to mice not my idea of a good cup o'tea.  
 

N O T E S

[1] In a certain sense, they _are_ against "capital":  yes, they are 
against capital accumulation _unless it takes place for the benefit 
of global capital_.  Local lumps of capital must circulate globally, 
unless it is in the interest of global capital to put them there. 
They are internationalists, aren't they?  So are the Rubinellis.

[2]  One of the most outstanding members of this list, the late Jim 
Blaut, attacked this with his usual efficiency, and mopped the floor 
with Mr. Nairn's hairs.  Maybe Mr. Rubinelli would find his 
contributions useful.

[3] Maybe Mr. Rubinelli is informed of these events himself.  He 
displays so Italian a family name and so superbly perfect kind of 
Sepoy Marxism that he may well be Argentinean!

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
"Sí, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos".
Simón Bolívar al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de 
Buenos Aires, 1822
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 



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