RE: [Marxism] Re: A report on the CPUSA Convention Live Feed

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

 -----Original Message-----
 From: Mauricio Martinez
>
> the so-called 'revolutionaries of the phrase,'
> who, to paraphrase, are the staunchest of conservaties,
> because in their struggle for the correct revolutionary line
> leave the world exactly as it is.

Then this list is the most reactionary of all the internet lists!

> But criticism, or rather, dismissal of various
> agents in that struggle due to a lack of correct phrasing or
> a misguided political position here or there is simply the
> work of a theologian of the first order.

This is a disingenious response to criticism of the CPUSA. And the actual
inverse of the reality on the ground:

The CPUSA gets criticized not because of shiboleth stuff, but because of a
general, systemic, ideological abandonment of Marxism and of class politics
altogether. They don't have "a misguided political position here or there"
but they have a correct political position here and there (ie Cuba), which
they use as a smokescreen to validate the rest of their classless program as
"Marxist".

The theological battles between the sects cannot be construed into a general
incorrectness of the attacks on the CPUSA, but represent rather the
flip-side of a general weakness of the Marxist project in the USA that the
CPUSA is emblematic: I believe due to the abandonment of the epistemological
break represented by Marxism with modernist liberalism, complete with a
Bernstenian political program, a Comtenian historical philosophy, and a
Browderist organizational practice.

The split between the CPUSA and the CofC in the early 1990s, and their
current rapproachment illustrate this point. The CofC for Democracy and
Socialism (and the much smaller News and Letters splinter) represent the
open adoption of a liberal socialism whose single historic connection to
Marxism is that they use the word. To this day, young YCL trainees get
exposed to the Party Program way before they even, if ever, touch, say, the
Manifesto.

I love it when people hide behind Marx's critique of "Critical Criticism"
and "Absolute Criticism" when defending the CPUSA and that melieu, simply
because it exposes a lack of historical understanding of what the "Critical
Criticism" and "Absolute Criticism" where about. Roughly put, the "Critical
Criticism" and "Absolute Criticism" schools were the precursor of both
radical democrats and anarchists, with a critique that de-emphacized class
self-determination and a critique of capitalism as a system, and rather
concentrated their attacks on power and the state. Marx's famous debate with
the CCs about the "proletariat not being gods" has been historically
construed by class-collaborationist "Marxism" as a defense of abandoning the
proletariat whenever it is politically expedient to do, rather than it being
an explanation as to why the revolution must be a proletarian revolution.
Ironically, it was direct at a whole school of thought that finds its
largest, most visible representative tooday in the CPUSA itself!!!

The Holy Family is not about attack sectarianism within the class movement,
as you seem to construe it, but rather it is about putting forth a line on
the sand with regards of the proletariat as both revolutionary subject and
revolutionary object.

(I addressed this thing before:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w12/msg00081.htm )

Hence, to quote the "Holy Family" in defense of the CPUSA, which is the
epitome of abandoning class politics, is actually an exercise of theology,
and an amateurish one at that.

sks


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