[Marxism] re: New Orleans: "It's the system." - are we missing anopportunity?

["M. Junaid Alam" <alam1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Junaid, for once we have similar sentiments."

Unfortunately that seems hardly the case, since your statement merely
turns into a launching pad for rather baseless assertions against me:

"But I'm struck here because I've heard nothing but cynicism from you on
this list about the existing left organizations - whether it's that
they're sectarian, don't have a serious analysis of race, oppose third
world nationalism, or are paralyzed by dogma there is some reason to
write off the work those of us in Marxist organizations are doing to
remedy the very situation you are deploring..."

Perhaps what you see is criticism because one does not, after all, clap
one's hands together every time some group does something correctly. I
am not interested in the role of cheerleader. But neither am I
interested in the role of armchair critic when it comes to existing
American organizations. Take the ISO. I have criticisms of them, but I
also have agreements and, more importantly, respect their activist work.
That is why I worked with them through Left Hook and with other
organizations to help mobilize people for the March 20 protests earlier
in the year. I also was constantly in contact with them over the
Columbia affair. Take also the Socialist Alliance. Someone from there
approached me to help publicize youth anti-war actions in November, sign
petitions, and help plan in Boston. I readily agreed. I was also pretty
involved with the GDI people, including Camejo himself, in promoting
them during the elections locally and in attacking the pro-reformist
tendency within the Green Party. So I do not know from what molecule of
thin air you discovered the notion that I "write off" the work of any
particular socialist group.

You and I never got off on the right foot, what with me labeling you a
Horowitz acolyte and you describing me as a potential bin Laden admirer.
Maybe that is mere misfortune, maybe it reflects irreconcilable
differences. But back then, in mocking tone in your accusation, you wrote:

"Forget class, forget exploitation, we are now living in a world of
nations, religions and ethnicities, and oppressor nations deserve
nothing but violent aggression."

I still find it hard to believe someone with your intelligence is
utterly incapable of seeing that class exploitation is interweaved with
the "world of nations, religions and ethnicities" - a world that does in
fact exist and cannot be wished away by invoking class.

Whatever the case, the reality is only this: I consider you "workerist"
because you appear to ignore the contours of imperialism - national and
racial. You want them to merely disappear into a neat, Kautsykian level
playing field in which all workers will hold hands because - well,
because they are workers and that's what the script calls for. I take a
more sanguine view, a view drawn upon history, and drawn upon the
writings of American Marxists like Paul Baran, who wrote the
illuminating essays  "On The Political Economy of  Backwardness" and "On
the Nature of Marxism." in the 50s and 60s, and also Stan Goff, who does
not try to pussyfoot his way around the very real issues of racism and
patriarchy in America and how American workers are degraded by it.

At any rate, the dichotomy you are proposing here - whether we are to
blame those "self-interested, careerist, petty-bourgeois academics" or
the "ignorant, racist, self-centered privileged white workers", is a
canard which I do not accept. We have gone over this before. Every time
I brought up a historical situation or general trend, you would counter
it by pointing to some exception or personal experience of yours which
supposedly proved the opposite. So for instance, if you claim the
radical academics are "out of touch" with "actual workers", I would say
that the "actual workers" as a whole purged and persecuted the radicals
among them when the workers got a bigger piece of the pie after WWII to
begin with - to which you would simply say this was not "inevitable" and
cite an exception of some sort.

There are selfish academics. There are also selfish workers. There are
academics wfrom the conservative-liberal debate and disgustingly grafted
onto the worker-academic antagonism. Basically, the "pro-worker" adopts
the "conservative" tone, decrying radical academics as weirdos ouho
specialize in making the rich richer. There are also workers who
specialize in scabbing. Absolutely *nothing* within this framework  is
actually *useful* in understanding why there is no mass organized
socialist base in America. The whole affair devolves into melodramatic
hysterics characterized by name-calling one sector of society or the
other. So I reject this dichotomy, which I think has actually been
importedt of touch with reality and incapable of being real. And the
"pro-radical" adopts the "liberal" tone, dismissing the worker as stupid
and incapable of grasping certain esoteric truths.

Finally, I do not accept the idea that anyone who is not in a
self-declared socialist party is simply not doing anything. That is
patently absurd. If this were really the problem, then it should follow
that all the socialists inside socialist groups are making progress by
leaps and bounds in attracting new members. Needless to say this is not
the case. Exhortations about party members "being out there" and
"acting", tinged with this anarchist kind of "movementist" rhetoric, are
not impressive when numbers *remain* miniscule. Clearly there is some
other barrier besides physical energy, and I believe that barrier is
ideological hegemony. That is why I have been doing Left Hook for the
past two years, where young people interested in the world around them
from a leftist perspective can actually write and read and see there are
other youth like them out there. It's also why I helped build the site
for Monthly Review's new webzine which Yoshie edits.

Obviously, achieving any kind of mass base in America is going to take a
combination of counterhegemony and grassroots mobilization, but equally
obvious is the fact that that is not any kind of profound insight.
People have already been doing that for a long time. Hence my question:
why the hell do we have no real presence out there? I simply do not
think this question can be answered by invoking platitudes about "out of
touch" academics or the need to "hit the streets."



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