Re: [Marxism] immigration (response to K)

[Barney Katz <taxi4marx@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Calvin Broadbent <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> What's wrong with being in an imperialist and racist
> social chauvinist party
> like the Labour Party? Ask the Asylum seekers
> detained at Britain's
> inhumane, abusive, and torturous 'accomodation'
> centres. Doesn't support for
> the Labour Party sit ill at ease with your support
> for militant trade
> unionism? You are the pompous windbag, with your
> fake activistism in support
> for the IFTU and the Labour Party. Nobody on the
> list has set up an
> opposition between socialist trade unionism and
> armed resistance to
> imperialist occupation; it is you alone on the list
> who is the victim of
> that false dichotomy. You are quite clearly the
> vitim of imperialist
> economism.
>
> I suggest you answer Rrubnelli's question in the
> affirmative, lest all your
> talk of secularism and democracy will sound like so
> much wind. You'll be the
> first to denounce the 'sectarian bigotry' that will
> inevitably ensue when
> Iraq is Balkanised, then Ulsterised, by USUK
> marauders.
>

Calvin,

Within a small political sect that has no organic
connections with the working class, and never will
have, it might be possible to possess the correct
ideas about everything, but it's not possible to do
anything about implementing them. Unfortunately (or
fortunately), that's the nature of the small political
sect.

Within the historical mass organisations of the
workers - here in Australia, the unions and the Labor
Party - it is at least possible for socialists to
operate. It's not easy. There are lots of factions
and, to be sure, reactionaries and neo-liberals, but
that's life. That's the nature of the society we live
in. We have no choice but to confront it as it is and
try to change it the best we can given our meagre
resources. Small steps of progress can be made, and
are made, particularly among those Labor branches that
are left-wing strongholds (Labor left-wingers here are
not unsimilar to Eurocommunists, but more diverse).

While it's true that these organisations have acquired
procedural frameworks that mostly thwart rank and file
participation and decision-making, the struggle to
democratise the party and the unions is itself part of
the struggle for socialism, part of the process of
taking power away from the bureaucracy and politicians
that have taken over these organisations. It's a real
struggle; it's not an imaginary one.

The sect might provide a person with the satisfaction
of knowing that they have the right ideas, but
practical politics is the art of getting things done,
of making progress in the class struggle.

BK


        
                
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