RE: [Marxism] re: Some comments on Stan Goff's post

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

M. Junaid Alam wrote: "This sounds fine on paper, but I think it assumes
a one-sided view of why the Left isn't already more black, for instance.
That view being, the Left alienates and ignores blacks. I don't think
this is true....

"I think this is a very strange way of putting things. The reality is
that the most active and serious leftists are predominantly white and
middle-class. At the same time, among the most oppressed people are
blacks. And yet, paltry few blacks are involved in radical politics. To
paper over this contradiction, Joaquin says that if an alien looked at
radical leftist publications he would automatically assume they are from
the black community. Well, whose fault is it, really, that such is not
the case?"

Comrade M. Junaid Alam has penetrated precisely to the heart of the
matter. And I think that heart of the matter is what we conceive of as
"radical." 

I think the comrade may exaggerate a bit, but not much: as we normally
think of "radicalism" or "socialism" the situation he describes is
accurate. Thus the question becomes, is the way we think of "socialists"
and "radicals" correct?

As Marxists I believe we are compelled to also examine OURSELVES, and
most especially the collective "ourselves," as a social and historical
product. And my contention is that this "ourselves" that we largely have
on this list, and that we largely have on the structured "multinational"
left in the United States, when we examine experiences like the Russian
Revolution or the Cuban Revolution, are at best a small component of the
radicals, the revolutionary left, and when examined much more closely we
see that those who were like us in those situations played the role they
did by LIQUIDATING INTO a different KIND of left.

The majority of us in organized left groups currently or in the past I
believe really should view ourselves as coming from the intelligentsia.
I believe this is also historically accurate, by and large we've come
INTO the movement from intellectual youth and especially university
student milieus. 

But this means that *our* view of radicalism is shaped by the social
reality that we are radicals of the K Marx, F Engels, VI Lenin, Fidel
Castro and Che Guevara variety. 

>From the list I present I think it should be clear that I do not hold
the layer we come from in low esteem, quite the contrary.

In this I follow Marx and Engels, who thought that OUR kind of people
are so important they even put an entire paragraph in the Communist
Manifesto about us:

"Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within
the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring
character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift,
and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in
its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the
nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the
bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion
of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of
comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."

But before we get TOO excited, let's remember, it's just ONE paragraph,
in a pamphlet about a *different kind* of radicalism. 

Because there is another "left" we should think about. The left that
arises "from below," not from an UNDERSTANDING of social relations
(exploitation, oppressions, patriarchy, white supremacy, class, gender,
nationality) but from those social relations themselves, the "left" of
those who really don't even necessarily want to BE part of the left, but
just ARE, the social relations that ensnare them leaves them no choice. 

The two most significant social movements of the XXth Century in U.S.
society sprung from and were rooted in this OTHER left. They were the
organization of unions symbolized by the rise of the CIO and the Civil
Rights Movement. And if we look at how those movements arose and
functioned, something that stands out is *organizing* in a very
*organic* way. "Valga la redundancia" --the redundancy is on purpose, as
we say in Spanish. 

If you think about how we of the "political" or "ideological" left tend
to organize something like an antiwar protest, we put out a call, spread
the word far and wide, draw in people that we don't necessarily have
ongoing relationships with. We do socialist propaganda and all manner of
other things in the same way -- scattering seeds to the wind in the hope
that some --even if only a few-- will find fertile soil.

It is said that thing like marches and rallies are "proletarian methods
of struggle" as they rely on numbers and so on for their impact. I
believe that is true. But it should also be admitted that by and large
the WAY they are put together is quintessentially "petty bourgeois" --
we appeal to "people" as atomized members of "civil society." 

Now, I am for this, all other things being equal. I think it is good,
positive, progressive. It is not the be all and end all of organizing. 

Community or workplace-based movements aren't like that. They're based
on relationships, they focus on the most immediate, felt needs of the
affected group, they're the result of years of what in Latin America is
called "ant work." The task is NOT finding those who are willing to
move, the task is moving those who are there, in a specific time and
place and circumstance. 

And that is much more difficult, yet that is what must be done for this
isn't like poker, and if we don't like the working people history has
dealt us, we just turn in the hand and ask the dealer for new cards. 

Revolutions are made by parties --whether called a movement, army,
league or something else-- that fuse BOTH kinds of lefts, or more
precisely, put the services of our kind of intellectual left at the
disposal of the social left, fuse US with the actual *social movement.*


I mentioned in another post that two weeks ago I was at an event in
Durham, modestly called the Revolutionary POC Workshop. And actually I
did more than attend, I was one of the organizers. But being there, I
realized what it was really based on was the BLM and most of all SNCC.
Because the layer of Black comrades and cadre who were there were part
of a network or collaborations and relations that goes back 40 years.
And I want to say especially women organizers. And that is the granite
foundation on which some of us in Soli and other groups are trying to
grope our way to a collaboration of mutual learning and support with a
Black-Latino alliance as its axis that we think can be effective in
changing some things. Including perhaps the broader left, but that will
be a byproduct, because we're doing it for ourselves. 

That SNCC was the movement of the Black intelligentsia. But it linked up
with something deeper and broader, the Black Liberation Movement, which
grew out of, or really was the right name of the movement that initially
was called the civil rights movement, to the point that the primary work
of the former SNCC organizers now scattered here and there throughout
the South, and I repeat women organizers because I do believe this is
very much a gendered issue, is "community organizing." 

A lot of the heart and soul of the civil rights movement were the county
branches of the NAACP. And a lot of that organizing was done by Blacks
associated with the labor movement and the rise of the CIO. Rosa Parks
did not act alone. A man named E.D. Nixon bailed her out. He came from
the brotherhood of sleeping car porters. Rosa Parks acted with lifetimes
of effort behind her at the right place, at the right time. And so when
they held the meeting about her case, the problem wasn't the empty pews
in the church that seated a few hundred where that meeting was held.
That was the problem ED Nixon and his friends in the NAACP feared. The
one they found was the thousands of Black people who could not get INTO
the church. And that problem was the key to their victory.

And what was the NAACP in such places? It was the vanguard. It was the
solid, conscious, disciplined core around which the masses of the
oppressed and dispossessed finally cohered. It was that section of the
Black community that pushed forward all the others, including a young
preacher from Atlanta with a gift for oratory, Martin Luther King, Jr.

But it wasn't MLK that organized that infrastructure around which the
movement cohered. And a lot of the most effective organizing of those
branches, the gold standard, was done by a woman named Ella Baker. And
the more I learn about her story, and the story of those she influenced,
and the story of those who were influenced by those she influenced, the
more I think that if there's going to be a revolution in our epoch in
THIS country, the story of that revolution begins with her. And the many
other hers that followed her example. 

If you want to build a vanguard party, and I say this in all
seriousness, because I do believe a successful revolution requires it,
don't just go to Russia and Lenin. Because Lenin didn't build that
party. Lenin provided the political clarity such a party needed, but the
work itself was done by hundreds and thousands of Russian Ella Bakers
and E.D. Nixons and Rosa Parkses. And they did so against savage
repression, without NGO's and nonprofits, without foundation funding,
while holding full-time jobs and "meeting on Sundays over fried
chicken," as one veteran of the Black Liberation Movement described the
participation of his parents in the movement in the 1950's and 60's.

And LEST WE FORGET, people like unassuming Ella Baker organized the
NAACP despite and against a nearly 100-year campaign of genocidal
terrorism with few if any parallels in history. THIS is a left that some
might be tempted to call the REAL left, because it's where the rubber
hits the road, where the resistance --and I use that word advisedly, and
in its full meaning-- meets the repression, the genocide, and overcomes
it.

This is the left that surrounded the Hotel Theresa when Fidel visited
the U.N. at the beginning of the revolution, the left that put an end to
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by the --there's a perfect word in
Spanish for this-- "ajusticiamiento" (literally, doing justice onto) of
officers, i.e., fragging, the left that brought down Jim Crow and
American Apartheid and won the right of Black people to vote by turning
the other cheek, singing we shall overcome, burning down Watts and
telling Lyndon Johnson: the ballot or the bullet.

A lot of our attitudes are shaped from a viewpoint derived from reading
people like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Che; hearing Fidel or Hugo
Chavez speak. And it seems like this OTHER left of which I speak, the
"social" left, just sorts of falls into the laps or a Fidel or a Lenin
because these dudes are, like so totally brilliant. But that's precisely
the *opposite* of what happened. It's not the masses that rise to the
level of the intellectuals, it is the intellectuals who rise to the
level of the masses, who finally understand *themselves* as the
reflection on the level of ideas and strategy and the clash of
ideological currents of the REAL movement which is *social* and not
ideological.

"Herr Heinzen imagines communism is a certain doctrine which proceeds
from a definite theoretical principle as its core and draws further
conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen is very much mistaken. Communism is
not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from
facts. The Communists do not base themselves on this or that philosophy
as their point of departure but on the whole course of previous history
and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries at the
present time. Communism has followed from large-scale industry and its
consequences, from the establishment of the world market, of the
concomitant uninhibited competition, ever more violent and more
universal trade crises, which have already become fully fledged crises
of the world market, from the creation of the proletariat and the
concentration of capital, from the ensuing class struggle between
proletariat and bourgeoisie. Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is
the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this
struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the
liberation of the proletariat." (Engels, "The Communists and Karl
Heinzen." [Second Article]
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/09/26.htm#2.)

The task is NOT NOT NOT to "raise" the "spontaneous" social movement,
the resistance, to "our" intellectual level but to fuse our
UNDERSTANDING with the actual movement so that the actual movement
develops along a strategic line of march that corresponds to the real
social relations.

*  *  *

I am not going to take up M. Junaid Alam's argument that the Black
community is completely incoherent; that there was no sign of a Black
response to Katrina; that it is engaged in nihilism and fratricide and
so on, and the proof of it is that they're all Democrats. 

Because although there is quite a bit of difference between a John Lewis
and a Cynthia McKinney even though what separates their two districts is
just a street that's been designated the county line in my town, there
is a WORLD of difference between the Congressional Black Caucus and the
Democratic Leadership Council. 

It is the difference between the "shoot to kill" looters rhetoric of
white Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and what Democrat Mayor
Ray Nagin and Lt. Gral. Russel Honoré said and did in defense of the
"looters." And that difference comes not from the ballot line
designation but from this: the strategic line of the DLC is to shed the
Democratic party's identification with the Black community. The reality
of Nagin's and Honore's life is that they are both Black, irremediably
and hopelessly so. So Hillary is on the hill promoting a bill to ban
"flag desecration." And Nagin is in Atlanta talking to a mass meeting of
2,000 Katrina refugees about coming home. And about how if the feds
don't help people, maybe they'll organize a march on Washington. And,
yes, catching hell from the community for being such a Tom. What can I
say. Life is complicated like that.

I think the left will be getting somewhere when we go through that kind
of meeting not as observers or supporters but our protagonists. And not
until.

Joaquín


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