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

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jon Flanders, trying to distinguish between today's situation and the
1960's, asserted: "We are talking about something other than the
completion of basic democratic tasks, like the right to vote, aren't
we?"

First, and really an aside, this stuff about "completion" of "tasks" of
some other class's revolution I think should be dropped as a frame of
reference. It suggests they are "low level" and leads them to be
counterposed to the "real" tasks of "our" revolution. 

Now on to the main point. 

If you look at nationally oppressed peoples in the United States, in
reality the "tasks" remain quite the same. The "right to vote," for
example. Some comrades may think it is largely off the table now that
it's been taken care of in principle for Blacks, the way many people
(until the civil rights movement) thought it had been taken care of with
women being enfranchised.

But if you're one of the tens of millions of people of voting age in
this country who aren't allowed to vote, by law, or if you were
intimately connected with those people, you would view it differently.
Millions of Blacks who are either incarcerated, on probation or parole,
or who are marked as "felons" even though they have so-called "paid
their debt to society" are denied the right to vote. And tens of
millions of immigrants are similarly excluded.

I don't think you've seen the end of the struggle for the right to vote
-- not by a long shot.

But in the case of the Black and other oppressed nationality
communities, behind the struggle for voting rights is something broader
and deeper, the drive to self-determination, to control their own
affairs as a people. That may not take the *form* of explicit
nationality/"race" demands, the forms may be something like reorganizing
a transit authority, jurisdictional lines of governmental bodies, and so
on. One of the *forms* certainly is the drive by Blacks and Latinos to
elect Blacks and Latinos to office or to have them appointed, in the
case of non-elected offices like federal and many state judgeships.

One of the most important "democratic" fights is the fight for *equal
treatment* in everything from education to employment to health care to
bus and subway lines. 

Equality in education remains just as much of an unfulfilled promise
TODAY as it was in 1954, at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education
decision. Dual school systems remain the norm, even though now it
happens "naturally" (geographically) and there is a little bit of
"leakage" of kids from the oppressed nationality into the better, mostly
white suburban schools. 

In the case of immigrants, and especially the undocumented immigrant
population, which official numbers now place at 10 million plus, and a
study by the Bear Sterns brokerage house estimates at up to 20 million,
there has been a systematic effort over the past decade, and
intensifying during the years of the Bush regime, to create a thicket of
Jim Crow legislation and regulations that provide for discrimination
against them without so much as the fig-leaf of "separate but equal." 

For example, the business office of one state college in Georgia has
decided that it will not issue student ID's to those students it chooses
to single out on some unstated basis and ask for documents proving legal
residency that do not provide the documents. Fighting this is a little
complicated because the typical white liberal answer --"sue the
bastards"-- is not necessarily a wise move. The U.S. Supreme Court has
already invented out of whole cloth an impairment to the right of
undocumented immigrants obtaining civil relief in the case of back
wages.

Another example: undocumented immigrant are now denied drivers licenses
or ID cards issued in lieu of licenses in virtually every state, which
means also they're impaired from obtaining legally required insurance,
opening bank accounts, and so on.

The most extreme of these measures now pending in the Georgia state
legislature and in other states would, in effect, write into the state
constitution an application to undocumented immigrants of the essence of
the infamous Dred Scott decision of the 1850's, which said that Blacks
were not persons under the law. 

That's what the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment were written to prohibit,
but they are trying anyways. And in Congress, a bill that would strip
citizenship from children of undocumented immigrants born in this
country, sponsored by one of Georgia's representatives, by the way, is
gaining steam, despite the entirely unambiguous language of the 14th
amendment specifically written for the exclusive purpose of banning any
and all such legislation.

It may be that for Jon and those he is in close contact with at work and
in his community these things are all issues that have passed into
history. But that is not true of working people as a whole, and
especially not the communities of nationally oppressed peoples. 

This is an example, an object lesson, of why I say that it is necessary
for the structured multinational left to transform itself, to adopt a
strategic orientation to the communities, issues, concerns, struggles,
and movements of the Black and Latino communities, to immerse ourselves
in them, as a first step in becoming qualitatively Blacker, more Latino,
etc. I suspect that Jon doesn't see the *actual* daily fights going on
around these sorts of issues because the multinational left taken as a
whole remains disconnected from the communities, the comrades live
overwhelmingly in white/Anglo America.

This is a real problem, because in a sense what I'm saying is comrades
need to learn to swim. But how do you explain swimming to someone who
has never seen water except in a glass or a in shower? Never been
surrounded by it, immersed in it? 

We can discuss the laws of physics, buoyancy, fluid mechanics;
physiology, bones and tendons and muscles and the movement of body
parts. But actually both my kids learned to swim BEFORE acquiring any
theory and by being taught by someone who already knew how to swim while
actually immersed in water. The white left especially has a HUGE deficit
of such people -- and the problems that result are shown by Jon's
comment about after all we're not talking about the right to vote. 

Well, we certainly are, but we're talking even more primitive rights,
like the right to move about freely, which is what Drivers Licenses are
about, the right to make and enforce contracts, and so on.

I don't think we can understand the political struggle to overthrow this
system in this country without being part of those struggles. 

And this also relates to Louis's comments about how objective conditions
do not exist in the United States to build a revolutionary party. I
certainly agree with Louis on that, but I would disagree with what seems
to be his conclusion, that there is nothing to be done about it now
except individual activism and discussions in spaces like this one.
There is nothing to be done on the plane of formal organization, and
especially not formal, national organization.

Conditions weren't ripe in Russia either for building a revolutionary
party before the early 1900's. But what made the founding of a real
party *possible* was the organized political work with working people in
the 10-15 years that preceded the Second Congress of the RSDLP, which
marked its real founding. The kind of organic base-building work Lenin
did before going into exile, the Ella Baker type of work that went
unheralded at the time in the South but without which the Civil Rights
Movement would have been impossible, just as the RSDLP would have been
impossible.

Given modern communications and conditions, it is neither possible nor
desirable for such work to be carried out in an atomized way
locality-by-locality. It OUGHT to be done in a framework that allows
experiences to be shared and lessons to be generalized and that helps
the activists directly involved see where they work fits into an overall
picture of the political and social movements of the country.

Joaquín


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