Re: [Marxism] Our Marxist Maimonides

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor Gorojovsky wrote:
>
> Mike Leibowitz:
>
> > From my experience
> > of working with student movements and other campaigns, I saw the
> > basic truth that people transform themselves through their
> > struggles. That idea became the central concern of my political
> > world view - how do you put people into motion; how do you
> > develop their capacity to self-transform?
>
> When you have learnt that, what remains is commentary.

This is explicit in the Third Thesis on Feuerbach, the last sentence:
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity
can be conceived and rationlly understood only as _revolutionising
prattice_."

But (I believe this is also explicit in Mike's argument) that practice
cannot take place merely within the revolutionary party (however
organized) but must, rather, take place in the broad mass of people
engaged at various levels in the struggle. This is why a rigorous
insistence on "single-issue" struggles is so destructive. In _practice_,
of course, demonstrations or picket lines, etc., however labelled are
_de facto_ single issue. But the groups (especially the local groups)
that organize for those activities _must_ think of themselves as
potentially interested in a broad sweep of issues, and must at least to
some extent push their practice beyond a narrow conception of their core
purpose.

As far as I can see, the insistence of theSWP in the'60s that the
anti-war movement should be wholly single-issue was a deliberate effort
to prevent political development outside the control of the SWP. In so
far as this occurred in the anti-war movement, the SWP bears part of the
responsibility for the fragmentation of the broader left at the end of
the '60s and the early '70s.

Carrol

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