[Marxism] The absence of real forces [was: The low point]

[Jscotlive@xxxxxxx]

By which he appears to mean a combination of "slogans in support of the  Arab
Resistance, in order to help inspire their people on the front lines  against
imperialism" and ones designed to "attract those motivated by  material
necessity" within the imperialist countries, which sectors he  defines as,
"workers, poor blacks, whites, immigrants." This, he says, "will  and can
only be done by connecting the war overseas with the war on the   working
class and the poor at home. This is not being done to any large  degree  at
present."

I'm going to leave aside the obvious idiocy  of listing "whites" as such in
this context, while limiting ourselves to  targeting only *poor* Blacks. It
seems fairly clear that Jscotlive's fingers  got ahead of his capacity for
careful formulation at this point, and what we  have should probably just be
read as "working people and the  oppressed."

Reply:
 
Let me clarify. In the UK, of late, there have been a series of one and two  
day strikes across the public sector - mail workers, rail workers, govt civil  
servants, social workers - all have been taking industrial action, albeit on 
a  small scale, in response to below inflation wage rises on offer and/or  
changes to their employment contracts, this as the govt continues its  process 
of 
deregulation and casualisation of the British economy in line with  free 
market prerogatives. My argument is that we need to take the antiwar  movement 
into the trade union disputes and trade union disputes into the antiwar  
movement 
- in order to provide an analysis which identifies the common  denominator 
that underpins both struggles, namely the prerogatives of the free  market.
 
As Malcolm X once said: 'You can't understand what's going on in  Mississippi 
unless you understand what's going on in the Congo.' Conversely,  though, you 
can't understand what's going on in the Congo until you understand  what's 
going on in Mississippi.
 
Re my formulation, yes, you are right, working people and the oppressed. I  
meant poor blacks and poor whites in that sentence, however, in case you  
misconstrued my meaning there.
 
You:
 
Now, here's the problem with the approach of linking "the war abroad and  the
war at home" on that sort of scale as I see it. And that is that  most
working people --white folks especially, but not only-- do not  perceive
themselves as being targets of some war. At least not in this  country. (I
leave aside the ones that DO in the sense that "angloness" or  "whiteness"
considers itself to be under siege from the brown hordes invading  from the
South).

Reply:
 
The fact that people do not perceive the link does not in any way diminish  
the fact that the link does exist and that our task is to attempt to draw that  
link and help them perceive it. Yes, here in the UK too, most working class  
people lack consciousness. What of it? Twas ever thus.
 
False divisions set up by the ruling class on the lines of race, ethnicity,  
religion, gender, etc., are nothing new. But just because the task is  
difficult doesn't mean we don't set out to achieve it. There is a subjective  
factor 
in all this.
 
You:
 
There has been a tendency on the left in the United States for decades  to
cherry-pick wage statistics to make the case that working people are under  a
relentless and largely successful assault to drive down their standard  of
living. I've argued with comrades on this list and internally in  Solidarity
that insofar as the RESULT is concerned, it simply isn't so -- the  standard
of living of working people has not, in fact decreased, it has  increased.

Careful examination of statistics --especially per capita  household
incomes-- to try to figure out what the life experience of  typical
individual working people has been will show that from where most  workers
sit, their standard of living has gradually improved. And overall  statistics
about housing --square footage, amenities like central heating and  air,
etc.-- number of televisions, radio sets, phone lines, cars, etc. etc.  etc.
per household all confirm this general picture. 

It IS true that  total wages and salaries as a percentage of national income
has steadily  declined to pre-1930s levels, that economic inequality is at
peaks not seen  since the "gilded age" of the 1890's, that many, perhaps most
entry-level  jobs pay less than they used to, ditto wages in mining and
manufacturing and  so on, that median wages have been stagnant for decades,
that consumer debt  levels are astronomical, that economic insecurity haunts
working people in  ways that were unthinkable during the post-WWII boom. And
all sorts of other  bad things.

Reply:
 
>From this it appears you're living in a parallel universe. Perhaps a  stratum 
of the working class are doing okay, a result of the easy availability  of 
consumer credit, etc., but what about the millions of immigrants, documented  
and undocumented, those who came out in such huge numbers in recent years  to 
demonstrate? What about the poor blacks who continue to occupy the bottom  rung 
of the economic ladder? What about catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina,  
which demonstrated emphatically without need for Marxist tracts the social  and 
economic injustice which underpins US society? What about the over  2 million 
currently incarcerated in US prisons, a full quarter of the entire  world's 
prison population? What about the 30 million living in poverty in the  US?
 
The organised working class cannot be our only focus. Millions, tens  of 
millions, of workers remain unorganised.
 
You:
 
It seems to me Jscotlive's position suffers from voluntarism. He  is
determined to make a difference, insists that all of us should share  that
determination. These are fine sentiments. My problem is that he is  unwilling
to use the tools of a historical and dialectical materialist  analysis to
illuminate where and what kind of activism might make a real  contribution at
this point. 

And I don't believe this voluntarism is  an odd, peculiar failing of
Jscotlive as an individual but rather something  quite generalized on the
left. A mostly shrinking socialist left in the  United States, organized in
various groups and through forms such as this  list, circles of leading
activists in antiwar coalitions and so on, is  engaged --IMHO-- in a
political praxis that I fear is increasingly orthogonal  to the main lines of
political and social development.

Reply:
 
Completely wrong. Voluntarism, no, an attempt to deepen consciousness, yes.  
If I was interested in voluntarism I wouldn't be interested in reaching 
anybody,  would I? 
 
Also, and I say this again, everything we do anywhere must be tailored to  
what is in the interests of the international working class, not just a segment 
 
or section of the class.
 
But what of your alternative. It seems you advocate passivity in the face  of 
difficulties in making headway. Theory without practice is like a car without 
 an engine. Our theory is and must be informed by practice.
 
You:
 
Instead, the most visible and dramatic motor of change on a world  scale
became the anticolonial struggles of the Third World (including by  oppressed
peoples within imperialist countries, for example, of Blacks within  the
United States), national movements but of a type radically different  from
those analyzed by Marxists before WWI, because these are movements  evoked by
imperialist domination (indeed, some of the nations involved have  been
created by arbitrary imperialist imposition of a common oppression,  for
example, slavery of Africans and their descendants in the U.S.,  or
line-drawing on maps in Africa and the Middle East). 

Now, the  counterpart to these national movements is imperialism, and within
the main  imperialist countries we see a stabilization of capitalism and a
degree of  bourgeois ideological-political hegemony that was previously
unheard of and  with it the disappearance of the working class movement, even
as a minority  movement within the population of wage workers.

Enough time has now gone  by --way more than enough-- and my impression is
that these tendencies I  describe drawn from the U.S. experience also
manifest strongly in other  imperialist countries, that all sorts of
explanations that in decades past  seemed plausible need to be discarded. 

Anything that says that the  situation we face is an unusual, anomalous,
exceptional, peculiar, unstable,  momentary situation has to go. The idea
that this is not really what  capitalism is like, these aren't the real
social and political conditions  that are likely to prevail in places like
the U.S., Britain, Japan, etc.;  that this is some sort of parenthesis of
detour caused by Stalinism and the  post-WWII boom (roughly the "official"
SWP (USA) theory in the 70's), given  where we are today, six decades after
the end of the post-WWII strike wave  and nearly two decades after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, all such theories  and explanations have to be discarded.
The fact is this is "normal"  capitalism in imperialist countries in our day
and age. Our theory needs to  account for that.

Reply:
 
I'm sorry, but these interminable tracts are deadening and hardly jermaine  
to the thread under discussion. Brevity is a virtue, comrade.
 
J
 
 
 
 



   
________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism