[Marxism] Our alternative should be an antiwar movement, not an electoral one

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

I was going to start off by quoting Bonnie in the workers revolt thread, but
actually, I couldn't find a quote, because she isn't saying anything
POLITICAL. And by "political" I specifically mean relating to social forces
or layers IN MOTION, or that you're trying to MOVE, to get into motion; as
opposed to expressing correct ideas that accurately describe current
politics, diagnose the real problem, or prescribe precise cures, but lack a
SUBJECT.

Bonnie has regaled us with a fairly presentable recitation of Marxist
doctrine, but what is the point? It may be true that in the fullness of
time, a workers revolt is "inevitable," but in the here and now, in THIS
country at THIS time, not only isn't it inevitable, there is no indication
--none whatsoever-- that it is happening or is about to happen or is going
to happen in the next few years. 

That doesn't mean that I believe it can't or won't happen in the next few
years. While not tremendously optimistic, I hope it WILL. But if so, almost
certainly that would be the result of new circumstances in the objective
situation that do not yet exist, and that therefore can't serve as a
starting point for political activism TODAY. 

Louis was remarking how at the end of his tenure in the SWP, circa 1978, he
sat dumbfounded in branch meetings as comrades used preconvention discussion
to issue ringing reaffirmations about the working class being the only class
with the social and political power to change society and so on, and he was
wondering what he'd done at the age of 30-something to have been sent back
to political kindergarten.

The point was, I think, that this was the only possible motivation for the
new SWP line of subordinating absolutely everything to getting a big
majority of the party's membership and leadership into the unions in "basic
industry." It was Pascal's wager all over again: take the holy water and
believe. It could only be presented as a series of abstractions and eternal
verities because there was no real indication on the ground that the working
class was even beginning to cohere as a class, never mind that it was moving
to the center stage of U.S. politics, as Jack Barnes's metaphor-of-the-day
had it.

This shows that absent the social class that can, IN FACT, change society,
socialist politics tends to degenerate into defense of a series of timeless
postulates, as true in theory as they are useless --or worse!-- in practice.

Which brings me to the Greens.

OF COURSE BONNIE IS RIGHT, the Green Party is a petty-bourgeois mess that
does not fundamentally challenge capitalism as a SYSTEM. And we are now
ready to graduate from kindergarten. Cue up "Pomp and Circumstance," if
you're a traditionalist, or "Friends Forever," if you're not.

The problem is, I can't imagine a GENUINE workers party arising in THIS
country EXCEPT as a completely muddle-headed PETTY-BOURGEOIS party. That's
the ONLY way "advanced" workers will come to "correct" politics, THROUGH
THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE, not through being preached at by socialist prophets.
And considering where they are starting from, imagining such workers will go
from THAT starting point directly to "Theories of Surplus Value" strikes me
as a bit of a stretch. After more than half a century when there simply HAS
NOT BEEN a class-political movement of the workers as such, simply and
solely as workers, to expect OTHERWISE than a whole series of halfway steps
and even missteps is silly. 

But if one rejects such motion as there is in the direction of a break with
bourgeois politics, then there is nothing left to do but preach in the
manner of the utopian socialists, as Bonnie has been doing here.

But that still leaves us with making some sort of evaluation of the Green
Party's direction of motion. On this score, it is true that there are
contradictory currents heading in opposite directions -- there always are in
such formations. But in much of the country, the 2004 capitulation to A-B-B,
and the bureaucratic manipulation and exclusion it took to make it stick,
pretty much destroyed the Greens as viable political formations of the sort
we'd be interested it. 

And, worse, the little cliques that are proprietors of the Green Party
franchise in various states are an albatross around the party's neck.

I speak here generalizing from my own local experience, but I don't think it
is a false generalization. Apart from the Camejo wing of the greens in
Califas, which is not dominant even there, and three or four other
exceptions, my very clear impression is that the Greens as a national
formation are no longer moving in the direction of a break with the
two-party system, but rather back into the Democratic Party.

Sure, it CAN and SHOULD be fought -- and it WAS fought, in 2004 -- and there
was an outcome to the fight. The forces that favored independent political
action WERE DEFEATED. The ones who offered shame-faced, back-handed support
to Kerry WON. And that has had concrete results in the real world.

In Georgia, for example, it has meant that there hasn't been a single Green
Party representative to come to any of our immigrant rights community or
coalition meetings to offer support in the past few years. There hasn't been
a single Green Party banner at any immigrant rights demonstration that I can
recall. There hasn't been a single Green Party speaker at these events. And
if there's been even a single Green Party press release against the
onslaught of reactionary anti-immigrant bills the state legislature has been
showering us with, it made such an impression on me that I've completely
forgotten it.

How can I possibly argue for SUCH a Green Party in the political milieus I
am active in? That the ruling class and the working class have nothing in
common? True enough, but it is also true, unfortunately, that the immigrant
rights movement in Georgia and the Georgia Green Party have nothing in
common. Worse still, the truth is that among those who have been there for
us as a community are some Democratic Party politicians and some fairly
progressive labor officials generally most closely allied with precisely
those politicians. Sure I can --and do-- argue that ideally, instead if
being in bed with cowards and reactionaries indistinguishable from the
Republicans, these people should have the courage of their convictions,
break from the Democrats, and start a party that genuinely represents the
interests of Blacks, Latinos, women, and working people generally. But that
is a *propaganda concept* really accessible only to a very few others
involved in the immigrant rights movement. And --frankly-- it isn't all that
different from what Cynthia McKinney says.

>From what I've read about the Green Party's presidential ticket selection
process, it is in reality a parody of the farce being put on by the two
major parties. It doesn't work -- you can't do a parody of a farce, not
without openly presenting it as such. The essence of this is going to be
that perhaps someone who genuinely wants to run an independent campaign will
have to battle internally to out-maneuver the pro-Democrat clique in control
of the national and most state parties, and if successful in capturing the
nomination, will have to battle the same clique in trying to actually carry
out the campaign. 

The more logical option, I think, is the one Nader chose in 2004 --not to
get bogged down in trying to capture what is in essence a hostile apparatus
that isn't worth much anyways and which, if you do succeed in nominally
capturing it, is going to be trying to trip you up and undermine your
campaign anyways.

And perhaps this is an overly pessimistic opinion based too much on my local
negative experiences, but I think the fight to point the Green Party, as a
national party, in the direction of breaking with the Democrats was fought
--and lost-- in 2004 and that can't be changed right now. It is a different
matter in those local and state parties where a viable left wing exists.
Ironically, these probably represent many if not the BIG MAJORITY of the
active greens in the country. But unless I misunderstand something about the
national structures and functioning, even if the left has a big majority of
active part workers, it doesn't really have a way to impose its will and
take over the national apparatus.

I think rather than the Greens, or more precisely the green national
apparatus, where our attention should be focused on is on the millions of
people who voted for the Democrats in 2006 (or would have, if they had had a
viable Democrat candidate to use as a club against the Republicans) with the
overriding illusion or hope-against-hope that this would help to end the
war. 

I believe the mainstream of the Democrats are about to capitulate COMPLETELY
to the line of bullshit Patreus will feed them on Monday. It will be the
Anbar Province story, where Sunni tribal militias (a.k.a. the resistance)
have made a tactical accommodation with the U.S. forces on the basis of the
militias controlling the province on the ground and having U.S. support to
drive out both the mad-dog Al Qaeda in Iraq faction and Iraqi central
government control. The Brits apparently have arrived at a very similar
solution in Basra, except without the fig-leaf of a putative "alliance" with
the locals, and that has been the deal all along with the Kurds in the
North.

Unfortunately, these local modus vivendi arrangements do not a national
puppet regime make. On the contrary, they undermine it. And not just because
these are three sections of the country dominated by the three major
religious or ethnic factions supposedly battling it out with each other for
a bigger piece of the pie. But also because the OBVIOUS way to give each
group a little more is to take it away from the one warring faction without
any base of domestic support -- the American imperialists. What the oil law
and so on in reality set up in not a three-way split of benefits, but a
FOUR-way one, with the unmentioned beneficiary, imperialism, receiving the
lion's share. 

This means that for practical purposes the U.S. occupation HAS to continue,
because a more-or-less stable puppet regime can't be set up. 

At any rate, now that Bush has maneuvered the Democrats in Congress into
having to make policy for pursuing imperialist interests in Iraq, rather
than simply posturing in opposition to whatever it is Bush is doing, the
Democrats in Congress will expose themselves and betray the hopes/illusions
of millions of their voters even more grossly than they already have. 

How to relate to those folks who feel betrayed by that, and others who
identify with them even if they didn't vote or only came to similar
conclusions after the 2006 elections, is where I think the left should
focus.

On that, what I keep thinking is that I wish there were some way we could
offer them, not an utterly righteous and truly independent ELECTORAL
alternative, which in the nature of things right now could only be a
marginal protest vote, but a genuine antiwar protest movement that doesn't
spend most of its time worrying about how to play footsie underneath the
table with the Democrats, but just wants to end the war by pulling the
troops out and raising such a ruckus about it that the politicians can't
ignore it.

Unfortunately, I don't have any clear ideas or proposals on HOW to do that,
but my gut feeling is that this is what the left should be about right now,
building an antiwar movement, and NOT crafting an alternative for the
November 2008 elections.

Joaquin


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