Re: [Marxism] The campaign and the debate around Obama

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marvin writes: 

If anything, I think an argument could be made that the left in the
Democratic party has been more vigorous than the NDP left for some time. I'm
thinking of groups like the former Rainbow Coalition and, more recently, the
Progressive Democrats of America (http://www.pdamerica.org/). I know
American Trotskyists are contemptuous of the PDA and other opposition
caucuses and blogs inside and around the DP, but they seem to me broader and
deeper and more dynamic than any anything the Canadian left has produced in
the NDP since the Waffle in the late 60s.

A quick glance at the PDA website suggests there is considerably more
organized activity at this level than is credited by yourself and others on
the list. The real issue, it seems to me, is not that you think there is no
such activity, despite your claims to the contrary, but that you think it is
worse than useless because it reinforces illusions about the Democrats. I've
also previously alluded to the trade unions and the representative
organizations of blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, etc. who regularly mobilize
hundreds of thousands to organize and canvass on behalf of Democratic
candidates. These mobilizations at least match and arguably exceed the kind
of activity undertaken by similar organizations on behalf of the NDP in
Canada. However, you applaud this as positive political action in the latter
instance while wholly denying it's existence in the case of the Democrats. I
think you also make a fetish of "membership cards" as indicating a lack mass
participation in the DP, and greatly exaggerate the level of mass activity
and the presence of unnamed "structures" in the NDP as indicating the
control that party members are ostensibly able to exert over the party's
leadership and program.

*  *  *

Marvin doesn't seem to get it, so let me be blatant. The problem with
entryism in the Democratic Party is that there is NOTHING to "enter." Nada.
Zero. Zip. These groups you read about in his posts are purely letterhead
organizations. 

They way it really works in my experience at the local level is overlapping
networks and cliques, and in Georgia, separate ones by current and race,
with the most consciously anti-racist whites (often radicals from the 60's)
and least opportunist self-seeking whites serving as a bridge between them.
Generally a LOT of the self-seeking opportunist whites tend to be in the
conservative/moderate Democrat networks, the ones in the (white) progressive
Democrat networks tend to be pretty nice people, more teacher-college
prof-IT types, whereas the conservative/moderates are dominated by lawyers
and small businesspeople, tied to chambers of commerce and so on.

The Black networks in my area right now aren't politically differentiated,
but cliques of opportunists, AFAIK. Despite the radicalism of the Black
base, there isn't really a network of progressive/radical Blacks really
operating in local politics, in part I think because of McKinney's style and
personality wasn't conducive to its formation. There are individual very
radical, righteously so, Blacks in local politics, but they haven't cohered
into a real current. 

Obama has based his campaign not on ANY of these folks (although many have
turned out to help him) but on the campuses, especially the traditionally
Black ones, and the Black intelligentsia, such as it is (in the media
especially). They did an ASTOUNDING job in the primary. But if it is
spilling over into local city council and board of education races, etc., I
haven't been perceptive enough to see it. 

There are the beginning of two Latino networks, but very interpenetrated.
One a liberal/progressive electoralist network and one a more radical,
movement-oriented network. The more "left" stance of the Latino networks is
simply the result of the community being so persecuted and official state
politics being dominated by Republicans and on our issue, immigrants,
Republicans driven by rabid racists. At THIS point, there is a very
conscious "good cop/bad cop" division of labor between the Latino circles,
mostly aimed at moderate/progressive Democrat circles in the white and Black
communities. But as yet, this is mostly extra-electoral, focused on blocking
really bad legislation by building weird alliances, like between liberal
churches and ruthless bourgeois exploiters. 

None of this takes place in bodies affiliated with the Democratic Party.
I've become aware of it through my participation in the immigrant rights
movement, and from there have relationships with people in these various
circles. But for the kind of systematic intervention Marvin seems to
imagine, there simply is no place to do it. Sure, you can sponsor or promote
candidates in primaries -- one of the if not the top Democrat in the state
house of representatives comes out of the Georgia Communist League/October
League (M-L) decades ago and this person has YET to see their way clear to
speaking at ANY immigrant rights event or even our monthly community
meetings, which gives you an idea of how "effective" you can be once you
choose this route.

I know a lot of the opposition of the comrades to relating to politics at
this very immediate "retail" level comes from "principled" absurdities about
"permissible" election tactics and so on. But the truth is there is no basis
for the sort of intervention Marvin imagines. Nor should it surprise us that
there isn't -- the basis for it would have had to come from to a large
degree a dynamic workers movement and working-class radicalization, however
badly it got itself tangled up in the Democrat Party over the years. But
that might have been something real in the 30's 40's and 50's of the last
century. US politics hasn't had those features for a half century or more,
and there's no sense trying to act as if it still had them. 

In the Black and Latino communities, and the political networks associated
with them, there is something more of a base for this kind of work, but
actually I think it goes through community organizing and movement building
rather than anything that might be conceived of as "work inside the
Democratic Party" as such. 

Joaquin

Joaquin


 

-----Original Message-----
From: marxism-bounces+jbustelo=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:marxism-bounces+jbustelo=gmail.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Marvin Gandall
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 8:15 PM
To: Joaquin
Subject: Re: [Marxism] The campaign and the debate around Obama

Fred writes:
>
> He should consult comrades like John Riddell, Suzanne Weiss, and Barry 
> Weisleder, all of whom have quite a few experiences with the 
> structural differences between the NDP and the Liberals (or the 
> Democrats here) and have had occasional successes in work in the NDP.

I don't know Suzanne Weiss, but John, Barry and I go back a long way. When I
was active politically, we were in the Waffle together as part of the LSA
fraction in the NDP. I wrote the line document for the Mandelite minority in
the LSA on our experience in the Waffle. As I recall, Richard Fidler wrote
the line document for the League. Later, Barry and I collaborated in the
RMG, and subsequently in various smaller incarnations of the Waffle in the
NDP after I left the Trotskyist movement. These included at different times
the Left Caucus in which former LSA'ers associated with Ross Dowson played
an important role, the Agenda group which included the Canadian Lambertistes
Luc Aujambe and Ross Sherwood, and the Campaign for an Activist party which
ran Judy Rebick for party president.  I also wrote on the labour movement
and the NDP for Canadian Dimension and This Magazine, the leading
publications of the broader Canadian left, and participated in public forums
on NDP-related matters with CP'ers and social democrats. So unless things
have changed dramatically in the party in the intervening decades, and much
as I retain warm feelings and admiration for both John and Barry, I am not
sure there is much either could tell me about the Trotskyist orientation to
the NDP or the nature of the party or "the occasional successes of work in
the NDP". I'm glad, incidentally, you chose to qualify the successes in this
way.

If anything, I think an argument could be made that the left in the
Democratic party has been more vigorous than the NDP left for some time. I'm
thinking of groups like the former Rainbow Coalition and, more recently, the
Progressive Democrats of America (http://www.pdamerica.org/). I know
American Trotskyists are contemptuous of the PDA and other opposition
caucuses and blogs inside and around the DP, but they seem to me broader and
deeper and more dynamic than any anything the Canadian left has produced in
the NDP since the Waffle in the late 60s.

A quick glance at the PDA website suggests there is considerably more
organized activity at this level than is credited by yourself and others on
the list. The real issue, it seems to me, is not that you think there is no
such activity, despite your claims to the contrary, but that you think it is
worse than useless because it reinforces illusions about the Democrats. I've
also previously alluded to the trade unions and the representative
organizations of blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, etc. who regularly mobilize
hundreds of thousands to organize and canvass on behalf of Democratic
candidates. These mobilizations at least match and arguably exceed the kind
of activity undertaken by similar organizations on behalf of the NDP in
Canada. However, you applaud this as positive political action in the latter
instance while wholly denying it's existence in the case of the Democrats. I
think you also make a fetish of "membership cards" as indicating a lack mass
participation in the DP, and greatly exaggerate the level of mass activity
and the presence of unnamed "structures" in the NDP as indicating the
control that party members are ostensibly able to exert over the party's
leadership and program.

> Marvin's position would be more logical if he argued for the Canadian 
> labor movement abandon the relatively isolated NDP for the big as all 
> outdoors Liberals, who after all include a lot of people who 
> sympathize with unions, social movements and think that, all other 
> things being equal, world peace is preferable to world war.

I am afraid you are wrong about this. The unions support the NDP as do most
activists from the various sectors I identified in the Democratic party.
They don't support the Liberals. When Buzz Hargrove and the CAW began moving
to supporting the Liberals after the Ontario NDP government's imposition of
a "social contract" on Ontario unions, he was roundly condemned by the rest
of the labour movement. It's true that the CCF/NDP's failure to grow as a
third party for more than seven decades, and it's failure to sufficiently
distinguish itself from the Liberals serves as an incentive for "people who
sympathize with unions, social movements and think that, all other things
being equal, world peace is preferable to world war" to vote for the
Liberals against the Conservatives. But there is no historical relationship
between the labour and social movements and the Liberals as there is between
these institutions and their activists and the NDP.

> And to suggest that the base of the Democratic Party is "sympathetic 
> to trade unions, social movements, and world peace" is a great 
> prettification of both the base and their preferences. The Democratic 
> base is much, much more inclusive than the NDP's, for example. The 
> base of the Democratic Party includes, for example, investment 
> bankers, cops and prison guards, machine politicians and lots of 
> others. (It is also true that the NDP is pretty much nowhere among the 
> Quebecois and, I suspect, the Native peoples, whereas the DP has a big 
> Black and Latino base.) It includes not only peace-oriented sectors of 
> the population but quite hawkish ones.  Lieberman was not a Democrat 
> by mistake.

You will also find cops and prison guards. machine politicians, and
increasingly even investment bankers in all of the social democratic parties
as well. The suggestion is not that the the Democrats are what we used to
conceive of as a "workers' party". The suggestion is that neither are the
social democratic parties, if they once were. They are all pro-capitalist
parties which draw on a core base of trade unionists and supporters of a
wide range of social protest groups. It follows that if is valid to "enter"
the NDP and the British Labour Party, it is equally valid to enter the DP,
and if is perceived as futile or unprincipled to enter the Democrats, the
same should necessarily hold true for the social democrats.

> Marvin should avoid talking to radicals in the United States as though 
> we are all absolutely ignorant not only of Canada but of everything 
> about the US as well. This most recent contribution shows slippage in 
> that direction, in my opinion.

Well, I will have to be more careful of leaving that impression. The time I
spend exploring this issue is in itself indicative of my respect for
Marxmailers like yourself, Joaquin, and others whose contributions I value,
despite disagreement. I'd hardly describe you as "ignorant". I'd describe
your analyses of the NDP and the Democrats as self-serving, but  no doubt
you'd level the same criticism at me.



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