Re: [Marxism] The "turn to industry" of the 70s and 80s

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bhaskar: "I was mostly referring to the segments of the new left in the
1960s that enjoyed Maoist sloganeering. 'Power comes from the barrel of a
gun' is a crazed statement when the other side has all the guns." And... "It
[the radicalism of the 60's] was a reaction to USA society as it was, and as
such displayed nihilistic tendencies (the Weather Underground)."

I don't know where Bhaskar gets this distorted vision of 1960's radicalism.
The Weather Underground wasn't a significant force on the Left, they were a
bunch of rich white kids throwing a temper tantrum. The most violent
episodes from the anti-government side, so to speak, of those years were the
Black ghetto rebellions but these were spontaneous explosions of rage fueled
by centuries of injustice and sparked (usually) by some outrageous instance
of white (more often than not police) violence. The ghetto rebellions,
however, were not part of nor an expression of a conscious strategy.

But it seems to me the heart of what Bhaskar is trying to say is here: 

"... looking for emancipatory solutions to end the capitalist epoch in Mao's
agrarian authoritarianism, Castro's clique's state accumulation, Arab
national socialism, focoism, etc etc has been showed to be quite misguided
throughout the 20th century.

"The solution has to lie in the proletariat in the developed world."

My guess would be that Bhaskar is largely a follower of the theory that only
working people from the imperialist countries can save humanity, and
everything else is a side show and a bit of a farce that's bound to end
badly.

I of course completely disagree with this. As a strict Leninist in the REAL
sense of the word, I subscribe to the theses on the national and colonial
question sponsored and recommended to the Second Comintern Congress by
Lenin, and specifically that revolution in the main European imperialist
countries is not possible until imperialist super-profits from the Third
World are cut off. 

And I think the factors that might have led the Comintern to not include the
United States in that analysis at that time (a majority immigrant industrial
working class) receded in weight in subsequent decades and since WWII
especially, the United States has been the most outstanding and clearest
example of the phenomena that led the Second World Congress to draw those
conclusions about European imperialist powers. 

And obviously, the nearly 90 years that have passed since the Congress FULLY
bear out its conclusions in this regard. There has not been a socialist
revolution in an advanced imperialist country since then, and if you look at
Tsarist Russia's backwardness, you could say there has never been a
socialist revolution EVER in an advanced imperialist power.

But more significant than isolating specific cases is to look at the broad
sweep of history.

In this light, the Cuban Revolutionary War for Independence of 1895-1898 can
be seen not just as the last of the 19th Century Latin American wars for
independence, but the first of the anticolonial revolutionary struggles of
the 20th and 21st Century. It was followed by the Mexican Revolution and
then the Russian.

Events since then have confirmed that the locus of world revolution has very
clearly shifted to the Third World. This is not a theory about how things
OUGHT to be, but a generalization based on observation, a description of
what's actually happened.

One aspect of this in Marxist and Leninist theory --the gutting of the
independent class and revolutionary content of the workers movement in
advanced imperialist countries-- is tremendously undeveloped. 

And while the working class movement has increasingly not cohered, above all
in the U.S. (though my impression is the same tendency is evident in other
imperialist countries), OTHER axis of struggle and social movements have
emerged.

Thus "turns to industry" "proletarian orientations" and so on have not been
turns TOWARDS struggles by working people against capitalism, but AWAY from
them. That could not be clearer in the case of the U.S. SWP, but this was
also the actual, lived experience in the 1960s and 1970s, especially with
several New Communist Movement organizations ("Maoists," though this term is
really too narrow for the phenomenon).

This is not an argument about going into industry or relating to unions, but
rather, about making work in unions the central strategic axis or political
arena for your organization. If you do that, at least in the United States,
you have broken decidedly with the political realities and the political
life of the country you live in.

I think a half century or more of political experiences by various left
groups confirms that conclusion.

Joaquin


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