Re: [Marxism] Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood [was:The'turn to industry'...]

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sartesian: "So while we have 17% unemployment in Spain, massive
demonstrations plus seizures of plants and plant executives in France,
protests in Germany, drastic economic contraction in Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania leading to clashes with the police power of the states,  pitched
battles in Greece involving working class youth whose opportunities have
been cut off by the economy and the government, protests in Hungary against
austerity plans, and more and more and more -- comrade Bustelo announces  WE
MUST STOP FOOLING OURSELVES INTO THINKING THE PROLETARIAT OF EUROPE OR NORTH
AMERICA IS NOT DEAD."

Sartesian forgot to add the May Day immigrant rights protests in this
country, which,  although smaller than the ones three years ago during the
upsurge, show this is an ongoing movement that continues to organize and
fight. As well as the rebellions of immigrants in places like the Paris
suburbs. 

*  *  *

I was EXTREMELY explicit in my post that I was talking here about epochal
phenomena, spanning many, many, MANY decades, not this week's or this year's
news headlines.  And I even added for the benefit of readers who have a hard
time wrapping their head around the concept that THIS IS NOT YOUR
GRANDFATHER'S PROLETARIAT statements like:

"This is what has already happened" and

"Wishing isn't going to make things better. This history has happened and
NOT 'for better or for worse' BUT most decidedly 'for worse.'

"And even if the current economic crisis continues to deepen, things are NOT
going to return to the way they were in the mid-1930s, suddenly erasing from
history the last three-quarters century."

Notice, for example, the use of the past tense, the reference to my subject
matter as a "history," the 75-year time frame I present. 

When I talked about whistling past the graveyard, what Sartesian presents
--three or four struggles drawn from recent headlines and isolated from
their historical social and political context-- are exactly the sorts of
comments I had in mind. 

Sartesian makes quite clear that he is unable to understand that what's
being analyzed is an entire historical epoch and its effects. 

"It's kind of like when businessmen and economists claim they have
'conquered the business cycle'--- that's when you know the contraction is
about to begin.

"The more I hear Bustelo proclaim the death of the prospects for proletarian
struggle, the more confident I am that the struggle is actually gaining
strength."

*  *  *

"The proletarian struggle is gaining strength." This kind of Alfred E.
Newman "what, me worry?" smiley-face politics drives me batshit.

THERE IS NO PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE GOING ON. NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA. Not in the
*IMPORTANT* sense of the phrase, "proletarian struggle," that of a class
political movement. 

Let me remind comrades that class struggles are POLITICAL struggles. The
"economic" struggle of the workers is NOT "the" proletarian class struggle
but the normal workings of the bourgeois market for labor. It is the
substrate for the class political struggle, the ground in which it can grow,
but NOT the thing itself.

Under certain conditions --but not always and inevitably, contrary to what
Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto but would later implicitly revise in
their comments on the English workers movement in the second half of the
1800s-- this economic struggle gives rise to a class struggle.

The sine qua non for workers waging an actual class political struggle is
that they have a mass class political instrument.

Can Sartesian tell me in which imperialist countries workers TODAY have
THEIR OWN parties even just in the sense that the socialist and
social-democratic parties of the 1920-1940 period were workers parties?
Never mind mass workers parties that claimed to be revolutionary and
communist, like the CP's of that epoch?

That is why I say "And even if the current economic crisis continues to
deepen, things are NOT going to return to the way they were in the
mid-1930s, suddenly erasing from history the last three-quarters century."

The situation AFTER this world-historic defeat, this massive de-organization
and de-politicization (in a CLASS sense) of the proletariat not just in the
"West" but also in the FSU and other countries of late "really existing
socialism," the transformation of social democratic parties like Labour and
the PSOE into straight-up bourgeois parties essentially no different from
the U.S. democrats, and even on the level of the economic struggle, the
massive decline in union membership and strike activity in many countries
over several decades, etc. etc. etc., THAT is the starting point TODAY. 

You might think, we're going to pick up where we left off in 1948. WRONG. 

In terms of class political organization of the workers and the class
political consciousness, things are closer to 1848 than 1948.

EXCEPT, or course, for England, where the class consciousness and
organization of English workers in 1848 was much higher than it is today. So
much so that the British ruling class had to invent what we today call
"imperialist privilege" costing oodles of money, in order to undercut
proletarian organization and consciousness, re-enforce divisions between
English and Irish workers, between skilled and unskilled workers, re-enforce
the family, etc.

IF comrades want to discuss this seriously, I will continue to engage. But
if it is just going to be impressionistic recitation of two or three
headlines without any serious though or consideration of the historical
context, I'd just as soon give it a miss.

Joaquin

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
         --TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday


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