[PEN-L:1945] Re: Something completely different

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 13 Dec 1995, bill mitchell wrote:

>
> louis (author of the above) - please develop an argument rather than assertion
> to tell me why the things i am saying about france are "pretty anti-Marxist"
> and perhaps while you are at it, please develop a brief vision of what marxism
> means in the 1990s rather than the 1950-60s.
>

Louis:

I think your view of the French strike is undialectical. Rather than
seeing it as an advance in the class struggle directed against the
perogatives of capital, you dwell on issues that are entirely secondary.
The class-struggle never appears in a pure form where the working class as a
whole stands on one side of the barricade and the bosses on the other. It
is always shifting and filled with all sorts of contradictions.

For example, in the United States today the militia movement contains within
it all sorts of reactionary impulses while also reflecting the genuine
grievances of small ranchers and farmers against big capital. It has this
in common with the Populism of the 19th century in its early stages. The
Populist resistance of the small farmers against Wall St. did not have an
entirely progressive thrust at the beginning. One of the leaders from the
state of Texas was a advocate of race supremacy. It took some years for this
movement to develop a clear anticapitalist dynamic. At its height it united
black and white farmers against racist institutions and powerful
corporations.

During the 1960's, American student radicals thought the US working class
was an undifferentiated conservative bloc because of its home
ownership, high wages, and steady employment. This working class was
viewed as being "pro-war". The Archie Bunker stereotype was rampant among
SDS types. A Marxist analysis of the working-class would have revealed an
entirely different conclusion. Most of the soldiers were working-class
and by 1970 many of them were beginning to identify with the students and
support the antiwar movement. Many of the students themselves were
working-class. The state universities were mostly working-class. The
SDSers were fixated on superficial features of American society.

I believe you are making the same kind of mistake with respect to the
French working-class.

As far as a Marxism for 1995 is concerned, this is a Marxism that must
return to its classical roots. It must dump all of the nostrums that
coincide with the prosperity of the mid 1980s: that we are in a postmodern
age, that identity is just as important as class, that civil society is the
arena for struggle, not the state. In a word: the sort of stuff that Hillary
Wainwright is promoting in "Toward a New Left" must be dumped if we are
to move forward.

Actually, this "New Left" is starting to look pretty dated right now with
the spreading strike in France. People dropped their Marcuse in 1968 and
started taking a look at Trotsky and Lenin. My guess is that something like
this will be happening pretty soon.