Re: the next wedge issue

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As far as I am concerned, Justin's position is correct. What people always
forget in these disputes about reformism and revolutionism is that the
classical debates about this topic, which occurred in Europe, between
Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg and so on, took place in a historical
context in which there were fast-growing mass social democratic parties and
trade unions campaigning actively for social reforms which benefited the
working class, and the leftwing Marxist current within the social democracy
sought to shift this reformism towards a more radical, revolutionary
politics. That is how those debates arose. But these days, if you don't even
have any mass movement campaigning actively and democratically for social
reforms and able to make gains, then this whole dispute is irrelevant, it
skips over the question how you get masses of people to participate
politically about basic questions that concern them and their lives.

You could of course try to stereotype people and stigmatise people as
"reformist" while considering yourself very revolutionary, but that just
shows that you don't know how to take people a step further, and bring them
round to a more radical point of view. Such an attitude implies a labelling
theory of socialism, but a labelling theory of socialism doesn't work,
because people change over time, they evolve and develop their ideas and
practice, and therefore somebody who seems very radical today might be
reformist in the future, and vice versa, somebody who seems "reformist"
today might be revolutionary in the future. If you label and write them off
now, you make it much more difficult to work with them in the future - best
to say positively where you stand yourself, now. I have come across many
people who thought of themselves as super-radical, and then later they had
to tone things down, and they don't do very much, and their old "reformist"
enemies actually achieve far more for ordinary folks in winning battles for
civil rights, pay and conditions, i.e. have far more effect. Making
ultraleftist propaganda is not much of a skill, the skill is in winning real
political influence and having a real positive effect, and you don't do that
by pontificating about sexual relations. These days, the communicative
sophistication of people is very great and they realise that anybody can say
anything about anything, but what they look at, is whether you can actually
solve a problem for them. I don't say I am good at it really, I am more
concerned with my own problems just now, but that is the way it is.

As regards Melvin, I think he's basically a good guy, he just doesn't have
enough experience of socialist gay or lesbian people, that is all, and if he
did, he wouldn't talk that way. Personally, gay and lesbian friends helped
me out a lot quite a few times, and so I would never run down anybody like
that, quite apart from my belief that every adult must have the right to
make their own sexual decisions, what happens to their own body. My
experience was that people who had been through hell to sort out their
sexuality knew far more about it, than some heterosexual dilletante wanting
to make rules for the sex lives of other adults. Anyway, in places like
Amsterdam, San Fransisco, New York and Sydney, if you rave on with
homophobic cant, you can book a pack of problems, and the fact is, just
because somebody is gay or straight, it doesn't tell you much about the
person, other than giving you a clue about how to relate.

There is little point in sitting in on judgement about the sex lives of
other adults outside of a court of law, in cases of sexual offences, because
unless you are in the sexual relationship yourself, you can rarely
objectively judge the nature of the relationship anyhow, you basically have
to be in the relationship yourself to understand it - unless you think you
are God. Many people seek to discover and exploit the vulnerability of
others, there is lots of voyeurism these days and so on, both harmless and
harmful, but that is just to say that people want to appropriate and control
the intimacy they haven't really got themselves, and haven't created, pretty
sad really. The focus is on sex, but the real problem lies in the
negotiation of the intimacy that you really want. Therefore if you focus
obsessively on sex and sexual politics, you miss the real problems of human
relations in the society we live in, which are at best reflected in some way
way through sex. Biological urges in a human being are inseparable from his
personality, and that personality is formed within social relations, those
relations involve the interactions of giving and getting, taking and
receiving, and therefore a narrow focus on sex abstracts from all sorts of
cultural dimensions that need to be looked at, and the economic basis of
that culture.

Jurriaan