Revolution’s Core Outlaw Force: What is Needed? What is Possible?
Posted by kasama on June 26, 2010
by Mike Ely
The Kasama Project stated that,
“ We seek to find the forms of organization and action for the people most dispossessed by this system to free themselves and all humanity.”
In response, Jerry Spring wrote:
Firstly, it is not the people most dispossessed, but the working class as a whole that in freeing themselves will free all humanity.
I appreciate that Jerry has taken the time to investigate our views, and share his reaction.
In reply to Jerry’s simply assertion, I would like to ask, “Uh, who says?” Who says that it will be the “working class as a whole” that plays the historic role in emancipating all of humanity? Based on what analysis and experience?
That “working class as a whole” is a highly stratified and politically diverse thing in our world today, and the thesis of Kasama suggests that not all of members of that class will be that centrally involved (or significant as a leading or active force) in making communist revolution.
Kasama thinks that the motive force for making communist revolution is the people most dispossessed by this system — which in imperialist countries involve a significant section of the working class (in proportions varying by country), and in many other countries include sections of the poorer farmers.
My personal thought is that there are sections of the working class in the U.S. that are unlikely to support socialist revolution at all (let alone be a major initiating force) and that the emergence of a revolutionary movement will involve a fairly significant political polarization within the working class — with more privileged and historically reactionary sections potentially supporting counterrevolution. I certainly think we should work to neutralize those forces, and win over those that we can. But it is hard to imagine any real revolutionary alliance in the U.S. that takes as its prerequisite some idealized unity of the “working class as a whole.”
Broad Alliances and Hardcore Forces
Mao argued that our approach should be to “unite all who can be united against the real enemy” — a view that marks one approach to revolutionary alliances. Such alliances have cores forces and peripheral forces — and generally, to make a revolution there needs to be a “revolutionary people” among the oppressed who, one way or another, deeply and consciously want the kind of radical revolution represented by the socialist revolution. That core force is not an idealized thing — it will have (if it comes into being) a concrete history and existence. And while the conflicts in society are rooted in many contradictions (including sharp class contradictions among them), this does not mean that revolution will somehow involve (or require) the working class as a whole “flipping over on the plate” of the communist forces (let alone that working class as a whole somehow emerging in a unified way as that “revolutionary people” we will need).
Some strata within the working class can (hopefully) emerge as solid and leading social support for radical change, while others are more likely to respond to revolutionary possibilities with ambivalence and even opposition.
In materialist terms, some sections of the working class are barely exploited by capital, because they suffer from degrees of permanent unemployment and underemployment. Millions of others are exploited at or near the value of their labor power (i.e. they barely make enough to return to work the next day). Other sections (even within the U.S.) suffer degrees of superexploitation (i.e. they are paid under the value of their labor power, and may “make ends meet” but can’t support a stable family life or afford to raise kids in the U.S.). And still others may produce surplus value or have a social status as an employed worker, but have (to varying degrees) social situations that are not characterized by “nothing to lose but their chains” (i.e. their level of skill or social privilege put them both objectively and subjectively in a place far less alienated from imperialism and the current social order).
Outlaw Strata in the Heart of an Empire
Lenin spoke about “going lower and deeper into the working class” — and the conditions of workers has stratified even more in the century since he said that, and we need to understand (both tactically and strategically) the impact of different tiers among those generally considered part of the working class.
Those sections of the working class most likely to form a multinational hard core for radical social changes, actual revolution and a protracted fight for communism are those who live a bitter existence, who are often forced into outlaw status (demonized, criminalized, persecuted, imprisoned, rounded up.) There are sections of the working people whose communities are virtually occupied by hostile police and raided by authorities. They are often undocumented or immigrant or African American — but also potentially include tens of millions of working people from the white nationality.
In the U.S. poverty and alienation are more often concentrated among the young and female among the workers — with young single women often given the impossible burdens of raising children alone and many young proletarians excluded from work entirely and pushed toward desperate choices by a criminal system. And there are, in addition, tens of millions of employed workers whose lives and futures are highly unstable, and whose existence (even when then they are working) are marked by deprivation and alienation from this system’s mores and promises.
The revolutionary proletariat (i.e. the potentially revolutionary section of the larger working class) is in many ways an outlaw force — constantly treated as dangerous by this system, viewed with suspicion, targeted by police, often ignored by most authorities of political life, casually discarded, constantly undervalued, portrayed in insulting and deceitful ways in much of the media and mainstream culture.
The forces that will be at the heart of our core social base and organization are often demonized and feared by many in society. They are often viewed (in racist and reactionary ways) as losers, criminally inclined, unintelligent, foreign, gang-bangers, threatening, socially disruptive, uneducatable, disloyal, and more. It will be shocking to the body politic if we succeed in creating a class conscious articulate force that emerges from such strata.
I remember well when a group of Black Panthers came onto my campus and in blunt language challenged us to consider where we would stand if Black people took the road of violent revolution — it was both shocking and polarizing. Their very existence and presence and articulation made many possibilities imaginable. And the fact that they were willing to reach out meant that this revolution had room for many, and work for us all.
A System’s Polarizing Efforts and Ours
This system went out to the most backward and ignorant sections of the population over decades — and recruited them into highly active and funded political forces for reactionary conservatism. They took the form of the”Religious Right,” and the current “Tea Party” system. Highly conscious and well funded forces dragged some of the most apathetic and uninformed strata into political life, shoved microphones under their mouths, and sought to have them reshape the whole of American politics.
We, by contrast, have to identify and recruit among the most potentially radical, seeking to uncover places where cores of radicalized and engaged people are emerging among the oppressed. We need to fight (together with them!) to fuse socialist politics with an advanced section of the people — and to organically work out the emergence of a revolutionary people, and within it an organized core. And as such forces find their voice, and develop a political self-consciousness through struggle, training and experience — they will be able to repolarize politics drawing wider sections of people around them, inspiring radical forces within all kinds of strata, making the idea of radical change seem suddenly possible (in the minds of friend and foe alike).
This, together with great crises wracking society, is how revolutionary possibilities, alliances and parties emerge.
Unite the Left? How Likely? How Necessary?
Jerry Spring writes:
Secondly, it is premature to seek forms of organisation and action unless those forms are directed, first and foremost, at overcoming the impasse created by the present disunity of the revolutionary socialist movement.
Again, I can only respond “Who says?”
Is the unity of the “working class as a whole” somehow a prerequisite for revolution? And now the unity of some generalized “revolutionary socialist movement” (whatever that is) is also a prerequisite for building new communist organization deep among the people?
It seems very mechanical and idealized. It imagines things in prerequisite stages that have little basis (or likelihood) in reality.
Jerry writes:
“The revolutionary leadership that the working class needs, to enable it to realise its potentional, is hopelessly divided into a profusion of international factions and this is reflected in the disintegration of the revolutionary socialist movement into a confusion of revolutionary socialist factions in every nation state.”
I don’t think that is where we should look for the “revolutionary leadership that the working class needs.”
The most important potential cadre of a future communist movement will likely come from the children of those oppressed families who acquire some real education — and who face the complex currents of assimilation and mobility, or becoming activists serving the people. All throughout history (including in the U.S.) it has been dangerous thing for the system to start to educate the youth of the oppressed people. Some of them aspire to escape from their conditions personally. (One son of an active coal miner became a coalcompany hatchetman and once told me: “People say I forgot where I came from. They get it all wrong. I never forget, not for a single day. And I’m never going back there!”) But others suddenly find themselves seeing the situation of the people and their communities from a broader perspective, and find themselves compelled to dedicate themselves to changing the intolerable and overthrowing the oppressors.
In fact there may be regroupment of revolutionaries and communists (in the U.S. and elsewhere). We need new forms of unity among revolutionaries and communists — which will involve identifying important bases for unity, and important lines of demarcation. And ultimately, we need an organized revolutionary movement that has (in each major urban area) tens of thousands of active supporters and a sophisticated structure with leadership and divisions of labor.
But it is (in my opinion) unlikely to take the form of some generalized reversal of the “disunity” among existing leftist formations. In some ways the disunity is rooted in encapulated and outdated politics. But in other ways, there are real reasons why there are different and opposed trends (that may share a common self designation as socialist or communist).
Here too I imagine that if there were ever a revolution in the U.S. — I don’t assume that all leftist or “revolutionary socialist” formations would support it. That hasn’t been the case anywhere else, and I don’t know why it should be in the future.
Miles Ahead said
Mike said in part:
Want to ask Mike (really ask, not rhetorically), re the parts I italicized above, to flesh out his comments:
Why do you think historically, and even presently, there ultimately is and has been disunity on the Left? What new forms of unity do you or others envision, and what are you basing this on?
(It is one thing to identify the need for new forms of unity, it’s another to open the discussion as to how we achieve new forms of unity.)
And how do you or other KaComrades envision widening and incorporating that unity to broader sections of the people who may already be in motion, mostly around their own particular plights and circumstances?
I want to emphasize “envision” because it is obvious that none of our visions are etched in stone—and if they are, that might well be part of the problem.
By way of example, IMO in the 1960s, and even the 1930s, there was a lot more “unity, struggle, unity” among vast forces, in no small part due to the objective situation and what was called for. Whole movements (both in the U.S. and around the globe), crossing racial, gender, generational, class lines, were born. Seems to me, unity, or the need thereof, doesn’t just fall from the sky. And also IMO, some of those movements also gave rebirth to a socialist and/or communist agenda.
observer said
An amazing, and horrifically reactionary, article in yesterday’s newspaper gives a very real sense of the conditions that minority people live under here in the United Snakes:
June 25, 2010 NY Times
Fighting Crime Where the Criminals Are
By HEATHER Mac DONALD
“THERE was a predictable chorus of criticism from civil rights groups last month when the New York Police Department released its data on stop-and-frisk interactions for 2009. The department made 575,000 pedestrian stops last year. Fifty-five percent involved blacks, even though blacks are only 23 percent of the city’s population. Whites, by contrast, were involved in 10 percent of all stops, though they make up 35 percent of the city’s population. ”
“According to the department’s critics, that imbalance in stop rates results from officers’ racial bias. The use of these stops, they say, should be sharply curtailed, if not eliminated entirely, and some activists are suing the department to achieve that end.”
“Allegations of racial bias, however, ignore the most important factor governing the Police Department’s operations: crime. Trends in criminal acts, not census data, drive everything that the department does, thanks to the statistics-based managerial revolution known as CompStat. Given the patterns of crime in New York, it is inevitable that stop rates will not mirror the city’s ethnic and racial breakdown.”
…
“Such stops happen more frequently in minority neighborhoods because that is where the vast majority of violent crime occurs — and thus where police presence is most intense. Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. And the vast majority of the victims of violent crime were also members of minority groups.”
“Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city’s violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.”
end of excerpt from article, all of which can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26macdonald.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
Forced into conditions in which many are chronically unemployed and have absolutely no way to continue to exist except through crime, the minority community then gets blamed for their wretched condition and further vamped on by the cops.
Did you know that a disabled 22 year old trying to exist on a meager $449 a month SSI disability check instantly loses their benefits if a felony arrest warrant is issued for them?! Not a conviction, mind you, an accusation alone, which may well be false! And nothing to “appeal” because it is the “fact” of the warrant issuance alone that triggers the automatic benefit cutoff!
Result, 1.6 million people in jails and prisons and millions more going in and out of their revolving doors.
Indeed, any revolution in the U.S. will necessarily involve many “outlaws,” in every sense of the word. And very possibly relatively few suburban, home owning, industrially stabilly employed union members.
Jerry Spring said
In responding to my questioning of certain aspects of the Kasama statement of purpose, Mike E asks,
– as though I had actually suggested that.
The answer to the question is no. The unity of the whole of a revolutionary class is not a necessary prerequisite for it to overthrow a ruling class and its existing social order. There will be members of that revolutionary class who will stand aside, others who will offer some support and yet others who will actively oppose the revolution.
What such a class needs is a unified leadership and, as a communist who recognises revolutionary socialism as the necessary, transitional, lower phase of communism, I consider that the revolutionary class of today is the working class.
Therefore, for me, the terms ‘communist’ and ‘revolutionary socialist’ are interchangeable and so, yes Mike, I say that the unity of the ‘revolutionary socialist movement’ is a “prerequisite for building communist organisation”.
On first reading that Kasama was a communist project, I assumed that it upheld the working class as the revolutionary class and that supporting “people most dispossessed by this system” was a strategic rather than an ideological concept.
I was wrong to make such an assumption.
Mike E has clarified things for me – Kasama makes perfect sense as an anarchist project.
Nat W. said
Observer says:
“Indeed, any revolution in the U.S. will necessarily involve many “outlaws,” in every sense of the word. And very possibly relatively few suburban, home owning, industrially stabilly employed union members.”
I think this is generally uncontroversial,though perhaps not to those who work within a more tradeunionist or economist framework.
It discussion brings me back to a statement posed by Mike E, I believe in Kasama threads regarding the question of regroupment. Mike stated (i’m paraphrasing) that it was problematic that the movement that developed in 1960s developed in such a way that it mainly involved sections of white student youth and oppressed nationalities and that poor whites or (white working class) were generally left out.
This seems to me to be a likely way in which things are to develop again, though this time I can see immigrants playing a much larger role than they did in the sixties and there may be more of a polarization in sections of the black population due to concessions and the growth of the black middle class developing out of the upheaval of the 1960s.
It seems to me due to the particulalrity of the race question in this country and the general privilege that being white still carries even among lower sections of white proles, that while some sections of the white prole may support the revolution, though probably this section of people may be more on the periphery of a revolutionary movement and that it may become true that sections of the educated white middle classes play a more core role. This is only speculation however they are potentialities rooted I think in the actual social composition of the current US society and obviously there is the need for deeper and more thorough examination of these initial thoughts.
In addition I would question Mike’s articulation that the parties of the New Communist Movement did not grow out of organic movements, even if he is correct that the mini-party dynamic was problematic and not the basis from which revolutionaries must regroup. I bring this up in relation to Mike’s idea that none of the remotely sognificant communist parties developed from a mini-party formation, but developed organically from larger movements. I think the miniparties did develop from the larger movements of the 1960s, then from there there is the issue of the strategy for regroupment.
I may not have been interpreting Mike’s argument correctly and perhaps this can be clarified. Perhaps also someone can post a link to the comment I’m talking about for other readers.
nando said
The post at the top of this thread asks:
In answer Jerry says:
Perhaps Jerry doesn’t see the threadbare nature of his non-answer.
This answer is basically “Why is the working class as a whole the revolutionary class? Because my particular favorite doctrine says that is the communist position.”
It is a rather circular answer.
In fact, it is not a given that communist theory assumes that “the working class as a whole” is “the revolutionary class.” Nor should it.
It is quite possible for historical life to utterly crush some parts of the “working class” and make it passive and non-revolutionary, or bribe other parts of that class making those sections non-revolutionary.
So these are specific matters for ongoing analysis –and they have (of course) been studied and debated for over a century. And the answers have been different in different countries and period.
Jerry writes:
At the risk of stating the historically obvious experience of the communist movement: often having clear divisions and lines of demarcation cleaving the previous socialist movement has been a prerequisite for creating communist organization. In other words it has been the maturing disunity of the previous movement that made a new communist one possible.
Different point:
Communist and revolutionary socialist are considered interchangable for a number of people and a number of political trends (especially Trotskyists). However I would argue that we should be wary of this. And in particular I want to raise some important arguments from Bill Martin’s work “Into the Wild” that demand to be engaged.
First: I suspect that people often like to substitute “revolutionary socialist” for communist simply because it means that they their approach to the socialist history of the twentieth century is to say “What passed for communism is not what I want.” So that abandoning the public use of communism as a label is a way of asserting a political unwillingness to critically uphold the socialist periods of the Soviet Union and China. (The approach of the SWP in Britain and Solidarity/ISO in the U.S. is basically to say “there was no socialism in those countries, so what was called ‘communism’ in the twentieth century has nothing to do with what we are proposing for the 21st century, so we adopt a separate label for clarity: i.e. revolutionary socialism.”
Because I believe we should uphold, understand, explain and build on the positive side of the Soviet and Chinese experiences — it is important (for that reason alone) to “go against the tide” of standard anti-communist summations, and fight for the title of communist.
Second: I think our goal is classless global communist society, not merely “socialism by revolutionary means.” The first step of our revolutionary process is a socialist revolution, but that is not our goal. And we should adopt as our name and our banner our final goal — i.e. communism.
And I think there are quite a few socialists whose view of final goals does not go much farther than a state owned economy and an elaborate set of welfare nets and a radical democratization, attained by militant non-electoral means — and that is what many mean when they say “revolutionary socialism.” And because communists have different goals than that and a radically different view of socialism from that, we should not call ourselves “revolutionary socialists.”
For example, when many existing left groups call themselves “revolutionary socialists” — i think it is often accurate. And that (on close examination) is not simply a more popular way of saying “communist.” It is (by contrast) quite different from being communist — in terms of conception of the next leap, sense of what socialist society is like, their view of endgoals and their sense of the importance of communist end goals for the work in the present and near future.
As organizations, they are (in fact) revolutionary socialist, not revolutionary communist — though I imagine there are within their ranks quite a few people who are more radical, more to the communist side, or at least potentially open to that discussion.
As Bill Martin puts it very sharply:
And it comes out very sharply in the evaluation of the “socialist” nature of various societies and movements. And that (of course) is merely a form through which we debate what kinds of future society we think is positive, possible and acceptable.
I remember studying the political writings of David Laibman, a radical academic closely associated with the CPUSA. And he was waxing enthusiastic about the conditions in Eastern Europe during the 1960s — and once I studied his work at some depth, something hit me like a hammer in the head: It was not that he and I disagreed about the conditions in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. It is that he looked at those political conditions and social relations and liked them! He saw the gray conformity, the cradle to grave threadbare state protection, the social distrust of critical thought, the adoration of order and security, the conservative respect for scholastic high culture, the degree of class privilege for the educated and careerist, the pervasive pacifying whiff of police threat, and he actively liked all that. It was what he wanted in contrast to the capitalism we had. It was what he considered “socialism” and which I saw as another repulsive form of capitalist class society needing revolution.
* * * * * * * *
Let me just end by quoting some of Bill’s writing on this, because I want to really encourage more of us to give this a close read, and to engage it in much more debate:
Into the Wild Part 1:
Into the Wild Part 2:
Into the Wild Part 3:
* * * * * * * * *
After looking over Bill’s framework and the distinctions he is making, I found it relevant for evaluation Jerry’s parting shot:
Jerry is expressing how things look from a particular vantage… and where this kind of communism and critical re-evaluation just seems chaotic, anarchistic and oddly disrespectful of some forms of inherited communist doctrines (especially the particularly exhausted and uncritical assumptions about the nature and role of the “Working Class” — as it emerged from particularly European labor tradition and mythology.)
There is a long history of communists being called blanquists, ultraleftists, etc. by a particular school of socialism. And the value of Bill’s work is that it starts to go beyond the problem of “talking past each other” and starts to engage with what the actual difference of concept and political objective are.
Mike E said
Nat writes:
The revolutionary potential of white working people (especially the “poor whites”) is a major question of the American socialist revolution. Do white working people have revolutionary potential? If not, why not? If so, how to we give that a concrete expression?
If we were able to help create a base for evolution among white working people, it would have a huge impact on the U.S. — including on the optimism that Black and Latino people would have for the possibility of revolution.
This was part of what gripped me when I went to the coal fields. Stokely Carmichael had urged us to go organize poor whites, and I wanted to bring a section of white working people over to the revolutionary process that had been initiated by the Black liberation struggle.
I still believe that is possible, though (honestly) I can’t prove it.
Theories of Privilege
I am not a big fan of the now-highly-popular theories of “privilege.” I find them superficial, undialectical and mechanical. Nat writes, for example, “due to the particularity of the race question in this country and the general privilege that being white still carries even among lower sections of white proles…” Really? Is that how it works?
I don’t think that privilege is the reason for racism in some simple way, and still less do I believe that the core cause of racist oppression of Black people is found in the relative privilege of white people. In fact, racist oppression has to do with the structure and exploitation of a system (of historically evolved capitalism) — the extraction of great profit, the maintenance of lower castelike tiers in the working classes through color barriers etc. — and not mainly or fundamentally on the existence or distribution of privilege among white working people.
Relative privilege is often portrayed (and I’m not talking about Nat here) in a linear ways as corrupting and as a conscious acceptance of payment for enthusiastic collaboration with the system. Is it really so simple, generalized and direct?
And “privilege” is discussed as a simple binary thing… as if you either have it or you don’t. And as if (once you have it) you are in a morass where you can’t see anything clearly, and have made a devil’s bargain, and cannot be trusted to speak or decide, etc. And as if our world can be divided between the privileged and the non privileged. (White people, men and straights being privileged; people of color, women and LGBT people being deprived of privilege) But that really often pictures things in a mechanical (and dare I say, U.S.-centric) way.
I’m not saying (obviously) that there are no relative privileges in being white. (Though Nat’s expression “general privilege” might imply that it is universal and undifferentiated — as if it is cream cheese smeared evenly on a bagel and the “white privilege” of of a university professor is the same as the “white privilege” poor whites living in a trailer.)
But partisans of privilege theory rarely want to talk about the relative privileges that African Americans (or women and gay people in the U.S.) have, on a world scale, by virtue of being Americans. Even undocumented immigrants within U.S. borders, even the homeless dumpster diving in garbage cans have relative privilege over those left behind in Guatemalan villages, or homeless people combing Manilia’s landfills.
Do those relative privileges then rob the homeless of the U.S. or the undocumented workers (in fact rob everyone within U.S. borders) of revolutionary potential? Some people take it there — to a pessimistic and unjustified dead end.
There is privilege (of course), it does have some impact on consciousness and politics. The relative wealth and social mobility of U.S. society (and not just whiteness!) poses a political question to virtually everyone: Do we want in? Or do we want out?
And the existence of privilege (in complex and dynamic gradations) does not in fact mean that the answer to that question is a given, or that any answer is permanent.
When Nat speaks of “the particularity of the race question in this country and the general privilege that being white,” I believe that we need to spend much more time understanding the first half of that: “the particularity of the race question in this country.” Because there is dynamic change, and this is no longer the white caste system of the Jim Crow south, and the consciousness of “white people” (including poor white people) is far more complex and dynamic than some schema allow.
* * * * * * * * *
Nat writes:
Nat then writes:
Yes, I think what I was trying to say is not clear to you (and it may of course be my fault).
I in fact agree with you. The New Communist Movement did grow out of a tremendous mass upsurge (and it grew out of it with real organic ties). And this was particularly true of the Panthers and an number of other revolutionary liberation organizations that came out of the Black Liberation movement. (It was not universally true of the Panthers, but it was true in some places where they were most strong and developed.)
I think that, however, this upsurge was (demographically) rather confined — and the NCM tried to break out and develop organic ties far beyond the Black and Latino communities and campuses that were most directly involved in the upsurge.
And I think that was a failed if heroic attempt (overall) — and that failure was not solved by simply by then declaring that these mini-parties were somehow “vanguards of the proletariat” anyway.
And while these organizations may have developed with some (embryonic) connections to the people (in some black communities, or the Lords in the Puerto Rican community of NYC etc.) — these ties became weakened rather than strengthened after 1973, when the upsurge among Black people virtually imploded. It was hard to be close to the Panthers in the early seventies (and watching their Huey-Eldridge split) and not realize that they were deeply disturbed by their own weak ties to the surrounding communities of Black people. Here too the militant language of “vanguard” was much more hope — and a great deal of the effort of the BPP was a call to the community to “support the van” which was out on a limb and under so much attack.
What came into being out of that period of communist consolidation and popular collapse — were communist propaganda organizations and communist tinged organizing projects that often envisioned themselves as already being parties. Those claims became more and more threadbare as the isolation of a group like the RCP became obvious.
It is worth noting that after the formation of the RCP in 1975, there was a concerted effort to have its cadre cut previous ties to student circles and previous political contacts — in a misguided attempt to have the party as a whole turn its face to a new audience. A movement that emerged out of student radicalism lost a lot of precious connection with that world.
And yet that new audience, the industrial working class, did not prove to be fertile territory — especially once the 60s upsurge declined.
In the coalfields, we led strikes of tens of thousands, organized in a number of vibrant mass organizations, held maydays, put out local communist newspapers and propaganda, spent years at mass work — and did not recruit more than one non-movement coal miner.
By the early 1980s, there was a sense of floating, encapsulated like a seed, hoping to find new rain and fertile soil, experimenting to find effective methods — and drifting from one promising scene to another, in one “foray” after another.
Zuo Qing said
Mike said:
Sure, I can understand how some people can be too rigid with the Marxist analysis, but seriously, where is the Marxism in statements like these? I don’t see how this is different from the stuff the RCP’s been buying into for years about the “culture war” and “the coming civil war”, rather than class war.
The left has really done a bad job here of turning its back on basic understanding of the underlying economic problems of areas where such ultra-reactionaries are strongest (often but not exclusively rural areas and small towns), and simply dismissing it as “ignorance” that makes people so receptive to far-right propaganda. It’s ironic we talk about reaching out to the “criminally inclined”, “uneducatable”, and “socially disruptive”, while also saying “ignorant sections of the population” should be “neutralized”.
worker antagonism said
its my opinion that when and if a revolutionary situation develops in the USA it will do so in the context of a social formation significantly different from the present one defined by the severe escalation of the contradictions we see playing out now.
ie the continuing tendency towards the expulsion or marginalization of living labor from the production process ( some HR specialists are talking about about a labor force of 40% or more temps in the next few decades), decline in real wages, decisive end of “American exceptionalism” on account of changes in the international system,intensifying ecological collapse and shortage of key raw materials.
not to downplay the subjective aspect of organization and development of a revolutionary minority, but insofar as revolution is realistic its because its an objective necessity that will impose itself on the proletariat because of the contradiction between the continued accumulation of capital and survival which manifests with progressively greater intensity through the combination of universal proletarianization, automation ( the number of industrial workers in the PRC did not change appreciably between 1992 and 2006) and ecological crisis.
capital will collapse, people will be forced to revolt by circumstances,the question is if they will create communism or something else.
Nat W. said
Mike writes:
I’m not saying (obviously) that there are no relative privileges in being white. (Though Nat’s expression “general privilege” might imply that it is universal and undifferentiated — as if it is cream cheese smeared evenly on a bagel and the “white privilege” of of a university professor is the same as the “white privilege” poor whites living in a trailer.)
I may have used the expression “general privilege” a liitle too loosely. Certainly the differences in privilege you postulate are very real. It may be the case however that one is more class privilege than race and the other more race privilege, though the “types” of privilege exist in relation to one another. I just say write here I’m not trying to uphold the idea of “white privilege” as a fundamental theory of objective reality, though I certainly think it is an aspect of that reality.
I mentioned in post above that it may be that white youth and intellectuals may play a more core role in a rev situation than poor whites, at least for a time. I make this assertion due to my life experience and also due to the political work I’ve done. I also make the point and you do too, that the black population may be much more divided say, then during the Civil War or during the 1960s in a future rev situation due to the changes in US society that we all are seeking to understand better.
Mike explains in the beginning of his post:
“In fact, racist oppression has to do with the structure and exploitation of a system (of historically evolved capitalism) — the extraction of great profit, the maintenance of lower castelike tiers in the working classes through color barriers etc. — and not mainly or fundamentally on the existence or distribution of privilege among white working people.”
I think fundamentally this answer is correct, however, like you say we need to understand the race question in the 21st century more. I think it is fair to say that race in this country can often obscure class difference, and the idea of white supremacy can and does still have a strong pull on sections of alienated poor white people. The reactionary organizations do a play a roll in capitalizing on that pull but I think in certain ways because of the social structure of society and because of the nature of historical development in the US; some of these movements can be considered “organic” in their own right in a very reactionary sense.
Just to clarify again, I’m not talking about writing off the revolutionary potential of the poor sections of the white working class, I’m just stating there is something there we need to understand better to win larger sections of them to the revolutionary side.
Nat W. said
One more comment: In order for significant sections of the white working class and for that matter the white middle class to play a more positive and in fact core revolutionary role, the issue of race will need to be firmly and correctly addressed by revolutionary leadership as it obviously is a particularly significant question in the country we want o make rev in. What that means, I’m not sure however the negative example of the CPUSA during the Gastonia strike in the 1920s that Mike E details must not be replicated (maybe thats obvious), a situation I’m sure that will present itself again either between whites and blacks, whites and latino immigrants and unfortunately even blacks and latinos, etc. It seems if we get this wrong we don’t have much of a shot at rev in this country and probably don’t deserve one.
Also thanks for the clarification on the NCM question.
Steve Swede said
It seems many interesting ideas lack an elementary theoretical basis?
Working class:
negative – lacks means of production;
positive – produces surplus value based on use value [whether material(commodity) or/and immaterial(service)]
There’s no question of class without both these aspects …
and the class definition must simultaneously be understood in contradiction to capitalism/imperialism !
The working class party must represent the whole class but hopefully will organize the most conscious elements and cannot do so without uniting lots of people in different revolutionary movements…
Says who? Me!
Mike E said
I replied to Steve’s comment in a self-standing post.