Let’s Do Up Some Revolutionary Strategy
Posted by Mike E on August 7, 2010
I would like to make a proposal:
That we start to focus on some questions of revolutionary strategy. (Not to the exclusion of political economy, historical summation, radical philosophy or recent events… but still, that we spend some time on revolutionary strategy).
- How should communists do revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation?
- How do we prepare for future events and crisis — whose outlines aren’t yet visible on the horizon?
- What faultlines of society do we expect new cores of radicalized people to emerge from, and how do we concentrate, learn, teach and lead in those places?
- What will a transition from capitalism to socialism look like in the United States, and what kind of an organization, broader movement and class alliances will be necessary?
What existing documents and strategic proposals are worth studying and debating? What initial ideas do we ourselves want to share for discussion?
Jacob Richter said
If you’re interested, e-mail me and I’ll send you a copy of Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity by Mike Macnair.
“How should communists do revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation?”
The same way the pre-WWI SPD did its work in a non-revolutionary situation: set up and maintain an alternative culture (cultural societies, sports clubs, funeral homes, food banks, etc.), do not participate in government coalitions at any level, have a detailed political program for workers coming to power in the first place, etc.
Basically, follow the model established by the Kautskyan Marxist Center in the Second International.
All the above is also my answer to your second question.
BJ Murphy said
In a very neo-liberal situation we’re in, I would say “Combating Liberalism” would be a great small need-to-know in order to understand why we shouldn’t embrace these social-democratic structures & policies.
worker antagonism said
“The same way the pre-WWI SPD did its work in a non-revolutionary situation: set up and maintain an alternative culture (cultural societies, sports clubs, funeral homes, food banks, etc.), do not participate in government coalitions at any level, have a detailed political program for workers coming to power in the first place, etc.”
considering how the SPD responded when a situation with actually revolutionary potential did occur you might want to take a rain check on that.
they built up a very impressive counter culture, but when the critical moment came, they sided with the imperialist state, and the result of all that accumulated work became a gift to the counter revolution.
its hard to believe that the vote for war credits and the bloody suppression of the working class after 1918, came out of a lineage of perfectly correct previous practice.
Billy O'Connor said
Exposing the lunacy of “lesser evilism” should be a priority.
As far as new cores of radicalized people, the capitalists are handing us a taylor-made “99 Commando” to the tune of 50,000 workers a day as they fall of the cliff of unemployment benefits and are faced with homelessness. The tent cities that they pour into should be ripe for revolutionary classroom work.
Carl Davidson said
The first question of strategy is ‘who are friends, who are adversaries?’
The answer enables you to then elaborate a strategic plan, ie, unite and develop the progressive forces, win over the middle, and isolate and divide the reactionaries.
In the CCDS, we call our strategy ‘uniting the progressive majority,’ and the progressive forces include the multinational working class, the oppressed nationalities, and the broad masses of women and youth. We also refer to it as the ‘interconnection of class, race and gender’. We project a platform of consistent democracy across a range of immediate and midterm issues as the political basis for the progressive majority.
As for capital at the top, our adversaries, some of us divide it into three–globalist capital, US hegemonist multinational capital, and anti-global nationalist capital. Then we draw a line between productive capital and speculative capital, and finally between ‘high road’ and ‘low road’ within that.
The main immediate enemy is low road finance capital, both global and US multinational, which asserts neoliberalism in various forms. A rising enemy is rooted in the ‘Tea Party’ far right, rooted in anti-global nationalist capital to a considerable degree. And alliance between the hard-core neoliberals and the Tea Party is especially troublesome. By drawing the line this way, we can also take advantage of divisionsand form a tactical alliance with sectors of high road productive capital, ie, the green energy and manufacturing sector, that is largely Keynesian. We have to been clear about our own socialist views, however, which are not Keynesian but Marxist, and organize to unite a militant minority around them concurrently with an independent program.
The middle forces are largely viewed as those among the masses or among the political elites that waver between these two poles–and they are won over mainly both by growing the strength of the progressive forces in the first place, and then by adopting appropriate policies toward them.
In this sense, our approach is not the same as either the old ‘united from against imperialism’ or the ‘anti-monopoly coalition’ of the CPUSA. We are trying to do something different rooted in deep structural reform to grow our strength as a counter-hegemonic bloc.
As for an outline of the first stages of socialism in the U.S., many of us hold to the somewhat detailed view of the ‘successor system’ of worker-controlled market socialism laid out in David Schweickart’s ‘After Capitalism.’ I recommend reading it, rather than trying to put it in a nutshell here.
In nonrevolutionary conditions, especially those in our country where the working class is weak both politically and organizationally, it is important to wage a protracted ‘war of position’ to gather strength, especially by building the trade unions and working in the electoral arena, while not ignoring direct action and mass mobilizations, ie, ‘wars of manuever.’ Most of us are working on a ‘party within a party’ inside the orbit of the Democrats, where many active workers see themselves, as well as some third party efforts like the Greens. We think these will hopefully form wider alliances as the crisis in the Democrats comes to a head. We want to supplant the Dems, but with a mass and radical break to the left, not one that strengthens the right.
At the same time, in the context of all this, we build the organizations needed by revolutionaries for the longer term, with all the features needed for representing the whole over the part, and the future within the present.
We lay this out in more detail in our 2009 ‘Goals and Principles’ statement, which is readily available at http://cc-ds.org and http://ccds-discussion.org. The above is only a schematic outline, at best. A more serious elaboration requires much more in the way of concrete analysis.
But if you want to start somewhere, you can try your hand at critiquing this. FRSO/Refoundation also has a fairly detailed booklet on the topic, but it’s in need of updating from the Bush era.
The Marxist-Leninist said
You might find this an interesting place to kick off a discussion: Class in the U.S. and Our Strategy for Revolution
mediated abstraction said
I think that anarchists, especially in my area, are miles ahead of the communist left when it comes to this sort of strategy. There’s a pirate radio station, bike shops, prisoner book programs, involvement in the local co-ops etc. None of these things in and of themselves are particularly revolutionary but they exist in social spheres where people are interested in alternatives to the dominant culture and are very strategic positions to radicalize people and begin building dual power should a revolutionary situation arise. Communist revolutionaries ought to seriously evaluate North American anarchism and attempt to reach out because our tendencies have got much more in common now than we’ve ever had in the past.
Carl Davidson said
I not sure what you’re referring to, MA, as ‘this sort of strategy.’ You should tell us. The projects you mention, often part of the solidarity economy movement, which I support as part of a range of tactics, can be part of any number of strategies. As for ‘dual power,’ if you’re using it in some sense other than Utopian counter-community projects, you’d have to spell out some assessment of the balance of forces.
worker antagonism said
@mediated abstraction
explicit class politics and a appreciation of the scientific content of Marx’s critique of political economy is becoming more common among anarchists,while clearly a lot of communists are looking to move beyond simplistic ML dogma, so the potential for melding is there.
however I would not get too excited about anarchist community projects, the radical left in North America remains roughly the size of a postage stamp, regardless of tendency.
mediated abstraction said
Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware of how small and politically insignificant a lot of anarchist community projects are. What I have seen is an attempt to establish organizations that are in many ways not as tied to capital or the bourgeois electoral system. I feel it’s rather flippant to dismiss a lot of these “counter-community projects” as utopian because they serve as a foundation(however fragile) for a genuine counter-culture, the importance of which is currently being discussed in another Kasama post.
Carl Davidson: I haven’t really spent enough time analyzing and writing about the potential for dual power here(I’m a working stiff and lead a reading/study group) to elaborate any kind of worthwhile analysis. That remark came from my understanding that these kinds of institutions of class power usually arise when there exists in these sorts of “vacuums” that I see anarchists attempting to explore around here. One example I saw of this was posted on Kasama; the food co-op in my hometown made headlines with their boycott of Israeli goods and this wouldn’t be noteworthy if it weren’t for the primarily anarchist radical scene there and the role that radicals played in supporting that co-op. It’s small and arguably insignificant in the context of creating “dual power” but I see a sliver of potential here.
Carl Davidson said
You misunderstand me. I don’t ‘dismiss’ these as utopian, MA. As an active member of the Solidarity Economy Network as well as my socialist group, I’m actually an advocate for many of them, such as the Evergreen Coops in Cleveland. But the same institution can be viewed, and are viewed by different people, as part of different strategies. I was just trying to clarify yours.
Jan Makandal said
I think we should use the Internet to its utmost at the same time recognizing its limitation. This field of proposed discussions on revolutionary strategy is one of the limitations. Myself, I don’t believe in bourgeois democracy. I will never over estimate the violent nature of bourgeois democracy nor will I underestimate it. I am only using [literally and politically] bourgeois democracy to further the struggle to defeat them and at the same time creating condition to function in any conditions. At think the US left is dominantly spoiled by bourgeois democracy, so I have seen, coming from a social formation dominated by US imperialist bourgeois democracy the full length violent inherent nature of bourgeois democracy made in US. This medium, the Internet, seems to be quite limited to discuss or to engage in any discussions of a strategic nature dominated and controlled by the system. It is like the house slave discussing how to defeat the master in his house controlled by the master. This is the internal task of a political organization.
My participation in this endeavor will be limited due to the fact it is being done in a limited field. I am using bourgeois democracy but will not stay idle or passive even to defend bourgeois rights permitting me to advance in that struggle. The defenses of these bourgeois rights are not strategic but tactical, meaning totally secondary in our reproduction as proletarians revolutionaries. We must train ourselves to function in the most adverse, unnatural conditions.
A] To talk of strategy we need to talk of apparatus/ organizations. No worthwhile strategy will emanate from a bunch of unorganized individuals. New definitions of organizations of proletarians revolutionary’s organizations need to be constructed. Base on proletarian definition of Democratic Centralism. A total rupture from the bureaucratic line implemented, by most, under the name of democratic centralism. The principal aspect to talk of strategy is to first construct organizations.
B] A new way of developing political unity, base on the concept of political rapprochement, a principle guiding a collective path to construct unity in a political apparatus even in the most clandestine atmosphere of functioning.
C] A study of the social formation, structure and constant study of conjunctures of the social formation needed to be transformed. A study of the social forces needed to be organized. Social forces are all the classes, fractions of classes and social categories to be organized to advance the struggle.
D] A rupture with dogmatism. Theory shouldn’t be a collage, an accumulation of adage to function as absolute truth but rather a vibrant, dynamic process constantly being questions, tested and deepening to consolidate proletarian theory.
C] a rupture with pragmatics. Dialectic is not to give us the truth. The search of the truth is a pragmatic endeavor. Dialectics, Dialectical materialism and historical materialism, are to allow us to understand a formal abstract, an objective reality by using concept in order to transform it. Understanding clearly our understanding is subjective.
D] if we do not address point A. all others are unreachable, since the organization is the collective platform to collectively, produce theory and political line.
E] need to recognize two levels of struggle one of strategic nature the other of tactical nature. The strategic level is determinant but can’t exist without the tactical level. These two levels politically translate into two levels of apparatus. The revolutionary organization and mass organizations.
F] We need an organization that is capable to apply the three C’s in the most advance collective manner to not only gather data but to define the correct political line.
A] centralization of experience
B] centralization of knowledge
C] Centralization of conclusion drawn out of actual militancy
celticfire said
I don’t have specific suggestions for “revolutionary” work, because that is a developed discussion about how a particular kind of mass work connects to the larger project of a revolutionary movement (and a people’s army, and shadow government, and the eventual overthrow of capitalism-imperialism), but I think there is a serious lack of promotion of existing revolutionary movements in India, Nepal and the Philippines and their defense.
Kasama has been so far as I can tell the most consistent internationalist in this regard. Which is great, but I wish other organizations would step up and play a more progressive role.
We should be actively promoting these revolutions. One of the most vile arguments I’ve heard against this is that “well sure, but its only going to find a small base of people.” My response was pretty pointed: so fucking what?
Should we be limited to organizing/mass work that only can attract millions right now, under these conditions? That work, imho, almost exclusively ends up where Carl Davidson is boring us about, that is work that is permitted and accepted by the rulers.
This is not to say we shouldn’t be striving to attract millions (and more), but that being small but sharp isn’t a bad thing.
Some comments of Chomsky’s:
If Chomsky isn’t talking about the “social justice” NGOs/nonprofiters that feel really great about their “work” that co-opts and eats up genuine resistance, than I don’t know what he’s talking about. We shouldn’t be interested in this. Or selling papers. Or breaking windows. But we should think this out again, I think.
Carl Davidson said
Sorry if you find trying to design strategic plans work solving the problems of the workers and oppressed we have all around us as ‘boring,’ Celticfire. I don’t. I find it immensely challenging, day in and day out. And I also spread the word about Nepal, encourage people to study what’s going on there, and urge efforts to oppose US interference, as best as we can.
‘Boring’, indeed. I don’t know you personally, but I take that as a sign of dillitantism. So if that shoe doesn’t fit you, don’t complain about how tight it is.
worker antagonism said
@Carl Davidson
“Sorry if you find trying to design strategic plans work solving the problems of the workers and oppressed we have all around us as ‘boring,’ Celticfire. I don’t. I find it immensely challenging, day in and day out.”
trade union work and participation in elections is in no way a viable strategic plan for solving the problems of the workers and oppressed, what it does do is perpetuate the faith and dependency of the masses on the institutions of the ruling class and thus it makes an invaluable contribution to the reproduction of bourgeoisie ideological hegemony, regardless of what some Eurocommunist interpretation of Gramsci says.
celticfire said
Carl,
Let me explain: your model of social change is fundamentally non-threatening (and never will be) to this system. It is a model that easily co-opted and directly benefits capitalism. Its social work. Its not communist, or revolutionary or deserving of such. Is it progressive? Well that divides into two: between those things that will actually benefit us in a revolutionary situation, and those things which objectively will impede us.
The “stop the violence” bullshit in Oakland that attempted to water down the anger that popular felt against this system is an example of something that will impede us and does RIGHT NOW, not just in some future situation. Politics that reinforce norms, traditions and values (even liberal ones) of this system will always be boring.
Carl Davidson said
Trade unions alone certainly don’t bring the workers to socialism, nor does organizing for elections and the casting of ballots.
But are you seriously arguing for a strategy, especially in non-revolutionary conditions, where we set these tools aside or try to skip over them? If so, make your case. But describe, with some detail, exactly how you think workers should organize themselves to fight for what they need, both today and tomorrow?
Organization is a key weapon of the working class I don’t know of any revolutionaries who disagree with that point. It’s also the case, or at least obvious to me, that most workers and most of the oppressed in this country today are sorely lacking in almost any kind of combative organization at the grassoots.
So if you don’t want to organize workers into unions, or have nothing to do with the few that exist, what do you have in mind? Better yet, not only ‘in mind,’ but what do you actually organize? If you organize at all?
If you don’t have serious answers here, I don’t think you can talk seriously about strategy and tactics of any kind.
worker antagonism said
@Carl Davidson
We should encourage the formation, proliferation and federation of autonomous groups organized on a predominantly geographical basis for the purpose of challenging working conditions, housing conditions, police violence, prisons/repression within the context of the class situation as a whole.
groups under the complete control of their own rank and file membership and not constrained by the NLRB and so on.
Following this line of action is of course much more difficult then integrating into the trade union/NGO complex, but its the difference between attempting to begin the constitution of the self aware political class against capital, and perpetuating business as usual.
Carl Davidson said
How would an ‘autonomous’ group or federation of them organize Walmart workers for getting a contract. Or organize anyone to get better health care or jobs to work at that pay a living wage? Walmart is a very tough nut to crack, so I won’t hold you to a suggestion on that one, but I will on the others. These are the things actually of the minds of workers when you talk with them. We have examples of how we go about it using our strategy at http://beavercountyblue.org So give as some examples. If you don’t have any, why not?
worker antagonism said
@Carl Davidson
Your whole orientation seems to revolves around reform work within the framework imposed by capital, reform work that not only does nothing to develop revolutionary consciousness for the long term, but tends to fail at its ostensible immediate goals in the short term, we are currently experiencing a historically unprecedented absence of strike action, how are the unions helping out with that?
social democratic approaches are not only ineffective at building up revolutionary counter power over the long term ( a century of history has shown this), but can do nothing against capitalism’s tendency to further immiserate living labor and expel it from the production process.
let me be perfectly clear, I do not claim to have the answers, far from it,I think truly effective strategies can only develop from the cross fertilization of various forces within actual practice.
however there are such things as obvious dead ends.
and engaging in bread and butter social work, within bureaucratized state oriented institutions is one such dead end.
if you want some recent examples of the concrete practice of the worker’s movement against social democracy and reformism, take a look at the Italian “area of autonomy” between 196-77, the Proletarian Left in post 68′ France, the autonomous movement in Spain in the 70′s, and so on.
we need a movement based upon people cultivating the power to run their own collective affairs in practice, against all the ruling institutions and norms, not a front strategy of coalitions for some minimum demand where a few professional organizers relate to most people as constituents, “vote for this”, “sign this”, etc.
Carl Davidson said
Strikes have shrunk, in part, because unions have shrunk–less than 10 percent in manufacturing. Organizing for a union often gets you fired, and when the reserve army of the unemployed is large, and organization is weak, you’ll have fewer strikes and less solidarity.
Two workers were killed in a Zinc plant explosion a mile down the road from me two weeks ago. The Steelworkers are the union there. The plant is shut down until they solve the safety problem, but all the workers are getting paid anyway, for as long as it takes. The USW got them that. I just returned from a huge dinner also organized by the union, drawing hundreds of families in and out of the union, to raise funds to help the families who suffered the loss. It was a moving and powerful display of solidarity and mutual aid, not ‘social work,’ to use your dismissive term. Will things turn more militant? We’ll see how things unfold, but the most common thing I hear from the workers without a union is that they wish they had one to defend themselves, and not only in cases like this.
We are indeed in non-revolutionary conditions, but the test of our revolutionary mettle is how well we can do within them to grow our strength, rather than just biding our time, preaching to the choir, and waiting for better days.
Off of our work, we have won small numbers of workers to socialism and socialist organization, along side the far larger numbers we help organize in the groups united around a platform of immediate demands that can unite a majority. I also have a fairly good overview of the left in our region, and while our gains are small, I don’t know of anyone doing any better, and I know quite a few who aren’t getting anywhere, as far as the working class is concerned.
But you seem content to denounce all this a priori, and without any alternative example other than things you’ve read about from other countries in past periods of greater upsurge. What method is that? OK, maybe we can learn something anyway. But I want to know what you are doing here and now. That’s what counts most for discussing strategy for today and in the period ahead. That’s how we can test our ideas in practice. Or doesn’t that count as revolutionary any more?
Dave Palmer said
In 2008 in Milwaukee there was a campaign for a ballot initiative that would require employers to provide all workers with a guaranteed minimum number of paid sick days. We got enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot, and it passed by a wide margin.
I think, in many ways, this was an excellent campaign — it addressed a pressing need of the working class, drew out strong contradictions between the exploiters (who vehemently opposed it) and the exploited (who strongly supported it), and contested the issue of power. When I say that it contested the issue of power, I mean that many people were energized by the idea of direct democracy, that “this is something we can do for ourselves; we don’t need to wait for politicians to do it for us.”
And the campaign was a big success: the paid sick days ordinance is now law.
Except that (as could have been predicted) the exploiters, represented by their organization Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce, were successful in getting an injunction to prevent the law from ever being brought into effect. In his decision, the judge said that the law was potentially unconstitutional, since the portion which allowed victims of domestic abuse to use sick days to get treatment and seek shelter did not have any relation to “public health and safety.”
Because, you know, domestic abuse has nothing to do with health or safety.
The case will be going to the state Supreme Court. However, since many of the “justices” owe their positions to the millions of dollars in unregulated campaign contributions they received from WMC (look up Michael Gableman or Annette Ziegler if you think this is an exaggeration), the chances of the law being upheld are essentially zero.
You’d think that this series of events (if nothing else) would provide a very clear lesson on the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, and the hypocrisy and corruption of capitalist “justice.” Potentially, it could serve as a means of radicalizing people and organizing resistance.
Unfortunately (and predictably), the non-profit group which organized the original petition drive is not interested defending the democratic victory in a radical way, and is instead devoting its energies to the (almost certainly doomed) court case and trying in vain to convince local politicians to sponsor paid sick days legislation on the state and federal levels.
Meanwhile (also predictably), many people in the radical community seem to see the whole thing as “reformist,” and therefore are also not interested in interested in defending the democratic victory in a radical way, because they don’t see it as important.
I see these two attitudes reflected in the comments of Carl Davidson and Worker Antagonism.
It seems as though the choice is between fighting within a framework entirely defined by the enemy, which is doomed to failure, or rejecting this framework, which in practice often means abandoning the battlefield with your moral superiority intact.
I don’t know why I’m being self-righteous about this, since I clearly don’t have a workable solution either. But I feel that this was a missed opportunity, and there are probably many missed opportunities like this.
Scott Wallace said
I have been involved in the project of reanimating the Workers’ International Industrial Union. The WIIU is the spinoff of the IWW that embraced the concept of political action. The original WIIU disbanded in 1924, but we have brought it back, because for us, this union is the missing piece in the socialist movement. It is a revolutionary union that seeks to become the vehicle of proletarian rule. It assumes the historic role of unionism, that of organizing the working class for the purpose of abolishing capitalism and putting the means of production under democratic control.
When I first heard that some folks wanted to bring back the WIIU, I just sort of rolled my eyes. I figured it was ridiculous to attempt something like that. But then along came a situation where my union called a rally (I’m a teacher)to protest our inability to negotiate a contract, and I really wanted to put out a message that contrasted the class collaboration of our union with genuine unionism, so I put together a leaflet calling on my fellow teachers to take control of the union and align it with the principles of the WIIU. I then realized that the WIIU doesn’t need to be large to serve as an example for unionists everywhere.
I have since joined the SP USA, and at our Florida State convention we passed a resolution endorsing Industrial Unionism as a model for the socialist reconstruction of society. Industrial unionism avoids the two major flaws in 20th century attempts to establish socialism, namely Social Democracy, and bureaucratic statism. As such, I’m inclined to believe the that it holds great potential for unifying the socialist movement, and while Industrial Unionism has long been seen as a strictly anarchist project, with the reanimation of the WIIU, it can now also be seen as a socialist project. So we are now involved in a project to propose to the broader socialist movement that industrial unionism be embraced as a unifying concept, and that various socialist parties cooperate, dovetailing their political campaigns, and using them to help build a revolutionary industrial union movement. Part of this project involves encouraging unionist to begin to view unionism as the vehicle for the socialist transformation of society. Despite my initial misgivings about this project, I have found it to be extremely gratifying.
One other revolutionary strategy that I believe holds considerable potential, and can complement industrial unionism, is the construction of revolutionary cooperatives. I believe, however, that I will leave the details of that for another post.
chegitz guevara said
For some reason, I am reminded of a scene in The Princess Bride
Basically, before we can strategize, we need to know our assets and our liabilities.
Bezdomni said
Among other things, build an infrastructure that will enable people to connect to one another through commonly accessible technology which is maintained by the community and does not rely on the government or businesses to function. For example, a distributed network of Wireless LANs would be an invaluable resource for connecting members of a relatively large community in new, interesting and meaningful ways. It would be a great way for news and information to travel in a manner that is purely organic and in no way controllable by authorities. It would also be possible to share internet connectivity through such a network, providing impoverished people all of the information and ability to communicate to be found on the internet anywhere there is a wireless signal at absolutely no cost.
Needless to say, such a massively distributed computer network would be extremely valuable in a socialist society for planning an economy and allocating resources among other things.
The best strategy that I can think of is “find ways to create new connections between people which are unsettling to capitalists and more or less impossible to stop”.
Capitalism defines a certain system of social relations (as we all know). When something “unintended” and “disruptive” emerges out of the conditions capitalism has created (i.e. black panther soup kitchens), then the capitalists respond in some manner which defuses the situation to the best of their ability.
In rare situations, the attempt at resolving the situation backfires and makes matters worse for the capitalists. In extraordinarily rare situations, several attempts at resolution fail and capitalism becomes overwhelmed — which is an appropriate point to begin organizing for the seizure of state power.
The trick, I expect, is to “think a few moves ahead” and anticipate how capitalism reacts to things which it finds disruptive and potentially threatening. When the capitalists have a thorn in their side, it is our job to find a way to push it in deeper before they notice and get it out.
B said
Okay, so you communists who were so in 1968 only have roughly 4 decades on me so forgive me if what I say here is stupid. These are actually some ideas that I first had when I’d just started to see the world as it really is.
Around that time I studied these intentional communities called Twin Oaks and East Wind. They’re a bunch of people who live out in the country in commune-type things and share all of their income, most of which comes from products they produce and sell. Twin Oaks (VA) makes tofu and hammocks. East Wind (MO) makes nut butters. There are other places like this, but these are the two biggest ones that I know of. I read about how they trade products with other intentional communities and I thought about what it’d mean to have a lot of these communities, but infused with some revolutionary politics.
I realize the limitations here and am in no way suggesting that we could unplug from capitalism through an intentional community movement, but I wonder if there is any potential in them towards building a revolutionary movement?
I know that it wouldn’t be easy to start up such an operation, but imagine if it did jump off somehow? You’d solve one problem we have right away , there’d now be the potential for base areas in the countryside, ergo eventually for protracted people’s war. Also, more revolutionary-minded people could be enabled to gather skills we need to run the new society. What would be required is money to obtain farmable land, some people who know how to farm and/or produce needed goods, and revolutionaries willing to devote their lives to the cause. I’m not saying that all the revolutionaries should vacate the cities and move to the communes where we’d be easy targets so as long as we weren‘t able to defend ourselves, that’d be a mistake. Revolutionaries who have high-paying jobs and some others should stay in the cities to help sell the excess products that are produced and to recruit etc.. Eventually we could begin to produce enough so that we could give our products to poor people, and that is probably the stage in which the capitalists and their allies would really come after us, but hey I’m just throwing this out there as a potential road, and I don’t pretend to be able to see the end of it from here.
BroadSnark said
Ran across this discussion, including the comments about anarchists, and I just wanted to mention that anarchism and communism are not mutually exclusive. There are many anarchists who also consider themselves communists.
Carl Davidson said
I agree that David Palmer’s example about Wisconsin and the guaranteed sick days initiative is instructive. While it’s one tactical battle, from my strategic perspective, it shows two things.
The first is the need for grassroots organization to unite a progressive majority behind it, one that will take the battle all the way through, including in the courts. Group like the Greens, PDA and the unions and health care coalitions would seem natural.
But you also need an organization of revolutionaries to unite the militant minority, both to help draw the wider lessons about class power and the class natures of society, and what needs to replace it, alongside helping with tactical leadership and pushing that forward. Having exhausted the initiative process, and won there (war of position), the ground is prepared for more militant direct and mass action regarding the courts and the manipulations of the capitalists and politicians opposing it (war of maneuver).
You may or may not win the reform. But the main victory is whether or not the progressive forces and the revolutionary forces are stronger after the battle than before. As a wise man said, ‘fight, fail, fight again, fail again…until our victory. The is the logic of the people.’ Something close to that; I don’t have my ‘Little Red Book’ handy.
Jacob Richter said
“they built up a very impressive counter culture, but when the critical moment came, they sided with the imperialist state, and the result of all that accumulated work became a gift to the counter revolution.
its hard to believe that the vote for war credits and the bloody suppression of the working class after 1918, came out of a lineage of perfectly correct previous practice.”
Two notable flaws: lack of clarity on the state and sticking to national limitations instead of being more international.
The USPD emerged during WWI, and had the sectarian, ultra-left formation of the KPD not occurred, the USPD would have been in a position to seize power (having taken much of the SPD’s “counter-culture”).
Scott Wallace’s RIU is quite compatible with the framework of the Kautskyan Marxist center, and the RIU has the potential to become a de facto mass workers party (through political action) alongside any official mass workers party. The only difference is that one mass workers party stands in elections, the other organizes strike action.
Radical Eyes said
To bring us back to Lenin’s three-part “recipe” for a revolutionary situation:
What is required to make a revolution:
1) The emergence of a situation in which the ruling classes are not able to rule in the old way (contradictions amongst the bourgeoisie; and between the bourgeoisie and the masses)
2) The emergence of a cultural situation where the masses of people refuse to or no longer feel that it is possible to live in the old way (a crisis of hegemony for the ruling-class)
3) The emergence of some sort of vanguard organization, or revolutionary party, that can serve to draw lessons, coordinate actions, and direct strategy that can overthrow the (already teetering) ruling structure.
I am in now way suggesting that such a three part “recipe” ought to be taken uncritically as dogma. But we might engage with it, and/or use it as a tool for deepening and organizing this discussion, no?
So for instance, for starters, concerning revolutionary ingredient #1 what do people see as the actual contradictions (or growing weaknesses) amongst the ruling classes and/or between the ruling classes and the masses of the people (globally and within the United States) that may open fissures into which these ruling parties may fall, and/or from which mass dissilusionment and broad radicalization may emerge.
It would seem to me that methodologically (in the spirit of dialectical materialism, even!) a discussion of strategy and tactics should start with a concrete analysis of the emerging situation, aimed at locating the explosive “fault lines” that are even now creeping beneath our feet. The question is: where?
Carl Davidson said
I agree, ‘Radical Eyes,’ in starting by getting our inventory and the time of day reasonably in tune with reality.
I think the most interesting new development is the bankruptcy of the hard-line GOP neoliberals. They have no solutions to the crisis they helped to create, and can only obstruct and blow smoke. The Tea Partiers to their right are even worse, offering little more than white nationalism riveted together with a promise of tax relief.
We need to clarify this as widely as possible from a Marxist perspective in our propaganda and agitation, ie, our work of revolutionary education among the more active fighters. We have done this, in a small way, by publishing a booklet on full employment as a progressive path out of the crisis. It’s available from me for a small charge at carld717@gmail.com We use it as widely as we can in our community-based work and trade union work.
We also have to expose the ‘reform’ neoliberals and Blue Dogs in Team Obama as conciliators of this bankruptcy, who continue as ‘deficit hawks’ to push war and austerity on the masses, while continue to help the rich.
But this is not to say capitalism has no way out of this round in its crises. Contra the old rigidities of the ‘general crisis’ theory, I think it does. It resides in a clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy, combined with a VAT to help level the global playing field and a financial transaction tax on speculative Wall St capital to help pay for it. But most of the ruling class currently opposes this in practice. Some of them, mainly left Keynesians, disagree and know this is their only hope and argue for it. But they are a minority and ‘Out in the Cold,’ at least for the moment. So even if US capitalism can get out of its mess, it’s an open question as to whether it will or not.
This is where strategy and tactics vis-a-vis the upper crust come in. I argue for a tactical alliance or popular front with the Keynesians vs. low-road finance capital. In fight for jobs and against the climate change crisis, we share the objectives of green and clean energy, cutbacks in militarism, and job growth via green infrastructure and manufacturing.
But we do so not from a Keynesian perspective but a 21st Century Marxist one. We also put on the table the deeper structural reforms that alter power relationships and form a bridge to a socialist transition. In brief, we have our own independence and initiative in a broader front against finance capital.
This is only a bare bones outline for nonrevolutionary conditions. Should an insurrectionary period or crisis emerge soon, we’ll have to shift gears considerably and quickly. But I’m offering it up as a working hypothesis answering the first questions of strategy concerning friends and adversaries, as well as a proposed line of march. And if you think this means I think the Democrats are going to solve our problems, then you haven’t understood anything that I’m saying.
worker antagonism said
@Carl Davidson
So you will do your part to try to help the bourgeoisie out of its difficulties and hope to get a few concessions in the bargen.
Unfortunately they don’t want that sort of help, and are quite happy with further austerity,repression and ecological breakdown, you are going against the logic of the system when you demand renewed social democracy, its a dream.
not to mention a dream that is depressing and demoralizing in the constraints it imposes on the possible, come on “dare to struggle, dare to win”, don’t admit defeat before you even start.
“I argue for a tactical alliance or popular front with the Keynesians vs. low-road finance capital. In fight for jobs and against the climate change crisis, we share the objectives of green and clean energy, cutbacks in militarism, and job growth via green infrastructure and manufacturing.”
who is “we” here?
I for one am completely uninterested in all the restructuring measures listed above, what does interest me is the construction of autonomous proletarian power that is utterly antagonistic to capital, so that when revolutionary moments come, a revolutionary minority will already exist to push the situation towards a favorable resolution.
when I see sweeping lists of grand reforms like the ones listed above, what comes to mind is the old cliche about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, this century will be the century of the final crisis of the system, for good or for ill.
we need to be as radical as reality.
Carl Davidson said
You may not be interested in things like wind turbines for power and factories here with jobs to produce them, but I assure you, the working class is, and they are campaigning for them. And we’ll need the green infrastructure in a future socialist order as well as the current one.
The workers, especially the unemployed and more oppressed, are in need of work and an income. opposing wage slavery doesn’t mean we campaign for full unemployment, or stand to the sidelines in fighting for full employment.
You can do so if you like; just don’t claim to be following anything even close to the mass line.
As for the kind of autonomous organizations you have a notion about, go out and organize a few of them in the here and now, show us the results, and we can discuss the implications. Otherwise, it’s empty phrases.
worker antagonism said
“You may not be interested in things like wind turbines for power and factories here with jobs to produce them, but I assure you, the working class is, and they are campaigning for them. And we’ll need the green infrastructure in a future socialist order as well as the current one.”
the vast majority of the working class is not interested in campaigning for wind power, its interested in reality tv, beer, and internet porn, clearly communists need to spend more time watching television and surfing Redtube, while buzzed off naty lite, you can’t get closer to the masses then that.
in any future socialist order, the first priority will be reducing energy consumption as much as possible, not massive and wasteful infrastructure projects.
“The workers, especially the unemployed and more oppressed, are in need of work and an income. opposing wage slavery doesn’t mean we campaign for full unemployment, or stand to the sidelines in fighting for full employment.”
sure, I happen to be in “need of work and an income” myself at the moment, however capitalism will never deliver full employment, regardless of how much Paul Krugman complains.
“You can do so if you like; just don’t claim to be following anything even close to the mass line.”
I don’t follow the “mass line”, I follow a social revolutionary line.
Carl Davidson said
Have you heard of the phrase, ‘hoisted by his own petard’, WA? It applies here. I rest my case on your argument. Perhaps others are more serious.
worker antagonism said
that does not constitute a substantive reply.
Carl Davidson said
Indeed. Nor was yours. If you want to make a more serious reply, I’ll be glad to respond appropriately. Otherwise, I could take apart your comment, but that’s just taking advantage of a big, slow mushball.
Jim Brash said
In my humble opinion it all depends on where you live in the world. If that place is the USA, then what region. What plafform/tactics/ strategy that we put forth in New Jersey may differ from whats done in California, or even New York.
Strategy/tactics depend on the geo-politics in which you are operating. Other than OutNow, real healthcare, & jobs with a real living wage, our demands may differ drastically from place to place. Our presentation to fellow workers also changes from place to place. Whatever strategy we work on or come up with has to be like water: water can be a liquid, solid, or gas. Our tactics/strategy should be just as flexible, as well as represenative of the dynamics/forces at work within the communities we live & operate.
Also we should have real community connections to the working class. We should learn the wants, hopes, & needs of our neighbors and use that knowledge to build bridges with them.
On another note I’d love to see kind of formation develop that is led by both anarchists & socialist. A black & red party would be an acheivement.
Jacob Richter said
“To bring us back to Lenin’s three-part “recipe” for a revolutionary situation”
In his works, Lenin explicitly credited Kautsky’s The Road to Power: Political Reflections on Growing into the Revolution for outlining a revolutionary situation. However, he distorted one and forgot a fourth.
—–
Where these conditions exist a great transfer of political power that shall destroy a tyrannical regime is only to be expected where all of the following conditions exist:
1.The great mass of the people must be decisively hostile to such a regime.
2.There mast be a great organized party in irreconcilable opposition to such a regime.
3.This party must represent the interests of the great majority of the population and possess their confidence.
4.Confidence in the ruling regime, both in its power and in its stability, mast have been destroyed by its own tools, by the bureaucracy and the army.
—–
Translation: mass hostility between the state and the workers, mass party-movement vehemently opposed to the state order, majority political support (not “electoral support”) from the working class to said mass party-movement, and breakdown in the state apparatus (army, police, bureaucracy, etc.).
This is why I think honest membership itself in a mass party-movement is the best indicator of political support.
Pink said
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hoist by your own petard.html
interestingly, ‘petard’ is related to a French term for flatulence, which seems apropos in light of a few of the ultraleft non-answers proferred thus far
Jacob Richter said
Correction: “mast” should be read as “must” in #4 above.
The Road to Power’s Chapter 6, from which I quoted, can be found here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch06.htm
Pink said
We need cadre, working class cadre, organized into a vanguard. There is currently nothing like this in the united states. Until there is a anti-capitalist revolution that succeeds without such a thing I don’t see any way around such a vehicle. Sure, I would support a real revolution led by anarchists or petit bourgeois intellectuals 100%. But going by their track records I won’t be holding my breath.
Jim Brash said
We need to define what is to be done in american terms. Vanguardism hasn’t worked well in the West. Troskyism hasn’t worked. Democratic centralism in practice has been ultra centralized and quite undemocratic. We need to begin to develop new modes of organisation. What worked in 1917, 1950, 1979, or even 2001 wil not work today. Every mass organisation/party be it the bolshevik party, the July 26 Movement, the FSLN, the New jewel Movement, or the ANC grew out of the historical process that was taking place during a given time in a given area. We can nolonger try to transplant what Lenin & trotsky did to what we are doing. We can learn from their examples but we can’t be clones/wannabees. We do not operate underground in the USA, leaders are not in exiled, the situation isnt turbulent, and were not in the industrial age. Nor are we in a period where being like the wobblies would be needed. The current period of history we are living in has its own unique dynamics, and strategy & organsiation should reflect that.
Pink said
I agree with you that we shouldn’t mechanically transplant such and such to our conditions, least of all a world-class bullshitter like Trotsky. Lenin wasn’t a LARPer, and the Chinese revolution wasn’t a historical re-enactment of something earlier. That said, there are common threads running through those revolutions, and the era of 20th century revolutions as a whole. The United States is *unique* but not *exceptional*, in the Browder sense, anyways. We would do well to study whose up, at least in terms of overall style of play.
balzac said
Above all I think we need to vastly expand beyond workerist conceptions of Marxism and attempt a radical reconsideration of who are most capable of revolution. This was done in the 60s with the Black Panther Party especially, but also along the lines of white youth radicalism. While I was not alive in that era, my historical readings of it have indicated that it was elements of the petit-bourgeois white youth who had the (potential for) revolutionary consciousness and not the white working class. This is obviously played up in conservative imagery (the photo of the young woman spitting on the soldier which, despite possibly not even being real, had a huge role in the cultural imagination of the time) which seeks to pit the lower strata of whites against everyone else but the mega-rich, but we also have to realize that this balkanization has been hugely successful and is very much embedded in the white American identity. Border patrols, the KKK, the Tea Party, the “enforcers” of white slave society drew (draw) much of their power on this sense of whiteness which caters to lower-class whites. If there are revolutionary tendencies within the working class, I think they will be held almost entirely by nonwhites, and I think this needs to be understood from the outset of any possible radical action. (I also would add that petit-bourgeois white youth now are not capable of any of the revolutionary consciousness which might have been possible in the 60s.) Any analysis of revolutionary work in the USA requires a racial consciousness/perspective as one of its core features, otherwise any work will be very easily subsumed.
I should note that I am speaking from an east-coast perspective. I know that the situation may be different in other parts of the country which have a history of radical labor organizing and whose movements were not so easily ruptured by racial fragmentation and the social capital (still freely available) of whiteness.
balzac said
To go a bit further, I would say that the potential for revolution lies in those who might be considered the sub-working class or, the more derogatory term, the “lumpenproletariat”. The BPP was the first in the US (perhaps the first in the world) to identify this and develop a revolutionary strategy which saw the imprisoned, unemployed, day laborers, etc., as the revolutionary class within a heavily industrialized country – basically bringing the revolutionary power of “the wretched of the earth” into the first world.
A number of conditions have made this transition mostly inevitable, but I would say the two major economic (rather than cultural – obviously the major cultural piece being race/nationalism) ones are the fragmentation of the labor process in the era of global capital and a century of Fordism and cooperative unionism. The workers who were once able to take control of the means of production can now only do so from from a foreign country and the revolutionary potential of unionism has been largely neutralized through a combination of co-optation and brute force.
Jim Brash said
A workers state will have very little to do with ownership over the means of production. I am starting to think and more to do with control over how we affect the ecology, manage existing institutions of the state, replace outmoded & antiquated institutions, and the smashing of the economy as we currently know it and replacing it with something that will not have to exist with expectant booms & busts. The working class in the US will never be like the industrial working class of 30 to 40 years ago. We live in a post industrial society, an imformation driven society and eventually we will have unions that reflect that. Just like we went from craft unions to industrial ones we will sooner or later see the formation of unions that reflect where the majority of the new jobs are being created and sustained as well as where workers in general are earning wages today & 2morrow.
David_D said
Regarding the construction of socialism in what would be the former United States, I think there is a certain value to the position advanced by some supporters of the former “Maoist Internationalist Movement” that proletarian dictatorship would likely come to the (former) United States via armed forces of oppressed peoples and nations, and that the proper policy for the majority in the country could be called “one big gulag.”
Let us remember that the gulag, as intended in any case, were intended to be corrective institutes and colonies, not penal institutes in the bourgeois sense. Most of the people in the United States are reactionary, backward, and objectively parasitic. It will require arduous and prolonged remolding of worldview to integrate these people into a society under proletarian dictatorship as citizens with full rights to civic participation. In the Soviet Union, this didn’t happen until the implementation of the constitution of 1936; prior to that time, many classes of people and individuals did not have voting rights, for instance.
Green Red said
In the briefest way to say it is as this:
If the regime of the state takes away a meter of people’s rights, immediately demand certainly more than a single meter back. Ask for things that are attainable but, is not in the ruling class’ interest and in the least demands severe reforms in the least or, revolution.
They attack the workers, more workers organizing and rights fought for. The more immigrants are step by step hurt, they, as a large population as they are, must demand further culturaly suit for them demands instead of hiding and abiding to only attain the basic rights.
The more fit to fight and armed the enemies become and forces bring, the more readying for action people should go for.
And well said by some above through historical experience. Alternative culture and, in fact economic bodies, in the smallest way they might seem to be, are positive steps forward and model acts.
When due to economical, cultural and so forth crisis bring people down and make them sink into drugs, drinking and despair, although have not yet heard of it but, forming progressive revolutionary addiction fighting groups are the best resolution. You are doping since you cannot make money as much as X or Y did? And they call you people of color and white trash, etc.? But is there enough food and capital to feed everybody around? So why shouldn’t it be shared? Let’s study history, how things were built here, was there genocide? who were stolen from their lands for cheap labor while lots of world’s slavery had already been over?
And their are solutions. Your ati addiction partner or take caring party belongs to this revolutionary movement…. or if you want you could be with that other person whos is a labor movement rep… But remember; unlike AA, NA, etc., we only talk partially about our individual crisis. We also study history collectively…
Anybody talked about it before and was it unsuccessful?
balzac said
Green Red:
I have heard about psychiatric groups/providers using the critical pedagogy method of Paulo Freire (“Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, etc.) here in the US with their model being those used by the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra) in Brazil. The MST have been very successful with this approach and are worth looking into for this reason as well as many others.
Also, the approach you are discussing was very significant in the 60s in the politicization of black prisoners – George Jackson is probably the most famous representative of this trend, along with the Attica uprising (which was in large part triggered by the murder of Jackson), but you can go back as far as Malcolm X to see strains of that. Malcolm was more of an autodidact but the Nation of Islam played a huuuuuuuuuuuuuge role in achieving a potentially revolutionary consciousness among prisoners.
balzac said
Point of clarification: the Nation of Islam was the leader of this trend for a long time and it had a huge effect on the lives prisoners, ex-prisoners, and prison culture in general. It also should go without saying that many of these politicized prisoners were addicts when they were originally sent to prison. The NoI was also a lot more problematic and not necessarily interested in revolution, though many of the people it originally politicized came to be, and despite the faults of the Nation, credit should be given where credit is due.
Alastair Reith said
I don’t have time to make a major contribution to this discussion, but I will offer a few thoughts. I believe that the key thing in this period is to do explicitly communist work for explicity communist goals. We accept that our ideas and efforts will only reach a small audience, and that we will only convince and recruit people in ones and twos. We don’t delude ourselves into thinking that by watering down our politics we can reach a mass audience and build a ‘broad, progressive’ movement or whatever.
We promote the revolution in Nepal – even if we only reach a few hundred and only convince a handful.
We organise study groups to discuss Marxist theory – even if we only reach a few hundred and only convince a handful.
We agitate in the union movement to break with the Labour Party and wage unhesitating class war on the bosses – even if we only reach a few hundred and only convince a handful.
We struggle to build explicitly and openly revolutionary organisations – even if we only reach a few hundred and only convince a handful.
We cannot allow ourselves to do the ‘left’ wing of the bourgeoisie’s work for it, and while we don’t want to be ultraleft and come across as insane, we have to fight and argue for communist revolution even when that seems like an impossible dream. The end goal is everything.
This approach has been tested in practice – it works. The Workers Party of New Zealand is the only organisation in this country which is uncompromisingly Marxist and doesn’t hide behind liberal front groups or calls to vote for the Labour Party. Despite this ultraleftist extremism, we are now by far the largest communist organisation in New Zealand, and the only nationwide organisation. Every other groups is based in one particular city.
The National Organiser of the WP, Phil Ferguson, recently made these comments in a seperate discussion. I think they are quite relevant.
Ian Anderson said
@Alastair:
I’d agree with all that. Another crucial thing is developing an analysis which is specific to our circumstances and informed by practical work. Aka the concrete analysis of concrete conditions.
Alastair Reith said
Exactly. Don’t take your political line from some overseas mothership group (whether it’s the British SWP or the Russian CPSU), don’t take your political line dogmatically from historical texts you force down the throat of modern reality.
We have to start with concrete analysis of the real world, identify the obstacles to revolutionary victory and come up with a plan of attack to completely wipe these obstacles out.
Such a plan, in my opinion, can only be developed in a situation of intense class struggle and revolutionary advance. So for now, I’m happy to recruit in ones and twos, help rebuild a fighting union movement and most importantly of all, build an openly and explicitly revolutionary communist organisation.
celticfire said
David_D,
Could you clarify this? It seems unnerving that you propose “remolding” of entire populations. I don’t find the hyper-Lin Biaoist MIM line “revolutionary,” but rather Khmer Rouge like in its revenge line. That’s not liberation.
I want the exploited of this country (and yes,there is such a class, contrary to the J. Sakai version of un-materialist analysis) to shape and define what their liberated society would look like and function.
How is the line different than arguing the socialism can’t come about until productive forces are adequate? It’s the same fundamental error that assumes the people as they are are not prepared to rule and I don’t accept that at all.
celticfire said
David_D: Also, I understand that the term you raise (“gulag”) has more than a few meanings, but you cite the Stalinist periods visceral granting of “voting rights” and its rather hapless constitution as something that should be repeated(!)
Again, I have the shivers.
What about that process do you uphold specifically?
The Soviet experience did not yield a lasting model for communist transformation. And those of us from Maoist politics have always been critical of it.
By the time the new Soviet (“the Stalin”) constitution was forged, that society was into a deeply conservative current. The Nepalese have evaluated it, and are putting their lessons into practice, in every detail to larger ones like how line struggle is carried out.
It’s worth learning from.
David_D said
My dear comrade Celticfire…
You say: “It seems unnerving that you propose ‘remolding’ of entire populations. I don’t find the hyper-Lin Biaoist MIM line “revolutionary,” but rather Khmer Rouge like in its revenge line. That’s not liberation.”
I do not think corrective action to reform would-be former US citizens would be about anything approximating “revenge.” I think the classification of the population according to former social class and political position would be nearly essential for some time after the establishment of proletarian dictatorship. This occurred not only in the Soviet Union, but in China as well.
The Bolsheviks identified people who were the drivers and supporters of the old society and excluded them from the body politic: these included clergy, certain occupations, and other categories. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lishenets It could be argued that Stalin’s abolition of the “lishenets” was a conservative or right-wing decision, in fact.
The Communist Party of China under Mao certainly did not reject this of classification. “Jieji chengfen” (class origin) was a very important factor in one’s social and economic life. It was a sort of “hat” someone wore, and it wasn’t abolished until Deng Xiaoping did so after he won out in late 1978.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea instituted a version of this policy as well, because all urban refugees in the countryside became “depositees” in their respective collectives. The mistake here was in not combating bourgeois right and treating the collectives almost like capitalist enterprises with the pre-existing peasants in the role of the bourgeois.
“How is the line different than arguing the socialism can’t come about until productive forces are adequate? It’s the same fundamental error that assumes the people as they are are not prepared to rule and I don’t accept that at all.”
I am not saying that socialism is not possible. I am saying that reactionaries should be rehabilitated. That is the context in which I cite “gulag.” Even with reactionaries, cadres should always adhere to a modern version of the Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention. But the answer to white terror is red terror. Mao’s “iron broom” cannot be dispensed with. For those who were parasitic or backward, no, I absolutely do not think they are immediately prepared to rule. For a sufficient period of time, they should be excluded from the democracy.
“Also, I understand that the term you raise (“gulag”) has more than a few meanings, but you cite the Stalinist periods visceral granting of “voting rights” and its rather hapless constitution as something that should be repeated(!)”
I do not understand why you put “voting rights” in quotes. Are you saying that Soviet citizens did not have voting rights? The Soviets had much to uphold. The elections were a popular mobilization for support for an alliance of party and non-party socialist patriots. I do not say we should replicate that, but I think that we should critically assimilate all that is good.
“The Soviet experience did not yield a lasting model for communist transformation. And those of us from Maoist politics have always been critical of it.”
Mao was critical of it, certainly. At the same time, Mao praised Stalin. “I think there are two `swords’: one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians.” Mao did not discard the sword of Stalin, and I do not think communists should do so today. That is not to say that a new trail should not be blazed, as is being done by the Nepalese comrades. I wholeheartedly support them in this endeavor.
David_D said
I think this is THE most important topic, and I will eagerly read everything posted in response to this post.
I have long thought “create public opinion, seize power” was a good main task – “turn every outbreak of protest and rebellion into a school of war.” I suppose I have long thought that the RCP practice as I understood it (which was some time ago) was fundamentally correct. The main faultline is national oppression and of course it intersects “immigration” as a political issue and the principal contradiction of this time, that between imperialism and oppressed peoples and nations.
That said, I think the days of a weekly newspaper being the centerpiece of propaganda should be over. Communists must adapt to the changing ways in which people access social messages. I did like the old PL “red eye on the news” segment they have in their newspaper “Challenge.” Ideally, I think a (daily) digest of news events interpreted through a communist lens would be useful. We can learn a lot from our enemies about how to do these things.
There are many other points that could be raised. What about elections? Militant unconditional abstention seems like a poor choice. I did note when RCP did not push this when the anti-immigrant proposition was being fought out in California way back in 1994. There can indeed be genuine mass movements that have electoral components. But we should reject majoritarian thinking generally and certainly have no illusions about seizing or wielding even small power through elections.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the things I think should be done, are premised on the condition that a communist party existed with the sufficient ideological basis and material infrastructure. It should, for instance, have its own intelligence capability to both ensure its own security as well as to, at least at some junctures, disarticulate the enemy (counterintelligence).
Carl Davidson said
Somehow this discussion has taken an odd turn, or so it seems to me. But to briefly engage a few of these suggestions for strategy, here goes.
Balzac want us to go back to the BPP ‘lumpen line.’ and avoid ‘workerism.’ My guess is that Balzac thinks that because they are more oppressed, they are more revolutionary, while others with regular jobs are not. This has some truth in it, but it’s too one-sided. I spent several years organizing among prisoners, ex-offenders and gang kids. Some of the best revolutionaries are to be found there. But there’s more than one way to be corrupted. We know about cushy jobs and perks. But dire conditions set people up for corruption as well, drawing them into ‘the life’ where people survive on the trade in women and drugs, and war among themselves violently over turf. Believe me, there’s nothing romantic or revolutionary about it.
I think we should work in all strata, from the lowest to the highest, and I concentrate where I am with industrial workers, the unemployed and stressed retirees, which is most of what we have around here. But I’d argue that no sector is automatically insurgent. You’ll find insurgencies among families and friends of the incarcerated, and by all means, work there. But you can also find insurgency among among college-educated workers who are single Moms concerned with day care, wars and ecological issues. Work there, too.
Some 88 percent of the working class in this country overall have no unions, and need them. The lack of basic organizations to defend themselves doesn’t help, so emphasize organizing the unorganized. It’s not a crowded field.
Jim Brash says we’re in a post-industrial society. He’s right to a degree, and it calls for some new approaches. For the masses, it’s also called the ‘Walmartization of America’–no union, low pay, few benefits or protections. But not all de-industrialization is inevitable. High-valued added green technology manufacturing and clean energy infrastructure is worth fighting for as a key way to oppose the downside of post-industrialism, as is the fight for a 6-hour day. But to do this, you have to work both with trade unions, high road green entrepreneurs and local government officials, both tactically and strategically.
As for David_D and his notion of putting the entire U.S. population in a re-education Gulag, all I can say is that the fantasies of alienated intellectuals have reached new heights. But even as a practical matter, how would you go about putting 300 million people in camps? As for defending Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, I was part of an organization that did just that back then. We were taken on the ‘Potemkin Village’ tours with smiling peasants and children, and published photo books on it. Then a years or so later, we found our Cambodian comrades who were here in the US, who went back to join in building the revolution, were all executed on their return. When the truth came out, it caused a severe crisis in our leadership that helped hasten our collapse. Believe me, you don’t want to go there.
Finally, Alstair has a ‘reach a few hundred, and organize a handful’ refrain. He only wants to build organizations of revolutionaries, but not build mass democratic organizations, only agitate for revolution within those already around. But this is exactly doing away with the task at hand, finding ways to organize in non-revolutionary conditions and still wage class struggle on a large scale, which requires a common front with mass democratic formations, and the building of new ones.
Here where I am, for instance, we are working with the unions and civil rights groups to build a large local rally for jobs and justice in a few weeks, then cooperating with these groups to fill buses march on DC Oct 2. As anyone who has done things like this knows, these a good opportunities to reach active people and carry out the work of revolutionary education, and expand organization on all levels. It makes no sense to close yourself off from this because you might be cooperating with a union leader or civil rights preacher.
To sum up, part of thinking strategically is taking a view of the whole, not just one piece you think is critical.
Ian Anderson said
We do form tactical alliances with reformist currents. Right now we’re building a campaign against Tory attacks, and this has involved working with social democratic unionists and the like; arranging meetings, leaflet drops etc.
However, we make our revolutionary politics clear, and we do not go out of our way to form united fronts with bourgeois political organisations. Firm strategy, flexible tactics.
As for a “mass democratic organisations,” I’ve found the Workers Party has a very democratic internal culture. It’s not a mass party because there is simply not a mass movement in NZ right now, revolutionary or social-democratic, and camouflaging our politics is no short-cut to that.
Jim Brash said
I’m a member of the United Food & Commercial Workers in New Jersey, USA. In my local we have 30,000 members but only about 5,000 of that are full-time employees. The union has yet to organize in any real way fast food workers, whom number in the thousands in my state. And they have a collaborationist policy with unionzied stores/supermarkets against wegman’s & wal-mart, the 2 largest non-union employers in our sector, as well as the other backroom deals they make with the bosses. So, there is room for organising workers there, but it would take the formation of a new union, similar to what the comrades in NZ have done in conjunction with UNITE. Also IT workers, many of whom are treated as contractors(so that they are forced to pay their own healthcare) could be and should be unionized. Its just getting like-minded class conscious individuals together in order to even discuss trying to form a new union together is the problem.
As far as how re-educating workers, we need to be proactive about that in the here and now. The only way to transform society is by winning the hearts and minds of the masses. A great revolutionary once said to his students to “love thy neighbor”. Thats the principle we need to impart but in a socio-political non-religious way to workers & their
allies. We transform society by creating an atmosphere of selflessness not by work camps, concentration camps, or by restricting workers who supported capitalism til the end. Once revolution is won its time to unite society to complete its greatest tasks: the abolition of class society and the formation of a stateless society, not further demoralise workers not in agreement with the masses & set the stage for counter-revolution.
On what is to be done: like minded american activists as well as those from other places that are interested need to start forming common internationalists bonds, via emails, onlists, webcams, traditional mail correspondence, study/discussion groups, around the anit-war movemnet etc., and start working with each other in areas in which they can agree be united arounda and go from there. Strategy can only come from doing whatever political/community work we can and not by talking about it only. Tactics are usually developed best during the courseof the struggle; the development of the movement. when Lenin wrote WITBD, it didnt come out of something abstract but out a very real process taking place during the the last decade of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th. Same thing Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, the formation of IWW, and on down the line. We can draw up a blueprint but it means nothing unless we start pouring the foundation for the house.
balzac said
Carl,
I said we need to expand beyond workerist conceptions of Marxism. I don’t think that means ignoring workers at all – it just seems that every post here has had to with workers and I was commenting that we need to move away from that track. I was also commenting on the fact that the white working class in this country has, at various points in time, been extremely hostile to radical/revolutionary work, and so that any strategic analysis needs to take race into account from the outset.
Carl Davidson said
I’m not sure what a ‘workerist’ conception of Marxism is, ‘Balzac,’ but I agree than we work among ALL classes and strata, even, to a degree, among the bourgeoisie. But I’m mainly focused on the centrality of workers and oppressed nationalities, especially those of the younger generation, where I can.
Likewise on the centrality of targeting white supremacy and the white-skin privilege. I’ve kept this up front almost all my life.
But I’m not so sure I’d use ‘extremely hostile’ as a descriptor in any period as a way of talking about white workers generally. In some areas and sectors, certainly. But rather than hostility, and apart from thinking they’re ‘white,’ I find the bigger obstacles to be cynicism, defeatism and and overall sense of powerlessness. Of course, if you approach anyone with a chip on your shoulder, you’ll run into some opposition. But if you deal with people authentically and without putting your head higher than their’s, you can talk to and organize among the basic masses just about anywhere today. Just don’t expect to ‘get rich quick.’
Jim Brash said
White middle class college students have provided the lion’s share or radicals in american society since the 60s. As a Black man in america I find it hard to talk to other persons of color about the 2 wars, tea parties, even union related stuff. They still see racism, but Obama is “our” man. So the democratic party has a perverse hold over the Black populace of america. The Black Muslims (Sunni or N.O.I) you can talk to, as long as u understand from the door that they are coming from a black nationalist perspective. There are groups like the Peoples Organisation for Progress, which is a diverse group, and the New Black Panther Party that u see out in the Black community promoting anti-war efforts & rallying against police brutality.
Malcolm X use to talk about the white kids from downtown meeting with the black kids from uptown in midtown. Well that midtown is hip-hop/rap culture & music. We need to figure out ways to reach the youth in america on the level(s) it exist on. Not speaking at them or above them but holding conversations with them at eye level. Right now is the time, this current generation my age(36) and under have the least amount of divisions in the history of this nation. We need to pounce on that. Also the NAACP is coming out to openly support the anti-war movement.
Most worker parties during the the past has had memberships consisting of largely middle class youth, academics, intellectuals, etc., because those workers who most need radicalisation, do to everyday life have no time for it. Also we have to remember that the right wing recruits from teh poorest sectors of the white race and those within the middle class who fear of becoming poor/poorer.
Part of any strategy must include workers of all races; of differing economic circumstances; sexual orientation; and of course gender. Also part of this strategy must include an action plan for independent Black political action; independent chicano & hispanic political action; defense of immigrant rights; defens eof civil liberties; independent labor political action. There are movements to be built but its going to be slow going until there is an upturn of events.
My questions to u seasoned fighters are : what should come first the movement or the party/organsation? Which grows out of which and why? I think if we answer the above we can answer better about strategy/tactics moving forward.
celticfire said
David_D,
I think I agree with a lot of that. However, in a different discussion, I think the voting rights permitted under the Stalin constitution were mostly decorous. (but that really is another discussion. But in all seriousness – what could the average soviet citizen vote for? how was it meaningful? It reminds of running for class president in school. Yeah everyone gets vote – so what? How is that meaningful?)
I realize that “brain washing” for instance means something different in China than it does in a Western context. But seriously, there is an eerie totalitarian tone to tacking ID tags on people and saying “they are this.”
I am not really convinced that we will need to build a huge database after the revolution and put some people in the “good” column and others in the “bad” one. Yes, of course reactionary ideas, habits and customs will need to be aggressively challenged. Real reactionaries will need to be held down. But on the whole, and I think Mao would agree, people should be allowed to express views that differ from official lines without worrying about their head being chopped off (literally) – because after all, they aren’t leeks, right?
What I am getting at this perhaps breaking down class divisions will require more nuance and sophistication than simply ascribing labels to people. Society as a whole we need transforming – including ourselves, right?
balzac said
Carl,
Then that is where we disagree. There is nothing wrong with that. My personal take is that workers do not deserve a centralized privileging in a US revolutionary movement, though I believe segments of workers may share a central role with many other social groupings. The main reason why I called out this focus on workerism was not because I seek to exclude the working classes from any analysis, but because every comment so far has only focused on the working classes. I am hoping that we can branch out the discussion beyond workers – not to their exclusion – and that any discussion of workers must include issues of race, gender, nationality, language, etc., none of which had been brought up so far.
A secondary point I was trying to make has been the legacy of Fordism – the willingness for corporations and the government to actively co-opt segments of the working class at the expense of others, a strategy which has so far been extraordinarily effective, especially combined with violence towards those who reject co-optation. This has also been largely kept out of the discussion and, again, race has played a huge role in keeping workers in line. I would like to see some responses to these questions because I do not know the answer myself.
nando said
David_D writes (in a very thoughtful comment above):
Patrick answers:
I think there are a number of important things raised here.
First, on voting rights. In many societies, people have formal voting rights — but the electoral process is a sham, and a legitimization of officials that the population has no real power to hold accountable.
In the Soviet Union it is true that people had formal voter rights (and were even required to vote).
The closing pages of the History of the CPSU(B) says:
What do you say about such a “remarkable victory”? An election in which all candidates of the ruling party are elected “without exception”?
It means the whole process was rigged. A sham. We know (and they knew then) that millions of people in the Soviet Union did not support socialism and the government. And, in fact, the society was (at that very moment!) going through incredible spasms of extremely violent internal struggle — struggles that touched the whole party at many levels, but also whole nationalities and large numbers of non party people.
How should we respond to this? By pretending to believe that a unanimous election of communist candidates was the geniune expression of the people (and therefore a “remarkable victory”)? Or should we acknowledge that in a complex and difficult situation (after years of internal struggle and mounting external threat) the Soviet government put on a public display of electoralism that was rather cynical and fake?
And lets step back a second:
this all took place at a particularly complex moment. The Soviet Union was seeking to pressure the western imperialists into a loose alliance against Germany (called collective security). And (as part of trying to affect public opinion, mainly internationally) sought to portray the Soviet Union as a highly democratic state — that deserved to be an ally of the western bourgeois democratic states against the fascist axis.
The 1936 Soviet Constitution was (in that context) a major manifesto intended to present a specific image to the world. (There is a lot of speculation that it was written by Bukharin, who was at that point still in the party leadership and was known to be closely associated with these efforts to approach the western imperialists.)
It has to be said, however, that it is easy to write all kinds of things on paper. The Soviet history of the next few years suggest (however) that this Constitution did not in fact have the power of law. The way the society actually operated was not affected by the adoption of this constitution — and in fact, the adoption of this constitution was followed by the faux election (that we just discussed), the Yezhovshchina purges of 1938-39 that raked society, and a whole series of high level political struggles (where the rule of law was rather crudely ignored, for example in the case of the military high command whose elimination seems to have happened without any semblence of trials).
In other words, I have to say (without meaning to offend anyone) it is either very naive or very cynical (or both) to talk about Soviet voters or to put forward the 1936 Constitution as if it is “proof” of anything: Since there is zero evidence that this constitution was every more than a PR event, and the actual political events of the immediately following years followed reveal how power and political selection actually happened.
Now I am not that personally impressed with voting. I live in the U.S. where people get to vote all the time, and where they really have very very limited power to formulate politics or exercise power. voting, here too, is primarily to shape popular political ideas, train people in bourgeois politics, and legitimize political leaders that were (more or less directly) vetted by the ruling class itself. We communists (or at least some of us) pride ourselves in not being suckered by the manufactured illusions of American democracy. Why should we act like the claims of 1930s Soviet electoralism should be uncritically believed?
Who are we fooling with this kind of argument? No one.
balzac said
Also, I noticed some skepticism about my choice of an online name, so I figured I’d clarify for you and others who might be interested.
Honore de Balzac, the French novelist, espoused reactionary (pro-monarchy, pro-clergy) politics but he was also a ruthless critic and satirist of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeois and capitalism in general. His writing dealt with the monetarization of all aspects of life in the wake of Napoleonic-Restoration France. Both Engels and Lukacs were very big fans of his writing and I’d personally recommend picking up a copy of “Lost Illusions” if you are interested in reading about the rise of capital before working class critiques of it were popularized (Balzac died just before the revolutions of 1848). Lukacs also has a brilliant essay on “Lost Illusions” in his “Studies in European Realism” which is what got me reading Balzac in the first place.
Carl Davidson said
I guess I’m still not getting it. What is it to ‘privilege workers’?
Marxism designates this class, and not any other, as the one bound with ‘radical chains,’ ie, that by casting them off, they free not only themselves, but all humankind. Marxism core value is the self-emancipation of the working class.
Is that ‘privileging’ them, ie, pointing out that they have a special role to play in moving from the old order to the new?
I’ll be the first to say that they don’t do it alone, and need many allies among other classes and strata.
I’ll also be the first the say that they are quite varied in different sectors and strata–and different approachs are often required.
Finally, ruling classes have been trying to use one or another sector of the ruled against others to keep them all down ever since there were ruling classes. This is nothing new. It just means fight to build class unity and broader alliances against the ruling classes has never been easy.
I work mainly with workers around here not because I ‘privilege’ them, but mainly because that’s the bulk of the population here. we have a few small business people and self-employed professions, and we also try to work with them, too. But it’s not most of our work.
During the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, we also made it our business to seek out students and soldiers to work with.
We’re for getting rid of divisive privileges. But that doesn’t mean we ignore or set aside the special characteristics of various sectors of the people.
balzac said
I don’t disagree that it is workers who hold that potential in many parts of the world: present-day China would be a prime example of a place where the workers would play the role outlined by Marx. In the US however this is not necessarily the case, things are not so straightforward. We have to remember that Marx wrote during the earlier stages of capital, and things have changed quite a bit. Workers obviously must play a significant role in any anti-capitalist revolution, but in many places in the world, the US in particular, there are many complicating factors which prevent a straightforward interpretation of Marx’s view of the working class not only problematic but dangerous.
As I said earlier, the closest the US came to an anticapitalist revolution happened in the late 60s and early 70s when petit-bourgeois white youth aligned with working class and sub-working class blacks and other oppressed nationalities. Elements of the white working class did join in, but not in a leading role and not in any large capacity. Why not? Because of the power of anti-black enmity among all strata of whites, but especially so among the white working class, and because of class politics which successfully played the middle class against the working class. I will re-post part of a quote which was from an interview with Lukacs from 1970.
Lukacs: Yes, but the trouble is that today there are no Marxists. We simply do not have a Marxist heory.
Believe me, today it is necessary to do what Marx did for the capitalism of his time… Socialism also needs a continuing critical and demystifying analysis, and this must be done on the world scale. No one is doing this. No one thinks of it. What is happening is grotesque. Lacking a theory, Marxists are condemned to trail along after daily events. Collective movements erupt and are called “spontaneous” – the movements of students, the young, and so forth – and then the Marxists run to catch up with the events, to understand them after the fact. Their theory is little more than a rationalization of their surprise…
Carl Davidson said
I don’t think things are ‘straightforward’ for the working class in any country or at any time. It’s always complex. There’s no ‘American exceptionalism’ here; in this sense, every country is ‘exceptional’ in its own way.
As for the need to do theory afresh, you’ll get no argument from me. My small group has produced two books to make a contribution, ‘Dialectics of Globalization’ by Jerry Harris, and ‘CyberRadicalism: A New New for a Global Age,’ by Davidson and Harris. The first deals with the emergence of a global capitalist class and the division of workers in the global workshop; the second unfolds the wider implications of the revolution in the productive forces wrought by semi-conductors and the internet.
The USW, the steelworkers, by the way, have begun organizing locals of high tech IT workers, regarding the point raised earlier. I first ran into them at last year’s labor day parade when I noticed a huge contingent of workers in the parade in the their 20s and 30s, and went to see who they were.
Alastair Reith said
It’s worth noting that I say this in the context of New Zealand, a country of 4 million people where the largest city is 1 million. Perhaps in the USA we could realistically talk of reaching thousands and organising hundreds, here we operate on a slightly smaller scale.
You’re building a strawman Carl. I spend a lot of my time and energy doing volunteer organising for Unite, a class struggle trade union that represents the lowest paid, most casualised and brutalised sections of the class in fast food, call centres, hotels and so on. Unite is not an explicitly revolutionary project, but it’s worthwhile work nonetheless. We need to rebuild a genuine fighting union movement and recover from the attacks of the 90s, and Unite work offers a valuable opportunity to get into the workplace and the community and exchange ideas and experiences with low paid workers.
The point is that this work *complements* my revolutionary organising. It complements my building of a WP branch in my town, and it complements the WP’s agenda of promoting class war and communist ideology.
You are not building mass democratic organisations Carl. You are building small and irrelevant groups of former Marxists who now seek to jump on the Obama bandwagon because they think it will make it easier to relate to ordinary people politically. Your approach is a contemptuous one – according to you, working class people can’t understand the lofty ideas of revolutionary communism and anti-imperialism, so we have to reach them by campaigning for a capitalist and imperialist politician, the commander in chief of the US empire. Frankly, you disgust me.
Um, where exactly are you waging class struggle on a large scale? And what, to you, constitutes a 'large scale'?
Your conception of this is flawed. Communists don't wage class struggle, the working class does. We take part in class struggle, promote class struggle, and when we have developed a base of support we can even lead class struggle, but it is not something waged by Marxist activists.
If you seek to get the numbers by watering down your message, you'll never achieve anything other than selling out. If you try to take shortcuts, try to catapault yourself into significance by moderating your approach, you'll only ever be significant within a framework of capitalist acceptability. Your approach is reformist Carl.
You mean like the Democratic Party?
I prefer to seek allies *outside* of the ruling class, rather than within its ranks.
Again, a strawman. When did I say we should refuse to work with civil rights preachers or union leaders? Right now, as we organise against the Tory government’s attack on workers rights and the coming attacks on the welfare system, I’m working with bourgeois union leaders all the time. But the point is that our priority in any given situation is to build support for communist ideas and recruit people to a communist organisational project. Not to campaign for imperialist politicians, not to pretend that workers have common interests with a section of the bourgeoisie, not to mislead and lie to the masses because we feel they’re too stupid and backward to relate to our actual ideas presented openly and honestly.
You can’t expand a revolutionary organisation on any level, let alone all, if your organising work consists of sowing illusions in someone like Obama. You’re just presenting yourself as (and concretely becoming) part of the left wing of capitalism – the acceptable opposition.
Alastair Reith said
Yeesh, could an admin please fix up my post? I don’t know what went wrong there!
Tell No Lies said
It looks like Op Art. I say leave it as it is.
[moderator note: I was tempted, but....]
Tell No Lies said
Or concrete poetry.
Carl Davidson said
My misunderstanding, Alstair, sorry. Your example of your work with the Unite organzation in NZ seems to be similar with the work we do with our mass democratic forms where I live, and for the same reasons.
But your caricature of my views are off base, too, such as:
First, unless you’ve gone through our mass work posted on http://beavercountyblue.org , you have little idea of what I do.
Second, there’s no contempt in understanding that the working class has varying levels of political consciousness–advanced, middle and backward. The workers themselves will tell you that. We organize what workers we can into study groups to take on socialist and Marxist theory. I come from this background myself, and there’s nothing special about me. If I can learn it, others can too. But not every worker has a desire to learn at any given time, which is a matter of their consciousness and priorities, not their ability. And I’d estimate that perhaps 20 percent of the US working class is functionally illiterate, which is little known, but an indictment of our school system. That still doesn’t mean they can’t learn and contribute, when special efforts are made.
So we have nonsocialist but progressive organizations that can unite a majority alongside socialist and revolutionary organizations that can unite a militant minority. Both are needed, like breathing in and breathing out.
And yes, we campaigned for Obama in 2008, and were correct to do so given the options available. But we worked independently of the Democrats and projected our own platform. Our tactics served us well. Now we, as part of a wider coalition, are in a much better position to help mobilize 100,000 or more to march on DC this Oct for job, peace and justice. That effort is aimed both at pushing Obama and fighting the right. It’s a concrete example of what ‘waging class struggle on a wider scale’ means in our country at this time and under these conditions.
Reforms are fought for by both reformists and revolutionaries. They do it their way, and we do it our way. There is obviously some overlap, but when we do our work well, they are fundamentally not the same.
jp said
carl davidson in an earlier post in this thread said:”Somehow this discussion has taken an odd turn…”
and how. in a request for ideas as to revolutionary strategy, we finally arrive at the white elephant in the beaver county school’s theoretical foundations: “…yes, we campaigned for Obama in 2008, and were correct to do so given the options available.”
I thought of posting some links documenting the horrific results of the obamaproject, but is this really necessary on a site like kasama?
carl davidson is certainly indefatigable, but the truth, not bluster, will set us free.
carldavidson said
And we had the debate here at the time, JP. And on this site, I may have been in the minority, but not alone. In any case, if you want to lay out an alternative set of strategy and tactics, please do so.
jp said
we’re having that debate now, carl davidson. the comrade from new zealand is not impressed with the great victory of the beaver county obamaproject – in fact, he considers it non-revolutionary. i rise to concur.
carldavidson said
Just elaborate on your own organizing work and the strategy that goes with it,JP. If you want, explain and show how NOT voting in 2008 helped you along. Better yet, explain why the results in the upcoming 2010 round do or don’t matter in your view of things, and what, if anything, you intend to do. But just asserting that my getting people out to vote for Obama over McCain-Palin settles some question, well, it doesn’t help us along in this discussion all that much one way or another.
Jim Brash said
A lot of radicals be they marxists, anarchists, socialists of a different variety, & social democrats supported Obama. Some because he was teh lesser of 2 evils, others because there was no real viable independent candidate, some who thought that we had reach a new historical stage in the class struggle with Obama winning the Dems nomonation, and still some supported him because they thought they could push him into providing needed reforms of capitalism in America,& others just believed in his message(not in the democratic party per se).
The only promise he has kept since coming into office has been the sending of more troops to Afghanistan. His healthcare plan was too flawed to support & was ill presented to the public. The BP mess has been miss handled eventhough the spill isnt the fault of the administration.
We all know that if his presidency is deemed a failure, that right-wing of ruling class will be able to get their man in and that this nation will move further to the right.
We are now seeing republican candidates win nominations via the support of the Tea parties and yet we as radicals can’t find enough common groud to put together a platform that can get independent other Ralph Nader national attention or even state-wide attention anywhere. In New Jersey teh only independent to make a splash was a former Reagan republican. Its sickening, that we can’t put together a united front campaign for one of our own around a handful of demands/points. I voted for Greg Pason of the SPusa for govenor last election, I did not feel that a threw away my vote. I was just saddened that more independent radicals inmy state didn’t not do the same.
Part of any revolutionary strategy needs be finding common ground with other radicals. As long as we remain a house divided in america, we will never assist the working class & its allies in winning anything. Also we need to start rapping our message/platform in the cloak of patriotism too. Appeal to the citizenry as American citizens.
Jim Brash said
Just a quick clarification on my previous post: What I mean by wrapping our message/platform in the cloak of patriotism is this-We should say to those in the communitie swe live & function in the following in presenting our views: Why is it in a free society high quality healthcare isnt free for all? Why in the greatest country on earth higher education isnt free? Why in this techonological age that we helped to create, the number of new prisons are out numbering the amount of new schools? Why are we able to send troops/construction workers, etc. to disater areas overseas but we cant rebuild the disaster areas that are our urban & rural slums? We are able to bailout banks but not the average homeowner? We can fight wars overseas but not joblessness at home? The above are just a few expamples of what I was attempting to explain at the end of my previous post.
The right wing has always attacked leftists/radicals as being un-American & un-patriotic in America. Its time that we start to turn the tables on them. We need to explain to fellow citizens that we are presenting/fighting for these/our demands out of love of this “great nation” and out of our love for our neighbors. I know some of u are laughing at my suggestions but they just might work.
jp said
carl davidson, I’ll respond as i see necessary. i am guessing that many who read your call-to-action posts are unfamiliar with their backstory – that what lies behind is the old familiar tail-the dems line.
if the thread is long enough, it emerges. your continued exhoration that we visit your ‘progressive democratic’ website needs challenging, though it gets tiresome (although not, it seems, to you).
need i point out (yet again) that you would have supported obama even if he dropped his bombs on the people of beaver county, instead of afghanistan? wouldn’t full disclosure of your line be helpful to persons visiting this website, in assessing your arguments?
if you stop making the argument that your strategy – helping to elect a charismatic face of empire, slaughter, wage and debt slavery, torture and environmental disaster – will lead us closer to the abolition of the same, i’ll stop disputing it.
carldavidson said
Supporting Obama over McCain in 2008 was a tactic, JP, not a strategy. The strategy I presented here was for a united and popular front vs. finance capital, with the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities as the core alliance and main force.
We call it ‘Uniting the Progressive Majority’. Beyond the basic masses here and the progressive forces abroad, it also projects an alliance with high-road productive capital to grow new wealth and new jobs and infrastructure for clean energy and green manufacturing. Within this broad front, we also promote worker-, community- and public ownership as structural reform bridges to Economy Democracy and a socialist future.
You can reduce this to a vote for Obama if you like, but that’s small potatoes. You skip over the more interesting and controversial stuff, at least among Marxists trying to think strategically with thoughts larger than those that will fit on a bumper sticker. The latter may suit you if you just want to throw a few barbs from the sidelines, but serious people will pursue the discussion differently.
jp said
encouraging a “multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities” to support obama (who you, incredibly, promote as as opponent of ‘finance capital’)? you’re right, that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
your fixation on strategy vs. tactics (in past threads expressed as a chess analogy)is gameplaying, and ignores the truth of death and destruction and then more of the same, wreaked by your man.
Jim Brash said
Carl, did this tactic(supporting Obama) compromise u & your principles in anyway? I didnt support Obama actively, and never would, but I did vote for him for a variety of reasons, some of which I regretted the next day, some I regretted the next year. I honestly thought he was the best candidate available to choose from on the ballot. I didnt support the SPusa, SWP, or Green Party candidates for a variety of reasons. I had never voted for a democratic presidential candidate prior to this. Looking back I feel as if I may have compromised my integrity in doing so for Obama. I was called an uncle tom basically if I considered voting for anyone other than Obama. I took offense to having my blackness questioned by family, friends, & coworkers.Like I said in a previous post, the democratic party has a perverse hold over the black populace when it comes to electoral politics. Part of any strategy going forward I must state again is independent Black political action. I would love nothing more than to openly & actively support a black or latino independent in 2012 against Obama and whatever candidate the Tea Parties & the GOP comes up with. The democratic party is a dead end tactic overall going forward in national & state-wide elections. Support for their candidate is support for their system. The question of integrity has also needs to be part of any strategy going forward. I know I’ll never compromise my own again no matter what the consequences are. Radicals supported the New Deal for tactical reasons just as Marx & Engels supported the Union during the american civil war. The reasoning for supporting the candidate of left-wing of the ruling class nolonger exists I think in America, elsewhere in the world the situations are different. Radicals of varying types may see it neccessary to support a candidate from the left-wing of local oligarchs or revolutionary democrats. We may even in the U.S. form coalitions that include members of the ruling class or represenatives of their parties, but we don’t actively support their candidates. We suppose to provide an alternative to the parties of capital. And thats the biggets problem with the last election-there was no viable alternative to Obama, because we all knew the McCain/Palin ticket was dead on arrival.
carldavidson said
I know Obama from Chicago, and worked on his very first campaign and got him to give his early anti-Iraq war speeches at two major antiwar rallies. Of course, back then, I thought if he was smart and played his cards right, he might get to be a Chicago Alderman someday. (In Chicago, Alderman ranks higher than Member of Congress in the pecking order!)
I’m probably less disappointed in him than some because I knew he was never a man of the left, but in his own head, something of a Keynesian liberal.
In any case, he was my first choice. I was with Kucinich and Richardson first, because they had firmer views on war and peace. I backed Obama as a lesser evil to McCain-Palin. But we always made it clear exactly what he was: a liberal speaking to the center, representing a faction of imperialism. We used those terms. In our mass work during the campaign, we put out our own views–Out Now, HR 676, EFCA, Green Jobs and Debt Relief for young people and homeowners. We made it clear that we would have to constantly organize and mobilize to push him to get any of it. It would be an uphill slog all the way. We basically tripled the size of our group, PDA, an independent PAC that works among Democratic and progressive-minded voters.
We also built our socialist group. We made it our business to expose the hand of finance capital in all the efforts at the top to thwart, gut and otherwise sabotage what people wanted out of the campaign. Likewise locally, the core Dem leadership in the CD is ‘Blue Dog’ and they did very little for Obama. When the rightwing populists put up the first ‘Democrats for McCain’ sign, they tucked their tails between their legs and ran away. But it was a good battle. The first time we set up our register to vote table with Obama signs at a white working class township fair and tractor pull, our first visitor denounced us as ‘traitors to our race,’ which indeed I was. But it got better after that, and we won over a good number. In the end, out township, all white and lower income, went 48% for Obama, 52% for McCain, better than average for that demographic, and Obama carried the state. But it was very clear from day one that this was more than just an election, but also a campaign for unity vs. racism and breaking with old ideas about who could or could not be president.
Because of this, we have lost no credibility among the people we work with; in fact, we have gained a lot of credibility for being fairly level-headed and on target. People appreciate the way we put things in a wider, more complete view, while zeroing in on the key task of the day. It’s a matter of developing class consciousness and revolutionary education rooted in mass struggle–not that we don’t also do study groups and book clubs.
I’m sure we could have done some things better, but on the whole, we did well, and I don’t regret it at all. Now we have November 2010 to deal with, and many of these local battles are rather important. So this will be another challenge and a testing ground for our approach.
carldavidson said
Typo up there. Should be ‘he was NOT my first choice’ Pardon the error.
Jim Brash said
Carl, at what point moving forward do we nolonger collaborate with the rpresenatives of the ruling class parties? The movement was nearly decimated when many radicals supported ww1 then again during ww2. At somepoint should a basic part of strategy should be supporting homegrown/grass-roots based socialists/anacrhists/leftists or even social democatic candidates and not merely centrist or center-left liberals? Does your group put forth its own socialists candidates in local elections?
I would rather a develop a united front with several radical/socialists/greens/union/anarchists/naacp/core type of groups and put forth a candidate that willbest serve the majority of our joint interests rather than back a candidate of big capital, but thats not likely to happen anytime soon. Even though I wish to hell we would try.
land said
I was very excited to see the questions for revolutionary strategy.
Will be working on ideas to share for discussion.
And not to the exclusion of radical philosphy.
carldavidson said
At the moment, we follow an ‘inside/outside’ policy. That means we build PDA and similar groups as a ‘party within a party’ that is not under the control of the regular structure. At some point this leads to a crisis for the Dems, and they will move against us.
So at the same time, we encourage working with third parties to a degrees, helping them develop a more working class character and community base. The policy is to see a longer-run ‘Red-Green’ alliance than can supplant the Dems with a new electoral instrument, but without giving greater power to the GOP and far right. The main thing is to build your own mass democratic organizations wherever you are, at the base, then network them horizontally outward, but upward as well.
‘Inside/Outside’ also means electoral work is not the only work, and in many periods, not even the main work, but we build alliances with the social movements ‘outside’ the electoral arena, alliances between the electoral left and the social movement left. This was the character of our ‘Medicare for All, Healthcare Not Warfare’ campaign. It also includes our work with the solidarity economy movement, which is a very diverse mixture of socialists, anarchists and a variety of NGOs. I would like to see PDA and CCDS (and others) become an electoral and legislative arm of the solidarity economy movement, but that has only a handful of positive examples at this time.
In any case, this work is only in its early stages, but it is also very promising, given the conditions of crisis and the bankruptcy of the neoliberals to offer solutions.
sks said
Carl, inside/outside is part of the problem.
Since the 1930s it has been the strategy of the CPUSA, and has taken them from being essentially the biggest national third party, supplanting the SPofA in this respect, to not even a pale shadow of their former self.
There is a difference between an alliance from strength with progressives, and what amounts to wanting to have one foot in hell and one in heaven.
The problem in the USA is that whenever new dynamic leadership emerges, it is either co-opted or destroyed.
I am all for the “tactical” inside, like supporting campaigns and voting for candidates to stop the GOP or in primaries for the democrats to get progressives, at least whenever there are no other viable alternatives. What I think has been proven a failure is the “strategic” inside, it ultimately means giving up independent organization – because money gets spent on campaigns rather than party building. This happened to the CPUSA.
The DSA, on the other hand, is a left fig-leaf for Democratic Party apparatchiks, and a way to channel fund from the left to the center. Their inside/inside strategy essentially reduces “socialism” to one more special interest group in American politics.
What we need to do is build a revolutionary movement, and this cannot be done from the inside. It has never been done, and it cannot be done.
Carl Davidson said
If you look at the CPUSA’s strategy and tactics in practice, you’ll see that it is almost entirely ‘inside.’ The simply work with the existing DP organization, if they work at all, rather than simply tail and vote for the ticket without building any new organization. They are opposed to the third party formations at this time. It’s one reason I am not a member of that organization, even if I can work with them on other projects.
Our approach is to work with some independent Democratic Clubs were such are allowed to exist, with PDA which is an independent PAC and not part of the DP structure, and to a degree, with the Greens, Peace and Freedom, Working Families, and similar groups, where they are not too sectarian.
DSA is actually a little more flexible on these matters than the CPUSA, and has some work with PDA and the Greens.
The SPUSA is an example of pursuing an ‘outside only’ strategy. They simply run their own socialist candidates. It has left them fairly marginal. They make a few gains, but only in ones and twos.
One problem to be overcome is that we are constrained by the most backward election laws in the industrialized world. We don’t have a parliamentary system, and policies like fusion voting were largely outlawed by the ‘reforms’ of the 1920s, since fusion had been used by the Nonpartisan Leagues, the Populists and even Debs to grow their organizations in those periods. The last major attempt by the left to run independently was the Progressive Party of 1948, but it was destroyed by the McCarthyite reaction of the 1950s (which actually started with the Dem liberals around 1948). Election law reform has to be among our projects.
The initiative I’m part of is called the grassroots nonpartisan alliance, which is an effort to form a common front of left and progressive candidates inside and outside of the DP, and projecting a common platform of radical structural reform. We think the DP will eventually implode, and perhaps sooner rather than later, and we need to prepare a left-progressive alternative so that the right is not the main gainer from that implosion.
At the same time, we need to build revolutionary organization. Socialism or any radical change is not going to be brought to us by elections, but it will certainly proceed THROUGH battles in the electoral and legislative arenas. You might wish to skip over or otherwise bypass them, but it’s not very wise to do so.
So I’m not bothered by the fact that the CPUSA claimed the ‘inside/outside’ strategy and tactics. They have claimed at lot of positive things that I’m for that have not been implemented. Their tactics, finally, also fit in a larger view called the ‘All Peoples Front,’ a new version of the anti-monopoly coalition. The view I’m arguing here is different. It doesn’t segment capital along monopoly and non-monopoly lines, but along productive capital vs. speculative capital, then ‘high road vs low road.’ Hence the popular front vs. finance capital is what I advocate. It may seem like a nuance, but it’s an important one.
jp said
carl davidson, exactly which democrats in your popular front oppose even ‘finance capital’? are you speaking only of some locally active democrats? if not, how do non-local democrats oppose ‘finance capital,’ and maintain their status within their party? will they do so in the manner of kucinich, who had no problem supporting kerry and obama? are you still claiming such representatives of finance capital are really opposed to finance capital (i.e., your assertion that obama is a ‘neo-keynesian’)?
actual opposition to ‘finance capital’ might be a helpful place to start with some left minded people, but when this front commits them to tailing the democrats, all potential is dissipated into the endless loop of lesser-evilism (aka when-the-democrats-rip-families-to-shreds-and enslave-workers-to-finance-capital-it’s-tactically-acceptable).
Carl Davidson said
Kucinich and Barbara Lee are our two most progressive elected officials in the House at the moment. In the Senate, we have Bernie Sanders. There are too few of them; the task is to get more.
But it’s really not so much a matter of personalities as political clout from the base up. If a left-progressive majority with a left-progressive platform can’t first elect people at a city level, how do you expect to have much power nationally?
My view is that you rarely get something at the top that you haven’t largely won and consolidated into organizational strength first at the base.
There is a sharp divide at the top between Keynesians and neoliberals, both of the ‘reform’ Dem variety and the unreconstructed GOP variety. There is also a sharp divide between global capital, multinational US capital and anti-global national capital. You can read about it every day in the press and business publications. And these divides run across all parties, even if one or another has a greater proportion.
But none of these outlooks are ours, even if we can form alliances with the Keynesians against the others to win certain reforms.
At the moment, the main obstructionist power in DC is neoliberalism of both varieties, the GOP and the Blue Dogs–all reflecting the intransigence and self-defeating policies of finance capital. They have the upper hand. The task of the progressive majority is to divide them and push through the immediate measures that the people need. Our task, within that battle, is to grow and develop the socialist ad revolutionary forces.
But we can’t do much of anything without building powerful organizations of our own. The mass movements will rise and fall like waves, and we should encourage them. But what matters most is how well and how widely we are organized, on all levels.
nando said
Carl writes:
There are many assumptions embedded in this. Including just the use of “we” and “our.”
“We have Bernie Sanders.” Do we? He was a foremost promoter of land developers in Vermont, and their capitalist interests (that’s how he rose to Mayor of Burlington). He mixes that with a vague social democratic rhetoric and liberal politics. How exactly to “we have” Bernie Sanders?
Is that really “the task”? And how is that different from “the task” (and the blinders and the illusions) of left liberals generally?
someone could write a book unraveling the assumptions in these two sentence… and their class nature.
But let’s just make a quick pass:
Carl doesn’t talk about the interests of the oppressed here, but some aspiration to increase the “clout of the base” — the “base” in this case being the current bourgeois lingo for people seen as the regular voters of the Democratic Party.
“political clout from the base up”? Is it possible under capitalism to have “political clout from the base up”? What does that look like?
Isn’t this actually a bourgeois democracy where the system (its laws, its policies) ultimately have to conform to the workings of capitalism (i.e. creating conditions for profitable investment, keeping wages competitive with other regions, serving the interests who own the media and production, etc. etc.)
So the argument is that the Democratic Party doesn’t listen to its “base” — and so that base needs to build “clout”, and it will build such “clout” by winning victories for a “left-progressive” forces at the “city level” — not over national politics (the war, health care, immigration), but in elections where the macropolitics of our interests are subsumed by “local” maneuvers and budgets.
Note the use of the term “much power.” Carl is not discussing “taking power” (for the people!), but having more influence (pressure and influence) on the ruling powers by developing a “left-progressive majority” in certain cities.
First: “left-progressive platform” — I suspect that the program meant here is neither left nor progressive. What Carl’s term refers to is a liberal platform. (not even a social democratic one). And such politics have (imho) very little to do with serving the people — especially if they are confined to the maneuvers over contracts and budgets that define city politics.
Again, this is an argument to merge into liberal politics, at the city level in hopes of (later, down the road) have enough “clout” to pressure the Democrats (at a national level) to give some reforms.
And it takes as a key assumption that there are huge splits inside the ruling class that should be the focus and pivot of our own activity:
there are divides, and they do define bourgeois politics (and you do read about them everyday). But our politics is not served by subsuming ourselves in the liberal (keynsian) camp and drawing those we attract with us.
Carl appeals to those whose outlook is not liberal (he speaks to leftists), but his pitch is for left liberal politics, strategies, assumptions and goals.
Actually the idea that us, formng alliances with “Keynsians” (meaning pro-state interventionist liberals) is a precondition for “winning certain reforms” is totally entrapped in the logic of the system. It isn’t even a particularly visionary or effective reform strategy.
In fact, if you look at how certain reforms are won under capitalism, it is often when sections of the people threaten to step out of the normal confines of politics. Because the things we win are not generally “reforms” (won through “reform” politics) but “concessions” won through struggle against our enemies and oppressors.
this is a sentence of real irony.
Because Carl is insistent that anything we form must be take as its assumption that
In other words, the organizations that Carl wants to build are precisely NOT “our own. He wants us to form organized networks that are bound hand and foot (organizationally, ideologically, tactically, strategically, symbolically, effectively and congentially) to our oppressors (to ruling class strategies, parties, programs, options, issues, legal proposals, candidates).
observer said
The election of Obama has been an utter disaster for the left. It has paralyzed many people and organizations from being able to oppose the expansion of the imperialist war in Afghanistan, open targeted assassination of even U.S. citizens abroad viewed as “terrorists” without trials (even more openly fascistic than the announced Bush policies), or the continuing assaultr on immigrants, dispatching of more trrops to the Mexican borders, etc. Obama was the biggest, main threat in 2008, and the efforts of Davidson and those like him were a big aid to the imperialist’s very clever use of a black face to co-op and divert any possibility of a active resistance movement. Just as the Rodney King riots caused the ruling class to trot out the nominally “liberal” Clinton, abandon the first Bush, and dismantle welfare, which the first Bush wouldn’t have been able to do without massive opposition, the growing opposition to Bush Ii caused them to trot out black face Obama to carry out again even worse policies.
The efforts of Davidson et al are not “ineffective,” they are outright reactionary.
jp said
nando says: ‘… forming alliances with “Keynesians” …isn’t even a particularly visionary or effective reform strategy.’
excellent point: even reformers should have gotten the point since the post-mcgovern democratic party established itself as unreformable, and dealt with jackson summarily in 88. Nader 2000 was the H. Wallace moment for reformers, and like Progressives in 48, reformers ran scared at the first bell, back to the waiting arms of the lesser evil.
Carl Davidson said
Nando, if you want to discuss this seriously, then discuss what I say, not what you imagine I’m saying. When I say our organizations have to be independent and belong to us, I mean exactly that, not, as you would have it, the opposite.
As for Sanders, if you think he’s mainly speaking for housing developers and got his seat that way, you know little about him or his organization.
Through all of this, I have opposed any reasonable notion of simply merging into liberal politics–unless you think putting forward any platform short of the ‘d of the p’ is ‘merging into liberal politics,’ in which case we don’t have much to talk about, do we? You can do mass agitation for communism now, and oppose any structural reform package that might unite a majority vs finance capital. You can ignore all the more difficult questions of how to work in nonrevolutionary conditions which, for you, is a priori, adapting to bourgeois conditions.
Which means you haven’t come up with anything, other than to go full circle.
If you have an alternative strategy, lay it out.
Finally, the ‘base,’ for me, is the masses of the workers and the oppressed, despite the fact that a good number of them vote Democratic, and a sizable minority of the whites even for the GOP. Unless that reality is your starting point for getting elsewhere, you’re not dealing with concrete conditions in the U.S today.
Carl Davidson said
To ‘Observor’
If Obama was ‘the biggest main threat in 2008,’ what strategy and tactics did you unfold from this assessment? Did those who held this view, apart from the GOP and the right, thrive and grow stronger because of it? Give us some examples of the work. That’s the purpose of this discussion, as I understand it.
nando said
Carl writes:
I do want to discuss this seriously. And I am responding to what you are saying (or to be precise, my understanding of what you are saying.) And if I misunderstood parts of it, then lets clarify that.
This is not, i believe, a place where i misrepresented you, but where I am trying to drill down to the actual (i.e. objective) results of your proposals.
We can form organizations that “belong to us” — in some literal senses — that are precisely not independent (politically).
I don’t doubt that you want organizations controlled by forces you call “left-progressive.” I.e. independent in the sense that they have their membership lists, fundraising apparatus, candidate endorsement policies etc. All of those are necessary pre-conditions for an attempt to pressure the Democratic Party (its candidates, policies, statements etc.) toward your positions.
In that sense, yes, I’m sure you want independent organization.
I welcome the chance to make this distinction:
I’m not talking about organizationally independent. I’m talking about politically independent — especially in the sense that I believe your work will leave anyone it influences wholly dependent (and entrapped) by the existing political framework (its logic, its terms of debate, its faux choices etc.)
American politics is full of “independent” groups (who raise funds and issue statements and recruit members and independently decide which candidates to endorse.) But they are not independent in the sense we need.
Further: The record of the fusion of left-liberalism and social democracy (which you call left-progressive) is rather clear over the last decades (from “part of the way with LBJ” to the pro McGovern Hayden-Fonda Indochina Peace Campaign, to the Jesse Jackson campaigns etc.) in that they DON’T leave independent networks behind with ongoing life. (And Jackson’s Rainbow coalition is a major major lesson in this).
And, let me put forward a suggestion of why: Their main impact has never been “moving the Democrats to the left.” Their main impact has always been “moving the left into the Democrats.”
Because of America’s “winner take all” system, entry into electoralism doesn’t produce “independent’ third parties (the way it does in Italy or Germany). On the contrary, the Democratic Party exists as a black hole that eats everything up, draws it into its homogenizing singularity. The Democratic Party is structurally defined by the politics they called “centrist” (and that we call “liberal imperialist”), and structurally, any leftists who enter that gravitational pull are (over and over)sucked into the logic and power of that defining structure.
Why is there no antiwar movement? If not that the logic of Obama means that the electoral left is silenced?
they grumble. they complain. They say they are “betrayed.” They demand “let Obama be Obama.” they want him to “get tough.”
but really, that too is just chatter for their base — because the leaders of these “independent” left liberal groups (moveon, etc.) understand very very well the logic of bourgeois politics — and the “fact” that Obama “can’t” produce “overnight.”
So they support him, while posturing as discontent for their base. While obama’s press secretary insults the “professional left” as utopian, immature, disconnected, and (frankly) unpatriotic. (He recently quipped that they were so far gone that they wouldn’t be happy until the Pentagon was defunded, and wouldn’t be happy if Kusinich was president, etc. He also said that the grumbling left should “get out of your pajamas and off the internet.” And other insulting/revealing remarks.)
But my point is that the “independent” left-liberal groups don’t really disagree with these things — they too see the “reality” of the political situation (the division of congress, the need to win upcoming elections, the fact that reactionary “bubba” voting blocks in red states are always somehow “the key swing voter of the election that need to be pandered to.”
You can be as organizationally independent as you want, Carl. But in the U.S., this won’t even get you to a war-mongering Green party like in Germany.
Because the political strategies you propose are (pretty quickly and permanently) the politics of bondage, capitulation and even complicity with empire.
jp said
this type of d-tailing (since post-vietnam)has brought us a left significantly shifted to the right, most of whom in 2008 supported a candidate credibly argued to be to the right of nixon. that’s not due to a materialist analysis, that’s capitulation on a very broad scale. many factors therein, but the historical arc is clear.
Labor Shall Rule said
Under what conditions do you see the Democrats “imploding,” Carl?
Carl Davidson said
The Democrats are beginning to implode right now, LSR, over their failure on the employment crisis and the wars.
Anyway, MikeE shifted this discussion to another thread, so this post here is also my first post on the new thread:
MikeE says:
Some did and some didn’t, Mike. We grew by about two or three times in PDA and double in our socialist group, not to mention the quality of our new alliances and how we are now positioned. For sure, this is somewhat relative and on a small scale. The entire left remains small and marginalized, and none of us has all the much to brag about. But we came out of the 2008 campaign better than we went into it.
And I agree that you don’t always ‘thrive and grow,’ although, obviously, you should try to. Sometimes you have to go against the tide, and take some hits now because it’s simply the right thing to do, and make it up later. Things rarely follow a straight line.
The key is having a strategy. As in the little quote for Toffler I put in my email signature, ‘If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.’ You might be anyway, but this way you can at least fight it.
Then you add:
Yes, we are scattered–and it’s a constant struggle to overcome. It’s true there’s no open schism yet in the White House on the wars. But there is in Congress, and a Black woman is leading it there. One of the top Black leaders on the steelworkers was in our county recently, pulling together to march on DC around jobs and immigration to put some street heat on the White House and the Congress, so there’s an opening there as well. Because of our work with these forces in the campaign, we’re now well positioned to make good use of these openings. There are plenty of cracks, even if most Blacks still wish Obama well.
As for Nando’s claim that we lack political independence even if we do have organizationally independence, what’s being ignored is the fact that I have spelled out our mass platform dozens of times here–we projected ‘Out Now’ from the wars, HR 676, EFCA, Green Jobs for All, and Debt relief. Obama has never been for ‘out now,’ he’s opposed HR 676 for ‘insurance reform,’ he’s sidetracked EFCA. He’s done some initial funding on Green Jobs, but retreated on Van Jones. Likewise with debt relief for the masses. So our mass political platform in clearly mainly different and opposed to the White House, and we have been out in the street every week with our views–before, during and after the campaign. On the socialist level, we put out a ‘Buy Out, Not Bail Out’ position opposing the White House view and approach on Big Auto and the Banks. So the claim that we simply tailed the politics of the Democrats is simply wrong. If you don’t like the independent line we projected, put out what you think would have been a better one–rather than making distorted claims.
I do think a good part of the left has been disoriented by Obama and subsequent events. But that’s largely because all of its deep-rooted weakness came to a head. Much of the left has no decent electoral policy; they simply ignore them or try end runs around them with a one-sided emphasis of street actions, mass mobilizations, playing cat and mouse with cops, breaking windows and such. When the economic crisis hit in a big way, and shifted the center of gravity, they kept on with the same ole same ole, after found themselves out in the cold. They had very few ideas about what to do, and floundered for a time, flip-flopping between irrelevant denunciations of elections and last-minute tailing of the Democrats.
After 18 months, some folks are coming to the fore with better ideas that have a greater range of tactics and a willingness to work among basic masses that don’t always agree with some of their ideas. We’ll see how some of these things unfold between now and this November.
And by the way, Mike, are you urging a boycott of the November elections, or what? We can discuss the last one for a long time, but the upcoming one should be our focus now, together with the deepening jobs crisis. I’ve sent you our ‘Full Employment’ booklet, which spells out how we think this should be approached both strategically and tactically. A critical review would be appropriate, since I assume you agree the fight for jobs is an important one. But perhaps I assume too much.