A Libertarian Perspective: FBI Slaps Pro-Obama lefties
Posted by Mike E on September 27, 2010
The following is by the libertarian antiwar.com site.
The Obama Boomerang:
Pro-Obama lefties get slapped down by the FBI
by Justin Raimondo
September 27, 2010 — FBI raids on six houses in Minneapolis and Chicago, including the office of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, have the antiwar movement – and the left in general – in an uproar. Agents came barging into homes guns drawn, kicking down doors and smashing furniture, armed with search warrants. The warrants described, in suitably vague terms, allegations of “material support for terrorism.” No arrests were made, although a number of individual activists were served with subpoenas demanding their appearance before a grand jury. Computers, documents, phones, and other materials were carted away by burly FBI agents, who appeared at 7 a.m. sharp, locked and loaded.
Let the frame-ups begin!
This Palmer raids-style fishing expedition is apparently aimed at members and supporters of an obscure Marxist grouplet, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Maoist remnant founded in the 1960s which came out of the “new communist movement” documented in Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air. What drew the attention of the authorities to FRSO was apparently their “solidarity” work on behalf of the Palestinians and a Colombian leftist insurgency known as FARC.
More about FRSO later, but in the meantime let’s look at the context in which all this is occurring. Why it seems like only yesterday that the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General issued its report on the illegal surveillance, infiltration, and systematic harassment of antiwar groups, including the Merton Center, in Pittsburgh, the Catholic Worker organization, and Greenpeace. The report has been described by many as “scathing,” but in the process of trying to whitewash FBI Director Robert Mueller, it also succeeds in minimizing the crimes of the political police as they sought evidence to frame up a bunch of pacifists as potential terrorists.
In justifying the infiltration and extensive surveillance, FBI agents told the IG that, since the individuals involved were advocates of “direct action,” the activities of the Merton Center/Catholic Worker raised the possibility of “arson attacks” on military facilities. Remember, this is the same FBI that, under J. Edgar Hoover, spied on and tried to destroy Martin Luther King. An arson attack these thugs can understand, and deal with, but the concept of nonviolent resistance is a direct affront to their entire worldview – and a much more potent threat to their power.
The surveillance of the Merton Center, and specifically of a 2002 protest against the Iraq war, was supposedly initiated in order to garner information about “an ongoing terrorist investigation,” and so Director Mueller testified in hearings before Congress, but that turned out not to be true. A great deal of the IG’s report is taken up with defending Mueller, personally, who supposedly didn’t know there was no ongoing terrorist investigation that required the agent’s presence at the rally, where he took photographs of participants and collected literature. Or, at least, this agent didn’t know there was such an investigation – although there was – but went anyway, because he was a “probationary” pig, and was just trying to please his supervisor: his presence at the antiwar rally, however “ill-conceived” it may have been, wasn’t carried out “because of the Merton Center’s antiwar advocacy,” it was just “make-work.” And if you believe that, then I have a P. T. Barnum quip at the ready I won’t even bother typing out.
“Ill-conceived,” but legal – that’s the IG’s verdict on the Merton Center surveillance, because the FBI’s shenanigans fit the very loose legal parameters applicable under the PATRIOT Act. After all, the rationale goes, it’s possible that the subject of an ongoing investigation into al-Qaeda’s Pittsburgh cell might attend a protest against the Iraq war given by Catholic nuns. Just as I suppose it’s possible Osama bin Laden could convert to Christianity and become a Trappist monk.
In an editorial, the Boston Globe denounced the FBI’s actions as “red-baiting,” but this is incorrect: A footnote in the report seeks to justify the surveillance, or at least make it more politically palatable, by identifying the Center as an “anarchist” enterprise, one devoted to “mutual aid” as well as fighting war and State oppression. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, there aren’t all that many reds around to be baited – they’ve all either gone into real estate, or else gone to Washington to take jobs in the Obama administration. It’s those darn anarchists who are the new bogeymen, bomb-throwing radicals both Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh can vilify in unison.
Since the PATRIOT Act and subsequent legislation gave the feds a blank check to spy on us, law enforcement agencies have taken the opportunity to cast as wide a net as possible over the legal activities of American citizens whose only goal is to change American foreign policy. Under Bush, and now under Obama, the government is engaged in a systematic campaign to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat the anti-interventionist movement on the home front, all under the rubric of “anti-terrorism.”
The FBI invasion of antiwar activists’ homes and offices is the latest chapter in this ongoing campaign: as our troops take Kandahar, our political police are taking Minneapolis and Chicago.
The target of the raids, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, is interesting because its history gives us a capsule summary of what happened to the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 70s – and a lesson in why the current antiwar movement is floundering.
FRSO came out of the generational radicalization that created Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and energized a mass left-wing student-based movement. When SDS splintered into a couple dozen fragments in a frenzy of factional warfare, FRSO emerged from one of the splinters known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement (II) – the Revolutionary Youth Movement (I) being something altogether different, you see. In any case, as more and more of these young radicals began to go into real estate, or take up Zen Buddhism, the dead-enders either joined the Weathermen and went underground, or else joined one of the plonky neo-Stalinist “parties” – i.e. sects – that sprang up like mushrooms on a fallen tree.
FRSO was one such grouplet, formed out of the merger of the Maoist Revolutionary Workers’ Headquarters (which had previously split from the Revolutionary Communist Party), and the Proletarian Unity League. Both of these groups had been highly critical of the “ultra-left” doctrine, tactics, and strategy of the Maoist movement, and sought to salvage those activists who survived the flight to bourgeois respectability.
The idea was to rebuild the movement by carrying out a holding action, but the result was yet another split, with one faction deciding that the entire basis of Marxist-Leninist theory had to be reexamined with a critical eye – these are the “Left Refoundationists” – against the upholders of orthodoxy, who called themselves FRSO-(Fight Back). There are, today, two organizations which call themselves the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, with the orthodox faction winding up in the sights of the FBI, and the Left Refoundationists winding up in … “Progressives for Obama.”
One comic side note of the raids is the Left Refoundationist denunciation of the FBI’s attack on their ex-comrades, which, after decrying the incident as “part of a growing governmental trend targeting the left,” and pointing out that “the [African National Congress, which currently governs South Africa] was on the ‘terrorist’ list right up until they won electoral victory in South Africa,” is careful to point out, in bold print:
“Although the organization in question has a similar name to ours, we are different organizations. (We are officially Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad (FRSO/OSCL).) We were not targets in these raids.”
In other words: it ain’t us! It’s those guys over there:
“These raids and arrests have the effect of stifling dissent and foreclosing democratic rights of minority viewpoints. We should be concerned, whether or not we agree with the politics of the targeted organization.”
The Left Refoundationists went into the Democratic party, and were active in “Progressives for Obama,” an outfit cooked up by Tom Hayden, FRSO-“Left Refoundationist” and AFL-CIO bureaucrat Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover, whose job it was to get these former militant commies to the polls on behalf of the Great Change.
The orthodox FRSO-ers, on the other hand, continued along the “Marxist-Leninist” path, meeting with leftist insurgents in South America and occupied Palestine, but still feeling the pull of the Great Change. As their “Main Political Report” on the domestic situation for 2010 puts it:
“The election of Barack Obama as the first African American President of the United States is a contradictory event. In part the election of Obama was a referendum on race in the United States, a referendum that came out surprisingly positive … Obama’s election represents a rejection of the Bush administration policies and a desire amongst the people for a progressive agenda from the government. Immediately following his election there was a sense of optimism and a feeling that change is possible. This is a very good development after so many years of Bush. ”
I wonder if they’ll revise that last sentence in light of recent developments.
I think it’s safe to say the antiwar movement was unprepared for this kind of attack from an administration they hailed as “a very good development,” and I’m not just talking about FRSO. The idea that the election of a black man whose resume reads “community organizer” is going to change the face of US imperialism even slightly is an illusion brought on by the identity politics that have long since replaced Marxism (or any coherent ‘ism) in the canons of the left. If many have wondered who let the air out of the antiwar movement, it was precisely those “radical” leftists who, like the “orthodox” Marxists of FRSO, signed on as the “left” wing of the Obama cult. That’s why they didn’t see the mailed fist of the State coming even when it was a few inches from their faces.
The Minneapolis and Chicago raids are just the beginning. The logic of the “war on terrorism,” and its legal machinery here on the home front, is an ever-expanding campaign to associate political dissent – and, specifically, dissent from our interventionist foreign policy – with violence and treason. And it will be a lot easier to pull this off under a “progressive” veneer. Remember, Bush’s political police just spied covertly, as well as targeting Islamic charities and shutting several down: Obama’s KGB is conducting open raids on the offices of domestic antiwar organizations. Anybody who gave a dime, or an hour of their time, to the Minneapolis and Chicago antiwar groups in which FRSO involved itself is now apt to be on an FBI “terrorist watch list.” Under this “progressive” President, the FBI isn’t just taking photos of us at antiwar events and following us to the grocery store: it’s kicking down the front door and taking our stuff.
The escalation of Obama’s wars abroad is being matched, and more, by an escalation of the war on dissent at home – and the antiwar movement is caught unprepared, in shock that this “community organizer” and his buddies in the Justice Department would go after them. So watch out, comrades: that FBI agent at your door may be a “Left Refoundationist” of a particular type.
Okay, aside from the ideological lesson we can draw from this, what can the antiwar movement do, concretely, to defend itself from attack? What’s needed is a legal defense organization, one narrowly devoted to providing assistance to those who find themselves targeted on account of their anti-imperialist views. The network that’s grown up around the defense of Bradley Manning ought to be expanded to include not only the FRSO activists but all future targets of state repression – and, believe you me, there will be more.
The ruling elite has never been more nervous, because their rule has never been more brittle: the economic collapse foreshadows a political collapse that can only be prevented by a crackdown and general tightening of the rules of the American “democratic” system. They’re making up these new rules as they go along, and the process is still ongoing, but of one thing we can be certain: the Constitution is a dead letter. It no longer exists except as a document kept under glass, venerated but never obeyed.
In an atmosphere like this, anything is possible: repression, mass raids, and, yes, even dictatorship (in the name of “preserving democracy,” naturally). We are in for some hard times, and certainly some tumultuous times: if we’re going to survive, we must shed any illusions that the State is going to back off, or give us a break, because, after all, “our” guy is in the White House. The Obama administration is the enemy of freedom at home and the main danger to peace abroad – and progressive opponents of war and domestic repression need to either acknowledge that, or else give up the fight. The Obama boomerang has hit them squarely upside their heads: now they need to pick themselves up off the ground and face reality.
Contrarian said
It may be written from a libertarian perspective, but its concxlusions, particularly the final paragraph, are absolutely right. The Obama regime is probably far more suited to carry out a full blown repression of anti-imperialists than the Bush regime was. One term president though Oabama certainly is, he may well carry out the repression needed to prepare the way for the more openly fascistic Tea Party controlled White House and Congress in 2013 that will make the Bush folks look liike “liberals” by comparison. Oh thank you, Progressives for Obama. See you in the detention camps.
Ajagbe said
it won’t do to take liberties with the facts. i hate it when people do this shit.
tellnolies said
Actually, I think this whole situation underlines why Obama’s election WAS a positive thing. Not in the sense that Obama is going to deliver any sort of progressive change, but in the sense that the illusions large swathes of progressive-minded people could sustain about the Democrats are being tested in ways that were impossible under Bush. Had these raids occurred under Bush, many progressives would have insisted that we could lessen the chance of such things by electing Dems.
The struggle to build a radical left in the US is in large part a struggle for the hearts and minds of a big chunk of the Democratic electorate. This struggle is made easier when what the Dems would do in power is not a matter of speculation, but rather on display everyday. Of course this isn’t unalloyed. Many people who voted for Obama feel compelled to defend policies of his that they would never have defended had they been carried out by Bush. But this is a struggle that we need to have. As long as the Republicans are in power, the possibility of electing Dems will remain a trump card in the system’s hand, a ready mechanism for channeling the discontent of the oppressed who should be the support bases of a radical left.
The challenge is to be able to both speak the unvarnished truth about the role of the Democratic Party AND to accompany its supporters through the twists and turns of the process of their disillusionment. Looking back on the 1960s we know that it was not the tracts of the SWP or PL that turned a generation against the Democratic Party, (not that tracts don’t have their place). It was, rather, the direct experience of the refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates in 1964, the deepening war against Viet Nam, the police riot in Chicago in 1968 and a long list of less well known but similar events that shook loose whole sections of the Democratic Party’s base and made them receptive to more radical and even revolutionary politics.
Make no mistake. It was Obama’s FBI that raided the homes and served Grand Jury subpeonas on our sisters and brothers in FRSO. And we need to shout that fact from the rooftops. The disillusionment of the Democratic Party base with their party will not come in a day. Rather it will occur at first in fits and starts around incidents like these. Those who see in this merely an opportunity to wag their finger and say “I told you so” aren’t playing for keeps. But neither are those who refuse to draw very clearly the connections that are evident to all who have eyes.
Nelson H. said
I think the word I’m looking for is drivel. Yeah, that’s it.
artemi0 said
gotta love the libertarians for their biting sarcasm and provocative analogy.
in this spirit- let’s take the analogy 1 step further to provoke some discussion. Obama’s election and proceeding government can be seen as a positive thing as it exposes the true nature of the of the Democratic Party- step by step.
It can also be viewed as a small step for the liberal dem’s, and a giant step for the ruling class.
I am happy to (once again) see the Kasama site engaging with a provocative libertarian perspective. Perhap’s the historical lesson to be learned here- is the one Ernst Rohem and nearly the entire lead command of the SA brownshirt’s learned from Hitler…
That is, when you lie down & rub noses with the pig and fall asleep- all that you can hope for in your dreams is waking up in a world of shit.
This is the ruling class’s reward for passionate and vocal, or even critical and tepid support. A boot kicking in your front door and then a bullet in your head or heart…
Am using very strong words and analogies here- feel it is the apporopriate thread to do so. On parralell threads there has been a lot of debate and discussion about a revolutionary approach to electoral strategy. The inside/outside strategy has had a lot of voice, so has the progressive/popular front allied against the “fascist right wing” of the bourgeoosie strategy.
My (non sarcastic) comment is- well, that’s exactly what you got, and this is exactly what we have.
Alex said
Obama and the Democratic Party didn’t exactly run on progressive issues, save for a few, not-unimportant social issues.
The Democrats campaigned on managing US imperialism better than the other party, by means of “Hope Mongering” – the empty idea into which some voters naively project their dreams–and continue to do so.
As in, “Vote for me and feel free to “hope” that I, without a real platform or mass movement, will break from 40 years of neoliberal doctrine, 100 years of imperialism and FBI/State repression at home.”
Americans, on whole, appear to be thoroughly reactionary, and I don’t think any amount of electoral disillusionment will radicalize those who can/do vote.
It is uniquely American that in times of capitalist crisis, the popular response is not a leftward break with Democratic Party, but rather a mass militant rightist movement in defense of capitalism and white privilege, as seen in Tea Parties.
Obama is simply the titular head of the guardian state for a rotten system. Perhaps lots of agree, evidenced by the fact that not many people vote. Yet I wonder if most Americans would fight to the bitter end to retain the fringe benefits of US empire and first world and/or white privilege.
Jim T said
FRSO-FB didn’t “get” a visit from the FBI because they ignored the repressive, imperialist nature of the Obama administration. They got a visit from the FBI because of their anti-war and international solidarity work, which they were conducting long before Obama was elected. The efficacy of this work might be debated–but that would be more appropriate at another time.
I’m in an organization that argues explicitly against participation in the Democratic party, and we didn’t see this coming. I *strongly* doubt either FRSO thought they were any less immune from state repression because the Obama administration is in power. This is not a time for “I told you so” statements–it’s a time to provide support.
tellnolies said
What Jim T said.
Sheitan Uldoleh said
Yes. Right on Jim T
Didn’t Lenin talk about participation in legal elections too?
tellnolies said
Yes he did. But he did so in a particular historical context. Even equipped with quotes from Lenin we still have to analyze our own historical context.
Sheitan Uldoleh said
und what was that peculiar condition that made it okay for him?
besides, what wrong did these freedom road group did and what sort of alignment did it have with the fing democratic party?
louisproyect said
The peculiar condition was the continuing ability of the parties of the Second International and British Labour to draw working-class votes in the 1920s. Lenin advocated that the Comintern parties urge a vote for their candidates in order to get a hearing from such voters, understanding that once they got elected they would sell out–thus helping to persuade workers to join the CP. In any case, this had nothing to do with supporting bourgeois parties like the Democrats in the USA. For people who want to understand how Lenin regarded such parties, go to the Marxism Internet Archives and do a search on “Kadet” within Lenin. This, after all, was the major difference between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: how to understand bourgeois liberalism. It is regrettable that a century after these debates took place, ostensible revolutionaries are dusting off Menshevik arguments.
tellnolies said
The problem with this comparison is that the US political system produces a different kind of political parties than European parliamentary systems do. The US parties are broad alliances with party primaries being the arena in which different fractions more commonly actually battle things out. Admittedly these are under bourgeois political control, but the fact remains that the Democratic Party draws the votes of much of the working class and even more of oppressed nationalities and other oppressed groups and its very hard to get a hearing among them if one operates exclusively outside the party. I am far less interested in campaigning for bourgeois Dems like Obama than I am in finding ways to build an explicitly socialist electorate which I think presently means fighting inside the Democratic Party by running explicitly socialist primary challengers.
Mike E said
actually there were situations in the duma electins where the Bolsheviks would support Cadets against the Black hundreds.
But mainly, Louis, your argument seems to assume there is a single approach rooted in established principle, so our electoral approaches can be developed by looking closely at “what lenin did.”
Really that won’t work. Nor will it work to assert some “class line” (as if the Labor Party in Britain is less imperialist than the Democratic Party in the U.S.). The assumption that the bourgeois Labor Parties were somehow part of a “workers movement” (when 1915? 1935? 1955? 2010?) is a view I hear, but that seems to look at the demographics of the social base, not the crude colonialism and policies of the party itself (i.e. its political class nature).
I have been thinking about writing more on TNL’s ideas, and appreciate him elaborating more on them now. I’m curious: what does itmean to be “explicitly socialist” in a democratic primary? I was in vermont when the “socialist” bernie sanders was the darling of Burlington real estate developers. How would it be articulated? Would it be a campaign intended to win, or to get a hearing on views? (I suspect it can’t do both — unless it is a Bernie style socialism). What do you think is the likelihood of being able to run a truly socialist campaign (dismantling of bases, destruction of nukes, freedom for puerto rico, nationalizaiton and popular planning of industry, ending farmer debt, universal education, end of suburbs, etc.) — yet remain in the democrats? If it is to get a hearing, why not run as Greens (the way Peter Camajo did)? Certainly there is a long history of communists running campaigns on their own platforms (from the bolsheviks in the duma to the German communists in the Reichstag, that we could sum up and consider.)
RW Harvey said
I know that I am dense at times, but for the life of me I just don’t get this fascination with electoral politics.
Like Mike I don’t understand what TNL means when referring to “finding ways to building an explicitly socialist electorate.” What’s the difference between a socialist electorate and a socialist movement? The only thing I can see underneath this is a belief about bourgeois elections being the primary vehicle to transforming imperial America. And that sounds like a quagmire of reformism and strange bedfellows.
louisproyect said
Mike wrote:
—
I dealt with this in depth on the Marxism list in a debate with Joaquin Bustelo, an ex-SWP member who had become sympathetic to the FRSO/Refoundation briefly.
Lenin’s 1906 article “The Attitude of the Bourgeois Parties and of
the Workers’ Party to the Duma Elections” pretty much summarizes his attitude:
It is the great historical duty of the workers’ party to help to create
an independent political party of the working class. Those who advocate
blocs with the Cadets hinder the fulfilment of this duty.
Another great duty that confronts the workers’ party is to free the
masses of the ruined, poverty-stricken and doomed urban petty
bourgeoisie and peasantry from the influence of the ideas and prejudices
of the liberal bourgeoisie. The fulfilment of this duty is also being
hindered by those who advocate blocs with the Cadets. They are not
divorcing the peasants from the liberals, but are strengthening this
unnatural alliance, which is fatal to the cause of liberty and to the
cause of the proletariat. They are not warning the peas ant masses
against the liberals’ backstairs politics (or rather, political intrigue
for the distribution of seats in the Duma), but are sanctioning this
intrigue by taking part in it.
Down with all blocs! The workers’ party must conduct its election
campaign independently, not only in words, but in deeds. It must provide
the whole people, and the masses of the proletariat in particular, with
a model of courageous and consistent criticism based on principle. Only
in that way shall we succeed in rallying the masses for effective
participation in the struggle for freedom and not in the sham liberalism
of the Cadet betrayers of freedom.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/dec/31.htm
louisproyect said
Some more on Black Hundreds and the Cadets from Lenin. It is virtually the same differences that appear on the American left today around “lesser evil” politics–supporting Kerry against Bush, etc., ad nauseam:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/nov/23c.htm
louisproyect said
The US parties are broad alliances with party primaries being the arena in which different fractions more commonly actually battle things out.
—
Right. The real estate faction battles things out with the defense industry faction, etc.
redflags said
Thank you Lousproyect for that historical gem regarding Lenin on the “Black Hundreds danger”. It is amazing how consistent some things are over the ages.
Keith said
I wonder how those who seem to oppose electoral politics in principle, like RW Harvey, imagine a revolutionary movement developing towards the seizure of power in the U.S?
redgreen02 said
Hi Mike E,
Saw in your post that you mentioned socialist views on suburbs. I have never been exposed to the socialist position on this issue, could you please elaborate on this a bit? I’ve very interested.
-Steve
Mike E said
Steve:
American suburbs are tied (by a thousand threads) to white supremacy, empire and an ecologically unsustainable economics. Endless suburban sprawl is a terrible development for a hundred reasons and would need to be reversed in any planned ecologically-sustainable socialist society.
A far more progressive (and sustainable) concept of planning is highly concentrated smaller cities, surrounded by large greenbelts (and wilderness) — where people can walk to work (or take short mass transit hops), where cars are not structurally necessary, where people live closer to where food is produced, etc.
American-style suburbs are an outgrowth of imperialist society, and their negation is part of the socialist project.
Mike E said
Louis:
My main point is that we need to abandon a logic that says “Lenin did it, so we should too” or “Lenin denounced it, so we should too.”
History is not a case file where we examine the lifes work of our heroes to determine universal principles to apply to our own (very different) moments.
However, just on a point of historical fact: You can quote Lenin from 1906 all you want… but in fact when the Bolsheviks later joined the Duma elections (after a sharp internal line struggle and major change of tactics), they participating in voting arrangements… they would oppose rival parties in lowlevel elections, but support the winners against more reactionary candidates. (That logic was built into the Duma estate system of voting.) And this included (unless i’m mistaken) supporting Cadets against Black Hundreds in specific electoral showdowns. And similarly the Bolsheviks got the support of other parties under similar circumstances and (in the end) had a significant part of the workers delegates in the national Duma.
Again: I think the details of this are largely irrelevant for our purposes, because it is not as if Lenin is revealing for us some universal set of rules for elections that we uncover and then apply… but because Trotskyism has this (rather metaphysical) theory of “a class line” and a demographic “workers movement” etc. it becomes important (in defense of a contemporary Trotskyist theory of electoral work) to impose those relatively-rigid a priori principles backward onto the Bolsheviks (when in fact their views and practice changed over several years).
Justin Raimondo said
@Jim T:
Oh bullshit. The FSRO got a visit from the FBI for which they were woefully unprepared because they abandoned what I thought was the Marxist theory of the State (a theory, by the way, which is pretty much the same as the libertarian theory of the State, but never mind that): that the State is the Enemy.
Blinded by identity politics, wishful thinking, and their own “bourgeois” everything-is-gonna-be-alright-because-this-is-America-after-all mentality, they thought the Obama administration an improvement over the Bush regime.
They didn’t realize the Obama regime is worse until it was too late. And I’ll bet they STILL don’t realize it, and won’t realize it until half their cadre are in the slammer.
I agree the FSRO needs to be defended — but you have to understand that seeing why and how they were caught in a trap is a necessary part of that defense.
Sorry for the interruption. Okay, now you can go back to your regularly scheduled program of flinging quotes from Lenin at each other …
Mike E said
I agree with Justin on one thing: the habit of “flinging quotes” as if it proves something is methodologically wrong and politically self-marginalizing.
We do need to examine and learn from history. (I’m not saying that examining historical documents and episodes is worthless, obviously.) But treating communist politics as a “tradition” — and therefore seeking truth in its “continuity” is metaphysics.
louisproyect said
MIke writes:
I have heard this before from Joaquin, as I pointed out above, but found no evidence of this. My reading of Neil Harding’s “Lenin’s Political Thought” turned up nothing like that either. Also, it is important to define what “supporting the Cadets” meant. Lenin was pretty clear in the passage I cited that this did not mean forming blocs.
Finally, I am something of a Lenin scholar and only responded to the question of what Lenin advocated, not what I advocate in 2010. Lenin stressed the need to vote for Comintern-type parties in 1921. I don’t think this is exactly relevant to our situation today.
My main point is the need for independent class action. This has nothing to do with being a Trot. It is what Eugene V. Debs advocated, what the American CP advocated prior to the FDR turn, and what Malcolm X advocated. None of these groups and individuals were “Trots”.
Mike E said
Here is the passage I had read:
This is in the fascinating book “Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma” by A. E. Badaev (an autobiographical book written by one of the Bolshevik duma delegates) which I would recommend to everyone for many reasons. (text pdf) — including its descriptin of agent provocateurs.
* * * * * *
I’m merely pointing out that there is a particular (historic) trotskyist view of elections — that make supporting Democrats forbidden because of a “class line,” and critical support for middle class parties tolerable, and that sees social democrats as part of a “workers movement.” It is a particular view (with a mechanical class component) of what independent political action means (independent of who? independent of what?)
I personally think it has been wrong to support the Democrats each time the question came up in my political life. (the Mississippi Freeom Democrats are before my time, and complex episode of radical politics…)
But my reasons for non-support are different from the common Trotskyist views on this important matter of independent political action.
And in saying that I’m not implying (or claiming) that you, Louis, are a Trotskyist… I am aware of your history and your self-labeling.
Also when I associate certain views with Trotskyism, it is not an attempt to dismiss-by-labeling (nor do I use expressions like “trot” which can be taken as old school put-downs, so please don’t put quotes around that as if i do.)
louisproyect said
Maybe I am missing something but Badaev states: “Hence, the agreements entered into by the Bolsheviks in the second ballots were not in the nature of a bloc of political parties.” I have to weigh this excerpt from a book by an obscure figure against the preponderance of evidence in Lenin’s writings that he considered blocs with the Cadets completely unacceptable. I invite you to search the Lenin archive for such a reference, even though this might cause Justin Raimondo to break out in hives.
Nelson H. said
@Justin Raimondo How might they have been better prepared? They seem grounded enough in their movements to be in the early process of turning this stuff around into movement building from attack. They seem prepared enough to have lawyered up and not spoken to the FBI. A future test lies before them with the impending grand jury hearings.
What then would you propose as a proper course of action? Functioning wholly as an underground organization? Personally, I have no use for Weather politics.
This whole thread reminds me of one of my favorite Propaghandhi lyrics, “With friends like these, who the fuck needs COINTELPRO?”
louisproyect said
But in order to safeguard against the possible victory of reactionary candidates, the Bolsheviks permitted agreements respectively with the bourgeois democrats (Trudoviks, etc.) against the Liberals, and with the Liberals against the government parties during the second ballot for the election of electors in the city curias.
—
Just one more thing on this. In 1912 Lenin wrote an article titled “The Second Ballot in Russia and the Tasks of the Working Class” that is pretty adamant about opposing the Cadets:
In order to conduct that struggle it will be necessary for the Marxists at the second ballot to make common cause with all democrats (i.e., also with the bourgeois democrats, Narodniks, Trudoviks, etc.) against the liberals. The entire behaviour of the notorious “responsible opposition”, the Cadets, in the Third Duma, the entire policy and tactics of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and on the other, the present movement among the shop assist ants, provide a particularly favourable ground for this fight by the democrats, organised by the workers, against the liberals, i.e., against the Cadet Party. Inasmuch as the second urban curia is the one in which there will be the greatest number of cases of a second ballot, the principal line to be pursued by the workers at the second ballot is precisely this: with the democrats against the Rights and against the liberals.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/apr/03.htm
Mike E said
No need to go further on this, Louis. The materials are there — they formed agreements (i.e. urged their supporters to vote for Cadet Liberals in some cases), but never agreed to stop sharp criticism of the Liberal politics. We can all draw our own conclusions (about what to believe, and what meaning to give it).
* * * * * *
Badaev is not an “obscure figure”. He was a member of the Duma (i.e. one of the main public faces of the Bolsheviks in the prewar period)… though not a leader of the party. His book was published in English during the 1970s (by the CLPs Proletarian Publishers, and widely read). Put another way: he is hardly obscure to me, or others who came into contact with his book.
His brief bio is here.
His memoirs of the Duma were published in the Soviet Union in 1929 — part of a wave of memoirs written in the Soviet Union about the revolutionary period (all of which I have found fascinating). And (for what its worth) certainly reflect the CPSU(B)’s own recollection of those tactical arrangements. (I.e. this is not some obscure person writing an unknown book through some obscure publishing house — this book is part of the research process inside the Soviet Union by which the CPSU(B) wrote its own history.)
Lenin (and the Bolshevik Congresses) opposed “blocs” with the Liberals (of the kind that the Mensheviks proposed, and which would subordinate revolutionary politics to capitalist programs).
But, at the same time, the Bolsheviks reached occasional electoral agreements with many other parties, that gave those parties the votes of Bolshevik supporters (i.e. political support in the election process itself) but did not imply specific long-term strategic alliance or programmatic compromise.
Those agreements were (I assume) different from the Menshevik approach (which saw Social Democrats as historically subordinate to capitalist politics). Though, i believe that on the ground in Tsarist russia many of these factional distinctions were often lost on the grassroots organizers who worked out such arrangements.
* * * * * * *
On a methodological point: I don’t think we can know or understand something as complex as the political theory or practice of the Bolsheviks simply by going to Lenin’s writings. The fact that Lenin doesn’t discuss such arrangements, but Badaev does is the kind of thing that occurs all the time. That is why history is not simply a matter of close textual reads.
And we certainly can’t extract the right or wrong for our own situation by assuming that Lenin’s approach to the Cadets maps over to define our approach to the Democrats. That just ain’t materialism.
PatrickSMcNally said
> there is a particular (historic) trotskyist view of elections — that make supporting Democrats forbidden because of a “class line,” and critical support for middle class parties tolerable
Just in the interests of accuracy, Leon Trotsky never advocated anything of the sort. The Socialist Workers Party did devote itself into the McGovern campaign in 1972, but that was at a time when they had been steadily moving away from Trotsky’s view of the proletariat as the center of action. Whether or not you think this is correct is another matter. The working class of the 1960s, despite being willing to strike in a variety of regions, was more or less satisfied with capitalism at that time. This led the SWP to move away from Trotsky’s line until they openly abandoned it in 1983-4.
As for the Socialist Party of France, I think a rational case can be made that they were a labor party of sorts as late as the 1930s when Trotsky was still alive. The postwar rise in imperialist living standards essentially nullified this. Any party after the 1950s which still held a substantive voting bloc did really merge itself into the bourgeois order of that time. It’s therefore pointless to deduce anything positive about Francois Mitterand in the 1980s from what is known about Leon Blum in the 1930s. In any event, it wasn’t Trotsky who advocated forming an electoral bloc with Blum’s party. It was Georgi Dimitrov.
But I would also make some distinction between Blum’s party in the 1930s from Roosevelt’s Democrats. The Democratic Party was by point of origin the party of slave holders. A lot has changed since then, but in the 1930s this would have been a fairly recent fact on the scale of history. Blum’s party did originate as a workers party. They sold out in WWI just as the German Social Democrats did. But the difference from the Democratic Party here could still have seemed notable then. Not so much now.
OK, back to regularly scheduled programming.
louisproyect said
Mike writes:
Yes, and this is what Tony Cliff wrote about Lenin’s attitude toward these parliamentarians:
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/chap17.htm#s6
Mike E said
Patrick writes:
You have stated well the view I am disagreeing with. It assumes that social democrats and labor parties are (because of their origin or social base or self-labeling) somehow “workers parties” and fundamentally different from bourgeois parties.
louisproyect said
The Socialist Workers Party did devote itself into the McGovern campaign in 1972,
—
Wrong.
louisproyect said
They are both like bourgeois parties and unlike bourgeois parties. In a very real sense, they are petty-bourgeois formations like the trade union bureaucracy they rest on. Lenin made a distinction between the “democrats” in Czarist Russia like the SR’s that the Bolsheviks blocked with on occasion and the “liberals”,or Cadets, that he opposed on a class basis. I think that this distinction is still useful.
Mike E said
Louis writes:
This is (again) the view I’m disagreeing with.
I don’t think the trade union heads are petty bourgeois either (in some mechanical or determined way). Some are simply imperialist agents (CIA affiliated, anticommunist, racist etc.), others are mobsters, more are self-serving careerists and paperpushers without a spark of bigger picture, still others are rather sincere trade unionists reflecting the more militant currents among their base. It varies with time and place, and is not marked by some formal or rigid class character.
The Social Democratic parties of the Second International were viewed by many as working class and marxist parties — many of them proved to be just a new variant of imperialist, colonialist and patriotic politics (and in the U.S., of a very crude and blantant white racism in many cases). The character of a political party is not reducible to its social base — the fact that a party emerged (somehow) from a generation of working class organizing doesn’t mean that it can’t be a crudely imperialist party.
For example: the main expression of working class organization on the U.S. West Coast was (for many years) rabid racist Asian exclusionary politics and pogroms. They formed “workingmen’s parties” and trade unions. They were politically expressions (continuations) of the literally genocidal settler tradition of the West — and the fact that they were demographically working class was distinctive but not defining.
Louis writes:
This is an example of the method i’m urging that we not adopt. Even if we made this distinction, our conditions are different enough that it would not be the same one. the Cadets were an opposition party inside an autocratic Tsarist state — do we really want to (repeatedly) use that as a reference point when discussing the U.S. Democratic Party (which rules a modern imperialist empire)?
It is just a wrong way to approach and assimilate the (very rich and instructive) history we have.
It is a method of constant analogy — where people try to understand today by approaching it through the lens experience of century-old case studies. Even if this method occasionally produces a correct stand (and it does occasionally) as a method it saps everything of materialism and critical thinking.
Justin was right to mock “quote slinging” above — and the habit of some communists to reference everything to some previous struggle (usually in pre-1930s Russia). It isn’t just off-putting and cliquish — it is methodologically non-materialist, because the situations we are dealing with have a great deal of particularlity, and an overuse of analogy is misleading.
You can’t approach a specific political question and ask “What would Lenin do?” It is a methodologically wrong use of Lenin’s contributions.
PatrickSMcNally said
> It assumes that social democrats and labor parties are
I think the key word here is “were” not “are.” I can see some justification for having still considered them as working class parties in the first half of the last century, but not in the second half. I would say that their character fundamentally changed as a result of the economic boom which followed WWII. That’s my opinion. I do see them as distinct from the Democrats at that time, to some extent. In the second half of the 20th century the Democrats moved further away from the legacy of slave-holders, while the older labor parties adjusted themselves to simply carrying out a program which was generally accpeted by all sectors of capital. Even the Communist Party of France quite overtly fell in line with this, as underscored in 1968.
But even before 1940, it wasn’t Leon Trotsky who advocated forming a People’s Front electoral coalition with the Socialist and Radical parties. That was done under the rubric of “antifascism” by the Comintern.
This has the makings of another war over definitions. A lot here seems to ultimately swirl around the stance of the early socialist parties towards imperialism, and how this should be reflected in their characterization (or not) as “workers” parties. Before the great boom which followed WWII, many workers in the major industrialized states still had a cause to feel exploited. This abated after WWII (without exactly going away) and has been creeping back since the 1970s (although most westerners still do enjoy a standard of living which would be out of reach for much of humanity).
The question which had to be dealt with by anyone on the Left back a century ago was how to deal with a socialist party which maintains support for colonial rule in Algeria or Viet Nam, but which is also involved with organizing the working class in the midst of class struggle. The answer which was given then was determined by a hope that working class struggle in the imperialist heartlands might result in a revolution some time soon. That faded out after WWII and so this original argument became redundant.
Mike E said
Patrick writes:
Yes, exactly. I think they too were a bourgeois quite chauvinist party, certainly in the 1930s, probably before. Their stands (toward both their French imperialist patrie, its empire and revolutionary possibilities) were, in the 1940s shameful and reactionary.
I think there is a lot of reason to think the French CP was never particularly revolutionary or communist.
RW Harvey said
Yes, I believe that in America it is a matter of principle to NOT participate in the electoral process at ANY level. Imperial democracy is actually a barrier to revolutionary consciousness and internationalism developing amongst the people in the U.S.
The burden, actually, may be upon those who believe this is a road to revolution to detail how this is so. Like I said in the earlier post, what is the qualitative difference that determines why we would want to create an explicitly socialist electorate (TNL’s words) versus an explicitly socialist movement more generally? Do elections provide a bridge to this socialist consciousness? If so how? By us waving placards at the back of the next Democratic convention? By us voting Obama in for a second term 2021 because he HAS TO BE better than anything the Republicans can offer? Since state and national elections are periodic, what is the work in between? Burrowing into the various local, state, and national committees? Raising money for the next attempt (a fulltime job it appears)?
My sense is that there is a fundamental difference between representative democracy (America) and a revolutionary, participatory democracy — confusion on this amounts to offering ourselves up to the deluge of habit that already creates passivity and cynicism in large sections of the population; this habit is called voting.
Who knows how revolutionary streams turn into raging rivers; who can plot the course of something like that? It appears, though, to be tectonic faultlines in the social fabric that open the door to moments when revolution and reaction clash openly over what the future will look like. Until that moment we keep our ears open and our eyes alert to the inevitable disturbances in the field of imperialism — this, and not the electoral arena, is where we can impact people with agitation, analysis, and action that will both build experience and raise consciousness.
PatrickSMcNally said
Despite some general agreement, this is a place where I think an important qualifier needs to inserted. The PCF at that time was actually acting in accordance with Moscow’s policies. We could rerun the whole span of arguments about Stalin subordinating the revolutionary aims of the early Comintern to Soviet strategy, but let’s not. All I mean is that the PCF at that time was determined less by native chauvinism than by adherence to Soviet dictates. If Soviet policy had dictated a call for Algerian independence, then they would have followed this. Just as the CPUSA took its original stance in support of a Black Belt nation under Comintern instructions.
That blind adherence to Moscow’s policy may have obscured an underlying shift going on within the PCF. When Eurocommunism was formed, the PCF really did shift overtly to chauvinism. Now they were no longer serving Moscow. Now they were serving their own native bourgeoisie. But in the 1930s this could have been obfuscated by the dynamics of the relationship with Moscow so that someone could have seen them as a “workers” party.
Mike E said
I think it is true that the European communist parties did what they were told (in the main). And the irony is that a socialist Soviet Union demanded parties in Europe that were not revolutionary.
I don’t think chauvinism arrives at the PCF in the 60s with eurocommunism. Go read their stuff from the late thirties.
Also you are mushing together different periods: The CPUSA in the early thirties was not particularly chauvinist, and adopted a position of supporting African American liberation.
In many ways the 1934 pivot point was major — and represented the arrival of the popular front politics (which demanded patriotism in imperialist countries.)
By 1934 however the CPUSA was celebrating the Fourth of July. Their leader proclaimed “Communism is twentieth century Americanism.” By 1936 they were supporting Roosevelt for president. And by the 40s they were gung ho for the U.S. military in a world war. Revolution had gone out the window.
redflags said
@Justin: The Obama administration is the enemy of freedom at home and the main danger to peace abroad – and progressive opponents of war and domestic repression need to either acknowledge that, or else give up the fight. The Obama boomerang has hit them squarely upside their heads: now they need to pick themselves up off the ground and face reality.
But this charitable assumption of the politics behind supporting Obama misses the intrinsic corruption that faces large parts of what is broadly called the “left”, surprising since Raimondo usually keeps his blade sharp for our sort. Institutional and alienated unions bureaucracies, foundation-funded NGOs and all the “non-party” left have in large measure become the constituency organizations of the Democrat Party. Think municipal unions rolling over for privatization or “service workers” supporting NAFTA candidates with tens of millions of dollars. Think NOW and the NAACP. And then watch that institutional allegiance trickle down.
There is an assumption that these institutions are “mass organizations” or, where they are near-universally not, that they “should be”. Going back to the 1930s when industrial unionism caught hold, or to the ’68 generation that rebuilt the left on new, transformed foundations… and what is funded to survive, what gets access are those networks, profile individuals and institutions which play ball.
Professionals who work through these milieu become ghosts in the machinery, whatever they want, “believe in” or hope for. So the duty of many “left activist” organizations is to round up the cadre, provide a “home” for activists, and carry on with business as usual. They know the advanced from the backward based on position and activity. So a poll of workers (or whatever respective “constituency”) is based on the managers, advocates and bureaucrats of said Democratic front organization and not the ability of the advanced to “represent the interests of the whole.”
This intrinsic corruption is often called “lack of backbone,” but that misses the material basis of these pro-Obama, Democrat politics.
As the old Soviet Union had a managerial class of CP cadre, so do most countries have a problem with social-middle-management confusing itself for representation. In power its a tyranny that anyone who worked for a labor union in the US has had a small taste of. Out of power, this intrinsic corruption serves to temper and constrain efforts at disjunction.
Philosophically, this argument plays out among Marxists as the distinction between “one into two” or “two into one”. Which is to say, revolutionary communism versus social democracy.
Corruption here is the confusion between the activist getting ahead (or in the best rationale “getting a hearing”). It confuses the network of professional leftists with the social base in need of professional revolutionaries. It reduces politics to the “possible”, which is what the liberal bourgeoisie can bear.
FRSO-FB should be commended for their bravery in simply reporting on Palestine, and the secular movements there. That they balanced this out with lesser-evilism may be understandable, but it was wrong then… and it will be twice as wrong when self-styled “progressives” come courting again after their candidate told us all to “fuck off” a dozen times. We will know who is a loyal dog of the Democrats when they work to isolate radicals, distort the actual record and trajectory of the Democrats in power.
Leave it to a libertarian to have more clarity on the left than it has of itself. Call is “plain speaking” — but the joke is on everyone who thinks conservatives are “stupid” while they vote for the very political party that proudly states its disdain for them, their agenda and very lives. Hillary Clinton and Obama murder people like us all over the world. And I promise “lack of backbone” isn’t the problem.
redflags said
I suspect Justin loves reading Lenin, and has put more time into that as a hobby than your average Leninist has in parsing their favorite chapters and verse.