Fuse
FUSE
People who thought they had clarity this time last year are confused again this year.
It’s not peoples’ fault they are confused about politics, when politics is the expression of class, gender, and imperial power. The entire apparatus of civil society bends toward the singular purpose of rendering these sources of social power either invisible or natural.
In either case, invisibility or naturalization puts these sources of power beyond our intervention.
Either there is no such thing as class power, or gendered power, or imperial power (because it is invisible), or those forms of power exist, but they are the result of the immutable laws of nature.
In extremis, those who hold that power will even accuse the subjugated of abusing them.
Back in my special operations life, we had the standard response tactic for embarrassing revelations: Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make counter-accusations.
So it is entirely possible that nothing I am about to propose will make sense to enough people to make a difference. I don’t pretend that I, or anyone else proposing a politics of real resistance, is yet standing before an audience sufficiently traumatized by the depredations of this system to embrace the spirit of actual resistance.
People didn’t know any better in 2004, and there is no reason – aside from the fact that things have gotten considerably worse – that people know any better now. After all, churches, and schools, and advertisers, and the press, and the think-tanks, and the NGOs… they have been plucking away at our heads since birth in one manner or another, and nowadays with the most sophisticated brainwashing technologies in history.
Nonetheless, I am going to run this up the proverbial flagpole, and see if anyone salutes.
Here is my grimmest prediction for the coming year.
The Bush administration will continue to occupy Iraq, and perhaps even attempt to switch sides – trying to team up with Sunni factions to cut the throats of their former allies, whose pro-Iranian politics has put the neocons into a terrible bind. In any case, they haven’t the slightest intention of giving up their Iraq bases, which were the purpose of this war from the outset.
Democrats will – with precious few exceptions – equivocate and evade on Iraq and try to wrangle other Bush administration embarrassments into a 2006 election sweep.
But the Republicans have figured the Democrats out, and the Republicans have made up their minds to fight or a one-party state, and they will take everything the Democrats do and say and beat the living shit out of them with it – as the Democrats deserve. Chalk one for the Republicans for at least being decisive.
Kerry couldn’t attack Bush on the most important issue in the country, the war, because he supported the war. Now most of these mealy-mouthed dickheads are stuck with the REPUBLICAN INCOMPETENCE argument. Republicans are not fighting the war well enough… but these same dickheaded Dems are shitting screw worms right now because after they cheer-led the Arab-bashing, kill kill kill war hysteria at its apogee, they are left floundering in the Iraq war perigee three years later.
Let’s don’t talk about that bad war, they are thinking. Let’s make a lot of noise about Abramoff and Scooter Libby.
Democrats are also now silent in the face of Katrina’s aftermath – gosh, everything must be okay now – because they are as deeply in the pockets of the gentrifying developers as any white-nationalist Republican. The Democrats support free-trade agreements, the criminal injustice system, weapons contractors… you name it, they like it. Who do people think finance their political campaigns?
Oh, they will rail to the heavens about REPUBLICAN INCOMPETENCE around Katrina, then they’ll support the rich white fucks who roll in to gentrify New Orleans into a Disneyfied Negro Theme Park that actual Black folk can no longer afford to live in.
At any rate, my grim prediction continues…
Anti-war “progressives†will continue to identify this war with Bush and his cronies, and selectively ignore the fact of overwhelming Democratic complicity and cowardice on the war.
They will excoriate those of us who attack Democrats, and as the 2006 election draws nigh, they will excoriate us more and more. “Bloody splitters…†like a Monty Python skit.
These same feint-hearted clingers will mobilize among an increasingly apathetic and disheartened population that intuits the fixed-game. They will go to the polls in November and vote lesser-evil Democrat. And they will lose.
The Republicans will use every dirty trick in the book, use the redistricting that is already a fait accompli, as well as out-organize the Democrats, and at the end of 2006, we will be closer to a one-party state… the war will continue… people will continue to die… and these progressives will go back home, nurse their sanctimony, and sputter helplessly while they go back to being good, obedient imperial citizens.
It’s funny to me that these palpitating progressives will scoff at the stupidity of the 40% of the population that still believes Saddam had something to do with 9-11, when the evidence that Democrats (1) supported and still support the war, (2) refuse to deal with the war, (3) are spineless cowards in the face of Republican criminality, and (4) will get their asses handed to them again in 2006, is just as overwhelming.
There is a way to avoid this, of course, but it is a bold way, and perhaps a way for which we as a society are not yet prepared. Maybe the pain is not great enough yet.
Nonetheless, I’m going to hook it to that lanyard and run it up the pole, upside down perhaps, not merely a flag, but the universal distress signal. Because my prediction, should it come to pass, will make what is inevitably going to get worse… much worse.
Now here is the big caveat. What I am about to propose is crossing some lines that we can’t step back across. It’s a two-step solution.
Step One: Bury the corpse of the Democratic Party.
Step Two: Make a corpse of the Republican Party.
This requires some chutzpah, and many won’t be up for it. It means undermining the Democrats in 2006 over the question of the war.
There are two parties, and they are both parties of the rich. The rest of us at this point have ZERO political independence from the parties of the rich. Anyone who thinks they can reform the Democratic Party from the inside, call me. I have a time-share to sell you in Pyongyang. It’s been tried forever, and it has NEVER worked. That could be because it can’t work. A party of the rich is by definition… of the rich. The rich are rich because other people are poor. The rich stay rich by making other people poor. Then they hire us to “clean their rooms, drive their cabs, and suck their cocks,†as it was put in “Pretty Dirty Things.”
But there is a trick to this. Many people say if we let the Republicans have it all, they are very dangerous. And whether or not this cramps up facile leftists, it is also very, very true. Republicans are very dangerous. Republicans are white supremacists. They are misogynists, more so than most Democrats even. There are quite a few of them that would resurrect Mussolini given half a chance and put his ass in the White House.
So we have to commit to step two in order to have step one make any sense.
That’s why I say we are crossing the line.
Step two is to massively and openly delegitimate, disobey, and disrupt the Republicans. I’m not talking metaphorically here. It means rebellion. It means taking on the exciting but very scary task of creating and sustaining a political crisis, like the Bolivians just did, that threatens to cause a government to fall.
This is where the Greens and the Labor Party and the New Party and all these other non-starters went awry. They put the cart before the horse.
They tried to create an alternative before there was an open space for it. They wanted to talk people into coming to their itty-bitty house when everyone was already inside two great big houses. What has to be done is tear the two big houses down, and start building something else out of the leftover material.
Quit being so goddamned afraid of a couple of nights outside.
Like I said, I don’t know if enough people are up for this now.
They will be eventually, because what we are watching right now is the rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. But some people love denial above all other things, because we are so afraid. Living stupid, alienated, well-fed, and entertained for a couple of generations will make you afraid.
Anyone my age or older remembers when we had a culture of resistance, no matter how unfocused. We flipped off authority, and we tried new shit, and we questioned everything. Our kids now are – with some very hopeful exceptions – such hopeless conformists that it makes me sad for them. There was a period when people reveled in the idea of tearing the master’s house down, even if we lived in it.
So pretty soon now, some of us old non-conformists, along with some new ones, are going to try one little thing.
We think it is immoral… deeply creepily disgustingly immoral, for politicians to dither around while people are being slaughtered in the war, or talking about incompetence in the Gulf States while they secretly support the gentrifying, land-grabbing pieces of rich shit who are perched around New Orleans like turkey vultures.
So we are going to do something.
Not much, and we don’t know if it will empower others to go the next step, that is, tell the same politicians who are allergic to any issue except their careers that they can go straight to hell, and we’ll fight the proto-fascists in the street.
We outnumber them and their cops about 10,000 to one.
Ain’t math marvelous?
Democrats, don’t you tell us wait. Because your house is not being bulldozed in New Orleans, and you have not been sent to war, and you are not waiting to see if an “exit strategy†turns up before your loved one is shipped through Dover in a flag-draped box.
Any Democrat who says we have to wait to leave Iraq until… whatever. Fuck you!
Did you get that? Fuck you! You put your sorry, pus-gutted ass on an airplane to Baghdad and take my son’s or someone else’s place while you figure out your “exit strategies.” And don’t tell me you are fighting Republicans for me. You haven’t done jack shit! I don’t need you to fight Republicans. I can withhold my taxes, or block the streets, or spit on them in their offices. I can slap the dog shit out of one Republican elected official and accomplish more against them than you have in your whole sorry fucking career.
That’s what some of us think. We ain’t waitin’ for Godot, and we ain’t waitin’ for you.
So we are going to try it, this one little thing, and see what happens.
And we are not inviting the whole world to come.
In fact, we are telling a lot of folks to stay home and do something locally.
This is our thing.
Remember the Fats Domino song, “Walkin’ to New Orleans�
It’s time I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
I’m going to need two pair of shoes
When I get through walkin’ to you
When I get back to New Orleans
I’ve got my suitcase in my hand
Now, ain’t that a shame
I’m leavin’ here today
Yes, I’m goin’ back home to stay
Yes, I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
You used to be my honey
Till you spent all my money
No use for you to cry
I’ll see you bye and bye
Cause I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
I’ve got no time for talkin’
I’ve got to keep on walkin’
New Orleans is my home
That’s the reason why I’m goin’
Yes, I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
FADE:
I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
I’m walkin’ to New Orleans
Well, members of Veterans’ for Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Military Families Speak Out, at the call of the Mobile, Alabama Veterans for Peace Chapter, will conduct a 135-mile march between Mobile AL and New Orleans LA from March 14 to March 19, 2005.
The call will go out on MLK day, and paraphrase Dr. King’s observation that “every bomb dropped over Vietnam explodes in Harlem.â€
“Every bomb dropped over Iraq explodes from Mobile to New Orleans.â€
We are going to do exactly what a lot of politicians don’t want us to do: highlight the connections between the illegal and racist war of the United States government against Iraq and the criminal neglect and militarized racist occupation mentality of the same government in the preparation for and response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
We talked about the goals of the march, and of course you have to have those. In activist-speak, everyone has become corproate, so we have to have a “goals statement.” We talked about – using the lexicon of the day – building political solidarity in the form of personal relationships between antiwar veterans and military families, and the surviving members of communities affected by the Katrina-Rita disaster.
We talked about demonstrating through our actions the solidarity of this critical working class, multi-national section of the antiwar movement (veterans and military families) with the survivors of Katrina-Rita not simply as the acute victims of a “natural†disaster, but as predominantly African Americans who continue to suffer structural injustice in the United States.
We talked about spotlighting the similarities between the emphasis on population control instead of reconstruction in both the Gulf States and Iraq, and the white supremacist assumptions built into much public discourse about both. From Angola Penitentiary to Abu Ghraib, as it were.
We talked about spotlighting the cynical and anti-working-class social spending priorities that ignore the input and needs of survivors of the Katrina-Rita disaster in the development of plans for its aftermath, and the use of poor and working class youth to prosecute the wars of the rich abroad.
We talked about conducting a strategic national-regional action that does not immerse the voices of these two stakeholder constituencies (veterans/military families and mostly African American hurricane survivors) in the cacophony of larger national actions. The connections drawn by veterans and survivors – all veterans in a real sense – must be associated with these “veterans†and not with any national grouping within which they are only a fraction.
We talked about involving larger numbers of African Americans in the effort to halt the war in Iraq by connecting that struggle with the urgent concerns of African America and exercising reciprocity from this key section of the antiwar movement with African American communities in this region where the socially structured oppression and inequality was a crisis for African Americans before the hurricanes – and only brought marginally into public view by the dramatic scenes from the hurricanes.
They bulldoze homes n Palestine. Now they do it in New Orleans.
We talked about the importance and difficulty of teaching more white people in the anti-war movement the connections between the system that colonizes African America, that colonizes Palestine, and that attempts to colonize Iraq.
We talked about demands, like self-determination for Gulf Coast hurricane survivors and for Iraqis; like immediate, unilateral, and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq; like proper care and full benefits for all veterans returning from the war, including Depleted Uranium testing and post-traumatic stress disorder treatment; like proper environmental clean-up of New Orleans and other affected areas without the mass displacement of residents; we talked about much much more.
But its what we are seeing in our mind’s eye that matters even more.
And we don’t see just “goals.” Soldiers have missions. I guess that makes us missionaries.
Walking down the highway shoulder are dozens of young veterans of the Iraq war, fatigue blouses fluttering, carrying their packs, walking most of the 25-miles per day, retracing the steps of many civil rights veterans through what some call the Black homeland from Mobile to New Orleans. They are accompanied by Vietnam Veterans, some walking, some of us aging beyond our long walk years, and along with other Veterans for Peace, rotating on and off of the accompanying VFP Impeachment buses. Prominent among them are the members of the Mobile, Alabama Chapter of VFP, who called for the action.
We envision a feat of arms… a marathon march of 135 miles, treading the breadth of the devastation, throwing their bodies – once put on the line… muscles, lungs, and feet… for imperial wars – into the road and the weather as a physical demonstration of solidarity with hurricane survivors and African Americans generally.
There will be no dilution of the veterans – veterans of the wars abroad (and the families ARE veterans) alongside Gulf Coast veterans of the war at home. No one will be able to say this is a march of “white northern liberals.†This march will have a distinct and authentic working class character; but it will not be a place where a dozen grouplets claiming to be that class’ vanguard compete to hawk their newspapers.
(If you want to do that, go to the rally in New Orleans on the 19th. If we see you on the road with us, we will get mad at you. I will. I get surly when I’m really tired.)
This is a veterans’ thing. Veterans of the wars at home and abroad.
Our identities as veterans – of war and disaster – will not be submerged in a mass of 300,000 people and bombarded by competing agendas.
At night, we stay in the homes of people who are parts of these communities, or we establish camps, reminiscent of the Bonus March camps, but mobile camps that pick up and move at dawn like a Justice Army driving into the heart of the Great Injustice.
By day, we tread down the road in an epic march, and at the end of each day, we rally, conduct press conferences, and build our new and powerful network with each other.
On the final day at mid-day, we arrive at a giant rally in New Orleans, where those voices that were silenced from the affected communities join those voices from military veterans and families to say that there is a twin injustice in the denial of self-determination to Iraqis and African Americans, and that this war and this disaster were only symptoms of the need for a larger struggle to remove the old power, root and branch, and replace them with popular power.
This is not a be-nice event. It is a be-real event.
There is a social explosion waiting to happen in the Big Easy. This march against war and injustice intends to light the fuse!
The fuse burns down Federal Highway 90, out of Mobile to Pascagoula to Ocean Springs to Biloxi to Gulfport to Pass Christian to Slidell to New Orleans.
The fuse burns through the recent Gallup poll showed that the majority of Americans now trust neither the president nor Congress, and this distrust goes across party lines.
The fuse burns through the generalizing sense of disillusion with conventional political practices, lobbying and voting, and places the politics of the war outside the obedient and contained electoral-legislative process.
The fuse burns through the neglect and abuse of the people whose lives were shattered by this storm and the government response is an ongoing, daily reality, especially in New Orleans; and so is the mounting collective anger and the sense that they themselves are the collateral damage of a colonial government, much like the people of Iraq.
The fuse burns through the long-standing mutual dependence between the Democratic Party and a whole layer of opportunistic Black politicians and relatively privileged professionals who perform a management function for the Democratic Party over the Black population as a whole.
(See the article at Black Commentator)
The fuse burns with the audacious heat of the great organizer Ella Baker, who called together radicalized students at Shaw University in Raleigh for a meeting that would found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which then went on to galvanize the Black masses of the South, and eventually the nation, with their audacious, out-of-the-box strategies during the world-historic struggle to dismantle legal Apartheid in the South – a region that remains, for numerous reasons, strategically pivotal for any social change movement.
That’s why the fuse starts in Mobile and ends in New Orleans.
This is more than a statement of strategic goals. This is a mission. This is a spiritual passage.
In March, the most fortunate among us will participate in the continuation of this same history by marching 135 miles in five days through the Gulf Coast of the United States – an area still so ravaged that residents refer to portions of it as Baghdad. We are going to comfort the afflicted, and we are going to afflict the comfortable, and we are going to show why there is a seamless connection between the slaughter in Iraq and the neglect and pillage of poor and Black people in the wake of a human, not natural, disaster.
We are going to demonstrate solidarity with a commitment of sinew and bone, with a trail of sweat, with a spiritual passage through the scene of an ongoing crime. We will walk through this domestic Baghdad, in defense of the people, truly in defense of the people this time, and with our actions we will expose the pretensions of superiority of the rich and powerful, and we will do it this time shorn of helmets and armor and shorn of weapons, naked of any defense.
***
When Operation Barbarosa was launched by Hitler’s armed forces against the Soviet Union, they were under orders to effect the annihilation of the Slavs. Ukrainians and Russians bore the brunt of this policy, as German units nailed peasants to their barns, shot them for sport, or burned them en masse alive in their homes.
24-year-old Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko was studying history at the Kiev University. She was a competitive sharpshooter in college, and she rushed to the recruiter after the initial attacks, requesting to join the infantry and carry a rifle. He wanted her to become nurse.
Lyuda refused to be contribute less than she had to offer in defense of her people. She signed up with the 25th Infantry Division. She became one of the 2,000 Soviet women snipers of which only about 500 survived the war. Equipped with a five-shot bolt-action rifle and a 4-power scope, she killed two German soldiers near Belyayevka, before she was sent to Odessa to confront an overwhelming German force.
In two-and-a-half months, Private Pavlichenko killed 187 Germans. During the Soviet withdrawal in the face of the German onslaught, she was wounded by mortar fire, while fighting at Sevastopol. In all, she would send 309 Aryans to Valhalla.
She would eventually be a school-teacher, but when she had to defend the people, 27 million of whom would be slaughtered by the enemy, she was there.
***
Jean Jacques Dessalines was born in 1758 a slave in St Domingue, now known as Haiti. He was the next General to Toussaint L’Ouverture – the first general of the slave rebels that would eventually win Haiti’s independence. Dessalines was unable to read or write and his body was scarred with strokes from the whip of his master. He ran away at about the age of 33 and joined the fight that started the French revolution.
He was known as the tiger and was said to be a born soldier. Many thought he excelled Toussaint L’Ouverture as a military genius. Yet Dessalines only learned to sign his name very late in his life. His fearlessness struck fear in the hearts of his enemies.
After Toussaint was captured, Dessalines went on to win the independence of the first Black nation by defeating the armed forces of the most revered general in the world – Napoleon Bonaparte. He had never internalized the sense that he was in any way inferior, and by his actions he not only won Haiti’s independence, he shattered the myth of white supremacy.
***
The Mungadai were an elite unit in the army of Genghis Khan. In addition to other unique characteristics, their mission was to attack the enemy well in advance of the Mongol army.
Legend has it that the Mungadai, though light in numbers and well forward of their main units, did not wear the armor helmets of the main Mongol armies. They shared with their fellow Mongol warriors an attitude of contempt for pain and death, but their reason for not wearing helmets was that it put them closer to God. God, you see, was all around them.
***
We are facing the most powerful enemy in history; the richest, the most narcissistic, the most lethal in terms of their sheer firepower… in possession of the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus ever known. And we will face resistance like Lyuda, we will face the internalized inferiority of our fellows like Dessalines, and we will go in smaller numbers and more naked in the face of our enemy than the Mungudai.
That’s because we are defending the people, when many don’t think they can defend themselves; because we know that our fear is the greatest weapon wielded by the powerful; and because we know this about the God that is all around us, the sum of all things, and that’s a lot:
I sought myself, and could not find myself.
I sought God, and could not find God.
I sought my fellow human being, and I found all three.
A revolutionary historian wrote once of soldiers – and we are all soldiers:
“Soldiers have a specific way of relating to the truth: it matters to them. It is a matter of life and death to them.
“So they judge people by a different standard of truth. And they judge politics differently. They are the first to know what kind of power comes from the barrel of a gun.
“That is why soldiers make good revolutionaries, and that is why revolutions always acquire their most turbulent force and active expression among the men and women of the armed forces, the workers in uniform.
“Soldiers are political scientists. No-one is more interested than they are, in what they are asked to die for. For this reason, no-one is closer to the heart of the people than soldiers are. When the people are rotten, soldiers cannot fight. When the people rise up, it is the soldiers who are always first to the front ranks.”
This march is our opportunity to draw nearer to the heart of the people, and why we must give this revolution its most turbulent force and active expression… why we must be first at the front ranks.
Love and rage.
Politics and poetry.
New Orleans is the bomb.
On to Mobile!
Light the fuse!
Chad:
VERY tiny clarification:
“Pretty Dirty Things†= “Dirty Pretty Things”
That was the first time I had seen reference to that movie, one I liked quite a bit but can’t seem to find anyone who agrees with me.
That quote [“clean their rooms, drive their cabs, and suck their cocksâ€] was perhaps the most memorable part of the movie, other than maybe the toilet treasure.
Cheers
10 January 2006, 11:10 pm~Chad
Randy Morris:
If we drive down from Wyoming, do we get to wear blisters into our feet alongside you guys? It’s been a while since I’ve done a 6-day road march, but I think the time has come.
I started the word going here. If you’all want a few more veterans to light the fuze, say the word. No bullshit agendas, just LPCs, rucksores, and the mission.
Or, if you need someone to play remf say the word and I’ll carry water.
Honestly, this is the first thing I’ve heard anyone propose that made a damn bit of sense. General Butler would be pleased, I think.
11 January 2006, 4:32 amStan:
I want to emphasize that the actual call for this action will come out on MLK Day from the VFP Chapter in Mobile.
We will have a web site for updates on program development. Vets and military families who want to participate will be given a contact number, and can register there. We are going to be exculsionary. Vets, military families, and survivors/local community and political formations (and press).
Everyone else who wants toparticipate or support, there will be three ways to do that.
(1) There sill be corresponding actions around the country to jam up Congress members. Military families and vets not on the march, or before or after the march, will go to local Congressional offices where their Rep has not agreed yet to stop voting funds for the war, and make that specific demand: Not another dime. Bring them home now. These actions will vary based on the character fo those who organize them locally, but some will include “occupations to end the occupation,” that is, sit-ins in the Congressperson’s offfice until s/he agrees to (a) quit voting appropriations to continue the war, or (b) the military family members and-or vets get hauled out in flex cuffs. In either case they can’t ignore the issue any more can they?
Coordinations for this will also be facilitated on the web site, with a lot of the work being done by Military Families Speak Out. http://www.mfso.org
(2) Participate in the rally in New Orleans on the 19th. Details will be revealed as the program is developed BY PEOPLE THERE… if you are part of any NYC organization, do NOT try to insert yourself into the NOLA planning. CLU, Common Ground, et al, will be figuring this stuff out.
(3) Send money to help us make this march happen. The web site will have a donation button, but in the interim, here’s what you can do:
Write a check for, just an example, $10,000. (-: Write it to “Veterans for Peace - Mobile to NOLA”. Send that check to:
VFP
Contributions - Mobile to NOLA
216 South Meramec Ave.
St. Louis MO 63105
Inquires about providing more assisance with fundraising go to anita-march@usa.net
We are also in the market for in-kind contributions: bottled water, non-perishable food, etc.
Media folks and film documentarians, contact rodino@riseup.net
Folks from the region who want to build the local anchor-events, get hold of me at stan@feralscholar.org/blog
Vets who are interested, get Dave at Daoudc@aol.com
Mobile folks, get hold of Paul at ziontrevor@yahoo.com
NOLA folks, get hold of Michael at michaelcuzzort@hotmail.com
11 January 2006, 9:09 amNeilcaff:
This march idea sounds like dynamite stuff, wish I could see it, I doubt the BBC or anyone will show it in London.
11 January 2006, 2:36 pmI have one a couple of comments on the need to challange Republicans. I will use the disenfranchised as a catch all term for the working class, women and oppressed nationalities partly for brevity but mostly because I think its pretty accurate for these groups, the vast majority in the US. Also I’ll admit I’ve never set foot in America so there’s a good chance I’m taking out my arse here.
That some kind of showdown between the disenfranchised and the bourgeoisie cannot be in any doubt. The normal methods of social control in America, consumerism (which in reality is just a form of debt bondage) sham electoral politics and the media are rapidly losing their power over a significant section of the population for reasons which have been well covered on this site and others. A more brutal, dictatorial state cannot be too far away if current trends continue unabated. The Republicans will lead this political restructuring because they have the social base and the outright nastiness to do it. The disenfranchised cannot defeat this charge if they have the collaborationist Democratats acting as a mill stone on the extreme right of the movement. So how to ditch the Dems? Maybe I’ve misread your intentions Stan but you seem to be saying the anti-war movement should agitate for people to withdraw their electoral support for the Democrats in order for them to lose their electoral base and thus fall into poltical irrelevancy (which should complement nicely their actual irrelevacy as far as struggle is concerned). From this vacuum on the left a new left wing movement of the disenfranchised can go toe-to-toe with the increasingly fascistic Republicans and put them to the sword. While I agree with your aims I don’t think the emergence of a new movement can work in these circumstances. “They tried to create an alternative before there was an open space for it. They wanted to talk people into coming to their itty-bitty house when everyone was already inside two great big houses. What has to be done is tear the two big houses down, and start building something else out of the leftover material.” I think the massive voter apathy in the US and the ready echo the anti-war movement has found in the US shows there is a significant portion of the population already outside the house, if a fighting alternative could be built it would attract the rest of the people out of the house in order to dynamite it. I dont think the Democratic party can be decisively destroyed unless there is a party to the left of it that has the trust of the disenfranchised and the authority to conduct a determined struggle against the bourgeoisie. In the absence of such a party there will always be a portion of the population who will hold their nose and vote the Democrat out of fear of the Republicans. As long as the Democrats exist the will always act as a break on the movement. What I’m saying is you guys need a party to unite all the energies of the disenfranchised. I you go up against the Republicans as an amalgam of different groups all doing different thing you’ll lose, badly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying sit on your hands and do nothing until this party shows up to save the day. I think all of the above ideas for mobalisation are great and I salute your ingenuity. What I’m saying is there needs to be a serious discussion in tandem with this towards fouding a left wing party. I’m not advocating some centralised vehicle like the old communist parties or even a new Democratic Party. Initially it would have to be an alliance of the different groups operating within the anti-war movement. I’m thinking of some kind of umbrella organisation that would allow revolutionaries, leftists, disgruntled rank and file Democrats etc to have a point of contact but still maintain some sort of organisational independence. It could give space for oppressed nationalities and revolutionary women to advance their aims inside a broader political movement. (The need for genuine organisational independence would be particularly important to win over these groups) I know I could be accused of trying to smother revolutionary energies in some kind of reformist blanket but I genuinely believe it is the duty of revolutionaries to build organisations that can help the disenfranchised defeat the bosses, if that involves working in movements that is not itself revolutionary well so be it.
Well thats enough soap boxing. Thanks for reading this.
Stan:
As I said, the notion of tearing down the Dems is unlikely to manifest itself in action yet, because there is not a great enough sense of generalized crisis.
We just want to threaten them now.. a real threat mind you… that if they refuse to weigh in against the war, we’ll withdraw support. They may turn against the war. The majority in the US already has.
As to left parties, I don’t believe in them right now. The ones we have are little more than propaganda companies at best, and cults at worst. Anticommunism is still so inscribed at the molecular level of US society that it is very difficult to overestimate.
I’m more interested in the development of vital, militant, and culturally embedded mass movements that put their own programs together without the direction of a bunch of would-be Bolsheviks. Until that happens, there is no use for a party. it will become like all the others… another sectarian club that convinces itself of its own schematic omniscience.
In this case, we just want to build solidarity with the people who ARE in a crisis, and have been in one before the acute phase post-Katrina. No one wants to get the “black franchise” for his or her own True Revolutionary Party. Folks there are in a fight for their very lives, and this is a moral imperative.
VFP, IVAW, VVAW, and MFSO are not revolutionary organizations. They oppose the war. For the same reasons they oppose the war, not in any theoretically developed way that conforms to the line laid out by the last Revoltuionary Congress or whatever, but because the contradictions are very clear.
As for the folks along the Gulf Coast, especially African Americans, I have to see THEM as OUR umbrella, not vice versa, for a lot of reasons.
Thanks for your thoughful post.
11 January 2006, 3:37 pmthe burningman:
This is great. I disagree, sharply, with Stan’s blanket dismissal of poltiical parties, but in terms of the movement terrain — he is right on target.
So much of the left, party-oriented and otherwise, seems to accept one or another version of permanent defeat. Like we’re on a long march with no destination. Any sharp, definitive statement becomes a “limit” on the “potential” of the “movement,” rather than the way we come to know things and guage our real successes and failures.
All Bosheviks are “would be” until they are. Separating social movements from underlying politics is impossible. If we write off building a party (whether you think we have the nucleus of such a party now or not) will subordinate movements, vital or not, to the limits of the “real.”
I don’t underestimate the genetic anti-communism of America. It is impossible to over-estimate — except when it’s taken to the point that says we can’t do it. I disagree, and I think that’s not what history has shown. People can actually fight in their own interests, explicitly — and form organizations which lead. That doesn’t mean that every organization that hopes to do this does — or that there aren’t real reasons (and pathologies) that hinder its development.
The Movement Is Everything, The Final Aim Nothing — this method is deeply embedded in social movements at this point. On one level Stan is recognizing the pull towards the Democrats as a dead end. On the other, he sees any attempt to “re-polarize” the country (or even the movements) around a revolutionary orientation as a fool’s quest that would be “another sectarian club that convinces itself of its own schematic omniscience.”
Just because you know SOME things, that isn’t to say you know everything. And I KNOW that even powerful mass movements will be coopted by demagogues if they don’t produce disciplined leadership cores with the capacity for progromatic leadership. Otherwise we bend in the wind. South Africa. The Second International. The CPUSA. And so on. You don’t have to be a sectarian to see this, or to be honestly concerned with addressing it.
Ruling it out of order doesn’t make it go away.
11 January 2006, 4:19 pmStan:
I didn’t say there was never a need for a party. I said there is no space for a party in the US NOW. This is exactly the reason that these mini-parties with the “correct” (what fucking arrogance!) line inevitably devolve into a collections of arcane debating societies that spend more time competing with (and attacking) one another for the limimted available membership, or the sectoral franchises (Black, Chicano, LGBT, Palestinian, et al). They are NOT the conscious expression of any mass movement. I’m all for consciousness and clarity of leadership. I just don’t believe it comes from a host of male-dominated, self-appointed “vanguards” (what a joke!) that think they can incant the revolution into existence with the quality of their propaganda.
Theory that doesn’t develop out of our present concrete struggles, and that depends on using the past as its teleological model is not worth a bucket of piss, imho.
I think Neil suggested the same thing, and discalimed any first-hand understanding of the US and its politics. We aren’t ready yet for A party of the left in the US.
If we were, it would exist.
Now we may be on the cusp of a party of African Americans. I don’t know. But collectively, there are grievances that cry out from the Black Nation that we cannot claim yet for, say, white folks… except anecdotally.
What kinds of parties have to spend half their time trying to recruit a dozen new people? No one had to do that with the cocaleros.
11 January 2006, 4:52 pmFantomas:
Stan, let me make a constructive criticism. No way in the world could I ever compose a profound statement such as this. But one thing I noticed is we need a more compact statement to fwd it around. Now I could edit that and do the same but I was wondering if you have abridged version which would reach the general public more effectively.
Also, I have a few ideas I think how this march can get publicity. And I will get into that later.
But four words:
System of Down Concert…. you could raise funds from it. And I bet Serj would do it. I don’t know if you aren’t familiar. But they replaced waht Rage aginst the Machine was to the Music scene. Very political armenian versatile metal group….
Serj (Lead vocalist) is a good fielder too on issues.
11 January 2006, 6:09 pmStan:
This was a header… a riff that talked about this event.
The actual “call” will come out officially on MLK Day, and from the Mobile AL VFP Chapter in much shorterm more accessibly popular form. So watch for that. I didn’t eant to go beyond the blogosphere in a way that would steal the thunder from the sisters and brothers there. Just a sneak peek, so to speak.
I’m all ears on any way of raising money. And I’ll travel to speak on this at fundraisers, as will others.
Hit me on my email stan@feralscholar.org/blog and let’s figure this out. I know less than nothing about organizing concerts, much less contacting big bands to make it happen.
Thanks.
11 January 2006, 6:30 pmRobin Hering:
Why do we continue to think in terms, models of political parties?
Why the need to use words like “Left”? They don’t mean much, technically, anyway.
In the meantime, “Anybody But a Dem” ought to work at the grassroots level, bumper stickers and such.
12 January 2006, 1:45 amNeilcaff:
Just to clarify some of my earlier points. I’m not advocating setting up a party right now. As you say yourself Stan the mood is not ripe for such a step. Your also correct that there is no space for a mass revolutionary party. With such varied consiousness in the US such a formation even if it existed would inevitably end up isolated. The thrust of my post was that at some stage there will be a need for a left party as the struggles between the contending classes become sharper. Right now though I think it would be useful to put out feelers in the movement to test the mood. In your main post you mention having various discussions with people on marches. Well why not see what peoples view are on this issue, what sort of issues should be its basic demands (troops out? no more privatisations? fully funded health service? etc) what sort of organisational structures could marry organisational independence with effective collective action? As you say VFP, IVAW, VVAW etc are not revolutionary organisations but wouldn’t it be useful if they were able to maintain their own existance while at the same time having contacts with other groups who could co-operate with them on actions where they share common ground? It could even become the nucleus of a millitary caucus for the party. Think about the effect that might have on Republican attempts to paint themselves as the party of the millitary. I don’t think a new left wing formation should be revolutionary. It should be open to all groups with a leftward or anti-establishment orientation.
12 January 2006, 6:34 amIn sum while no mood exists as yet for such a party if a vigorous debate within the left about it along side the tactics your proposing then the question of a party would be posed by the difficulties you will inevitably encounter in the course of your struggle. I think the coming period will be one of increasing crisis which could see sharp turns in consciousness and if the question of a party was out there in the movement then you could see rapid developments in that direction if your tactical approach was open and non-sectarian.
Stan:
I agree with you 100%, Neil. My comment about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was not hyperbole.
Hereabouts, there are complications, not the least of which — as I read history — is that our white working class (which thinks it’s middle class, and counting some imperial privilege IS enjoying a standard of living based on the US consumer-of-last-instance position in the world system) defends it racial-national privilege ferciously. Fascism is a “middle-class” phenomenon that hits when this comfortable strata is hit with an economic tsunami… if there is deep racial-national polarization and a penchant for militarism. Oops. These folks are standing on the most precarious personal debt ledge in history; and there are many metric tons of fictional value filling things like the real estate bubble here, while Dubya and his crew are driving their own train over a cliff. That’s why Bremer and the old Kissingeresque “realists” are trying to dash in to rescue the system from Cheney’s vandals.
I don’t know how the crisis will hit. Too much of a devotee of complexity theory to risk crystal-balling that way. But that it will happen — as the line went in the film Titanic — “is a mathematical certainty.”
So there are two schools of thought on this risk of fascism thing. One is to work harder to convince the white working class that their interests lie with a Black and White Unite and Fight program. The other is that white workers *generally* reject this as long as they enjoy their privileges, that they will follow their material interests, and that the way to forge unity is to strengthen Black and Brown political power first.
I’m with the second school.
In the movement work, the antiwar vets are working closely with many other organizations within the antiwar movement, and some, of course, like me, are also affiliated openly on the left. IVAW and VFP both have representation within UFPJ, for example, the broadest anti-war formation in the country. Within that formation, at least on the question of the war itself, the vets groups have worked very hard against more conservative forces to hold fast to the demand for immediate withdrawal… and that position is still explicitly the UFPJ position.
But then a formation like IVAW that coheres around a position on the war does not have any larger program, and cannot impose such on its members. So the individual members articulate with more advanced anti-imperial forces on a case by case basis.
So you can see the prevailing intersections and contradictions, and this is always a tough problem. Issue-advocacy is inherently pluralist here, as is our political culture. The war has exerted a unifying effect — but not in such a way yet as to leap over plural-ISM. We are definitly working within the movement(s) to expand and consolidate a consciously anti-imperial pole… but here is where left sectarianism actually works against us.
Anyone seeking to work more directly against imperialism, or at least asking how, is bombarded by the competition between these leftist cults, in which they each trash one another to show the superiority of their own cult over other cults… which scares large numbers of great potentially revolutionary people away.
And don’t get me started on left-wing machismo and male-leadership. I’ve been banging my head against that wall for two years. These formations seek out women to “diversify” themselves, but many smart women who ask sharp questions about the gender poltics of these outfits are … as I’ve indicated in earlier posts… given the economistic cult-line along with a copy of Engels “Origins,” and then deployed to recruit other people to the cult. Actual feminism, especially of the radical variety, is decidedly unwelcome in most of these groups, so tens of thousands of women who are seeking an organizational fit for their own political preoccupations — including anti-imperialism — are finding themselves in the liberal pluralisms that are at least not hostile to them. As I’ve said, the cults have always had a liberal line on gender. So if a woman has a choice between a liberal gender organization that tolerates differences on other topics and a gender-liberal cult that behaves as if it is hiding from the secret police and dictates the collective “line” on everything from the war to the proper way to make cake doghnuts, it’s not surprising they might choose the former.
On party formaton, the Greens attempted to fill the niche you describe, but when the Cheney-clan scared the shit out of them, half went running back to cling to the Democratic Party’s pantlegs (the irony being that they lost anyway, and the sky did NOT fall). And aside from “diversifying” the public face of the Greens with a couple of more melanin-rich spokespersons, it is so white you risk going snowblind.
A final problem, imo, that relates to this question can be highlighted by comparison to Galloway’s Respect formation, closer to your home. In short, this is working because it is local, small, and organic.. not, as some suggest, because of the superior line of some “vanguard” formation that has supported it. Embeddedness matters. With 290 million people scattered across whateve… 6 million? — square miles, this is not a viable model for the US, or even locallhy, given the high degree of cultural atomizaiton and mobility.
The exception in many respects may be along the Gulf Coast. We don’t know.
We know that a fightback is being organized, and by the actual stakeholders in the region, many of whom are not only “obejctively” (I hate that word) colonized, but who subjectively share a “national” consciousness.
So the support that gets pushed in to the region must be ceded to the local, organic leadership, in the hope that it will amplify the considerable Black political power that has been accumulated there over the years.
I’m very skeptical about the probability of a broader left-ish political formation that spans the whole country — which is multi-national and not in the least homogeneous. Every effort to do this, like Greens, New Party, Labor Party, has either floundered under the weight of its ambition (carried on the surface of an existing political Jupiter, so to speak) or been driven periodically to engage in symbolic politics, like running presidential candidates.
The conversations you suggest are terribly important, and are happening in some places (here, for example, but larger venues, too).
I’m of the Boyd school of tactical agility, and so the way I see this is we see this March action as a blow against the establishment. We don’t know how that establishment will react to that blow, in conjucntion with the host of unpredictable other factors. So we thorw it, and then we obserbe and orient to what they do, and decide on the next blow. Meanwhile, hopefully, we leave behind a Gulf Coast beachhead of resistance that has greater capacity to fight.
Just rambling with my coffee this AM
Thanks again Neil.
12 January 2006, 8:41 amI'm not a viking or anything but:
“In all, she would send 309 Aryans to Valhalla”
12 January 2006, 11:55 am*cringe* Should the large number of killed “enemy soldiers” (the youth of another country trained to kill and be killed) really be glorified as the epitome of heroism? Isn’t her courage in the face of terror enough? I mean, it’s amusing and all, but it just seems a tad innapropriate in the context of promoting class struggle. Sure, no one except a real Nazi would be bothered enough to actually be offended, but our very existence offends nazis, so that’s no big (actually, i could imagine some sorta new age neo-pagan being offended, nothing sucks more than humorless panthiests, er, except humorless monothiests). Just thought it warrented comment.. But the rest is great, inspiring as always!
not a mongol either...:
“They shared with their fellow Mongol warriors an
12 January 2006, 12:03 pmattitude of contempt for pain and death,” except when inflicted upon others of course. “but their reason for not wearing helmets was that it put them closer to God. God, you see, was all around them.” and apparently calling out for conquest. I just… I’m not sure I understand why this is here… I’m not trying be a jerk I just feel like I’m missing something.
Dick Reilly:
Stan - you might also want to look at the local grassroots organizing and popular counter-institution building that is unfolding in New Orleans right - particuarly the Common Ground Collective - a pretty amazing, locally led initiative that has scrounged scant resources to open free medical and legal clinics, a food pantry, a women’s center - and is playing a key role in the fightback against the proposed ethnic cleansing of the city’s low-income Black neighborhoods by the usual corporate-political predators.
http://www.commongroundrelief.org/
Hope you all will drop by and see for yourselves when you get to New Orleans.
Best from the crew in Chicago.
12 January 2006, 1:01 pmNeilcaff:
Hmm given me alot to chew on there Stan. Can you clarify a bit more about the two options for attacking Fascism thing. I’m not sure I agree with you on that one it sounds a bit like the mistakes made by the Republican movement in Northern Ireland (I’m an Irishman living in London) Still its a sensitive area (plus there’s huge differences between negrophobia and religious sectarianism in an Irish context) so I’d like a bit more info before I go sounding off.
12 January 2006, 1:22 pmAs for the rest more anon.
Stan:
Rippin and runnin here, so real fast.
We are already in touch with Common Ground and CLU. Tracking that. Also SOS.
Neil, no time now, but it is important to see the Black Freedom Struggle as having the character of a national liberation struggle. The division is not merely racial.
It is colonial and structural.
And right now, the MAIN organizing principle, albeit unspoken, of the Republican Party in the US is white nationalism. They stole that mantle from the Democrats with Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968. But the Dems are completely articulated with the Republicans through civil society and the way we finance political campaigns here. They split up the popular base along racial and gender lines, leaving women, conscious workers, and oppressed nationalities with this obscene political dependence on Dems to “protect” them from the most violent impulses of the fascist-leaning Republican base.
There is no painless or risk-free way out of this impasse. But I am arguing that the risks now of breaking with Democrats, in the absence of a generalized crisis, are far LESS than they will be during one.
A direct struggle for Black self-determination is not merely a containable “issue,” but strikes at the heart of the internal imperial constitution of US society.
Hypothetically, if there were a Black general strike in the US, within weeks, the federal government would be begging for solutions as the whole economy went spiraling into the dirt.
Of course, we are not “subjectively” there yet. And we are FAR from organizationally there yet. that organizaiton will be organic, if it exists at all. It WON’T be the New Bolshevik Vanguard or whatever, led by yet another male, white, would-be Lenin. it will be an expression of the concrete demands and grievances fo the Black Nation.
There is next to ZERO potential for anything like this among white America. Zero! At least for now.
12 January 2006, 3:19 pmm.c.:
Yesterday, the LA Times had a story about Bremer’s book. 1) Bremer is prolly playing CYA(according to the LA Times piece, his biggest targets are Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, & Feith) & 2) He’s cashing in for a big book advance. In an early meeting with Bush, the president tells him, “Pace yourself Jerry”, like they are back on frat row at Yale getting ready for an all-weekend long kegger. (Bremer replaced Jay Garner after a month, no saint but not ruthless enough for Cheney, imo).
12 January 2006, 3:20 pmHubris Sonic:
Excellent, sorry i cant be there with you guys.
take care.
13 January 2006, 10:19 amblubonnet:
Wow, the wind has been restored into our sails again. May we all “ride like the wind”. Well, I’m not one of you all, so I can only be filled with hope and joy and inspiration from afar. Stan IS the man. Love and Peace, and power to the people!!! May the force be with you…us all……wow.
14 January 2006, 4:24 amL Crow:
Now that there are real fires burning in the 9th - it’s to bad there aren’t more fires buning under people’s butts to get some help for the families that are being “burned out” after being “flooded out”.
I so wish I could be in New Orleans on the 19th. Moms with families just can’t get things arranged sometimes. Even my 81 yr. old mom wishes she could be there to hold a candle!!!!
Good luck to y’all - we will be watching and supporting from home!
14 January 2006, 12:13 pmConsumer:
Continually escalating actions like the one described above coupled with the implosion of the US military may well bring this bloody juggernaut to its knees.
A while back, Mr. Goff said in an open letter to active-duty US personnel that the Vietnam War was ended largely due to the military ceasing to function. On a related note, there’s an article on MSN about the slackening standards the Army is using to get warm bodies.
The writer concludes regarding the quality of the military: “No, things haven’t gone to hell in a handbasket, but they’re headed in that direction. Every Army officer knows this. And that’s why many of them want the United States to get out of Iraq.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2133908/nav/tap1/?GT1=7641
14 January 2006, 7:39 pmDougN:
I’m trying to understand what you meant with your point about “Galloway’s Respect formation”. Were you saying that a RESPECT type party couldn’t work here? I heard Galloway say when he was here that a number of people in the leadership of the anti-war movement in Britian found that they could work well together and so decided to launch the RESPECT Party. There seems to be a lot more competion and dissension within the anti-war movement here in the U.S., for example, the split between ANSWER and UFPJ. We need to find out from the Brits how they have managed to avoid the kinds of splits and fractures we have here. They have one large anti-war coalition, “Stop The War”. Based on the success of this Stop The War Coalition they were able to launch the RESPECT coalition, largely as an electoral expression of the anti-war movement. Why couldn’t we do something similar here?
14 January 2006, 11:02 pmDougN
Jorge:
For Pete’s sake, use a proofreader: from March 14 to March 19, 2005. Surely you mean 2006. And this is just one example. Not to nitpick, but these things can be important.
15 January 2006, 2:03 amJanet W:
Stan, I agree passionately with much that you have written here.
I have a suggestion for the list, something folks can do immediately and at no or almost no cost: use the letter that I have been sending in response to various fundraising letters from individual Democratic candidates, the Democratic CC (forget what letters stand for) Committee, and a few other non-Demo Party groups, like NOW, etc. The fundraising letters include a (usually) postage-paid envelope so that it costs you nothing to send off the letter. If enough of us use the Demos’ staff time and money opening not envelopes filled with checks, but envelopes filled with our demands for an end to war in Iraq, that’s one more way we can get their attention. Of course, it’s a small gesture and we need to do many, many other, more difficult and scarier things, some of which I have done and am prepared to do again (like get arrested), but it is something we can all do NOW.
Please feel free to adapt, or use this as a starting point to write an original letter. There are a few places where I have put words in brackets where you need to insert an individual or organizational name.
LETTER BEGINS HERE
I have supported [you, or organization’s name here] in the past, but now my money, time and energy must be dedicated to ending the war in Iraq.
I was disappointed that you did not name opposing the war against Iraq as a priority in your mailing. This corrupt, vicious and extremely expensive occupation/war against Iraq is the key to the Bush regime. It is destroying our economy. It is creating conditions for increased terrorist acts against Americans and our allies. It reveals the racist, colonialist beliefs of the small gang of neo-cons who have taken over the federal administration. It has killed over 100,000 Iraqis since March 2003 — not according to Islamicist propaganda, but according to US and Iraqi researchers who published their findings in the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet. It has taken the lives, so far, of about 2200 US servicemen and women.
If [you, or your organization] do not work to end this horror, you are complicit in it. They who do not speak up when crimes are committed in their name – and with their money – also are guilty!
Where is that last American who will die in Iraq for the folly of George Bush? Is he a senior in high school now? A junior? Is she in 8th grade? Is he entering junior high? Or is he, or she, in kindergarten? How long will it go, how deep will it bite into us?
Don’t say, “This is not our issue.†This war touches, infects, everything in our country. You must not evade it. When you take it on, seriously, then I will support you.
Sincerely,
[your name here]
16 January 2006, 2:24 amDan:
“I’m very skeptical about the probability of a broader left-ish political formation that spans the whole country — which is multi-national and not in the least homogeneous.” Maybe in the end there won’t be a solution that works and allows the Empire to continue — but isn’t that the point? Aren’t you all talking about a post-imperial and maybe even a post-United States endpoint on this continent?
16 January 2006, 2:20 pmBlake:
I was right -Gore is running for President!
In a remarkable speech today in DC, on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Gore, invoking “We the People” stated boldly the president has “repeatedly and persistantly broken the law”
Gore’s remarkable bipartisan history lesson demonstrated the current White House assualt on the US Constitution as unprecedented in US History.
AL GORE IN 08!- GIVE HIM IN 08 THE PRIZE THAT THE US SUPREME COURT STOLE FROM HIM IN 2000
Blake
16 January 2006, 3:54 pmhttp://www.ricklippin.com
http://medicalcrises.blogspot.com
ray-davison:
“[t]earing down the master’s house, even if we lived in it” … — when I was a girl, (Korean combat vet (radio operator) turned ATF’s daughter) checked out the house, as advised, across the country, thumb and greyhound, femmy wiles anyway, no choice for this one but to figure out what could be the point of effort, why bother catch a wave, I wandered. Not once during those years did I cross the treshold of a master’s house and hey I lived to tell the tale….
Entre nous, melanin don’t matter.
16 January 2006, 5:29 pmOut there, sure.
Boss man’s land,
though these days he’s just tall that’s all.
Sure, out there it’s to thigh size and then some and what they messing with thay for, anyway, hey! let my grand dad rest in peace.
How’s about entertaining proptings of cupid, say how came it to be bossmen get the profit from an ever expanding economy that is our, our own, our one and only aeternae life in time. Cupid no comprende land use patterns structured by the “profit motive”, n’tall.
elaina:
The language in this is fuckin’ inspirational, Stan. I was just now able to read the whole thing word for word. Thanks.
I’ll be gathering my rocks in TN.
17 January 2006, 12:48 amEric Odell:
Stan:
My belated response. First off, I am of course excited as all get-out about the prospects for the march. I think it’s exactly what we need.
Regarding some of the other stuff you discussed: I think there’s an important distinction that often gets lost in discussions such as this: that between a revolutionary party and an electoral “party.” I think it’s essential to maintain a firm conceptual distinction between the two. Ideally we ought to use two different words to describe them.
Because of the basic structure of electoral laws in this country, electoral “parties” are merely loose agglomerations of people who run for office and raise funds under a common banner. There is very little capacity for internal discipline to prevent unacceptable elements from entering or to purge them; such powers that previously existed were eliminated a century ago in the reform movement to destroy machine politics.
The combination of this fact and our “first past the post” system results in a very stable two-party system. It takes a tectonic rupture on the order of the shift in the middle of the 19th Century — in which northern industrial capital replaced southern agricultural capital as the dominant sector of capital in the country, along with that small matter of slavery — for a new party to emerge. Even in that case the electoral system was still in the middle of a process of consolidation.
Even though I spent my first six years of activism working in the Green Party, including a stint in the party’s national office, and still have a lot of sympathy for them, I have become very skeptical about the chances of a third electoral party to do more than create some external pressure on the Democrats. If progressive movements become strong enough, the Democrats will shift to the left just enough to absorb any electoral expression. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it again.
If somehow a third party managed to build itself up to the point where it could seriously contest against the Republicans and Democrats and threaten to replace one of them despite somehow not having a segment of capital represented within it up to that point, you can be absolutely sure that a chunk of capitalists would walk right on into that new party. There’s no way to stop them under the electoral laws of this country. Then that party would over time (and probably quickly) become a new Democratic Party, differing just about only in name from what we’ve got now. And as strongly as I believe those laws should be changed, I think it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to do so. After all, it’s keeping capital in charge of the entire electoral system — at least all parts that matter to them.
The upshot is that the mechanisms that have been developed to ensure the continuation of the two-party system and of the two parties within it are astoundingly strong and backed by both those parties and almost the entire ruling class in general. The more I think about the problem of electoral politics, the more strongly I believe that the left should treat it in a fundamentally pragmatic fashion. We are not going to make more than limited gains as a result of struggle in that realm. We should instead view electoral politics fundamentally as a way to consolidate gains that are won in the streets and other such places.
So I guess I disagree with a purposeful strategy of trying to take down the Democrats partly because I believe it would be almost impossible to succeed. (There’s also the principle of “targeting the main blow against the main enemy,” which I uphold against what I think are ultra-”left” alternative formulations.) That doesn’t mean I’m opposed in principle to third-party efforts, at least as a way to put pressure on the system. We should certainly energetically attack the Democrats when we need, but with a goal of bludgeoning them into responding to us. That’s my view.
Since the question of building a revolutionary party (or parties) of the dispossessed, as I noted, is an entirely different set of tasks, I’m going to leave it there.
17 January 2006, 3:17 amjonboynemo:
i’ll vote for gore if he grows his beard back.
17 January 2006, 8:50 amGeorge Richards:
In Canada we had a well loved politician of the left, Tommy Douglas, leader of the NDP party. He had a favourite story of a country of mice with two rulers, a White Cat and a Black Cat. The mice would vote for the White Cat and suffer terribly so they would vote, next time, for the Black Cat and suffer equally. And so it went. One unusually astute mouse opined that it wasn’t the Black or White, it was that they had no choice but to vote for a Cat.
17 January 2006, 10:26 pmthe burningman:
How exactly do we “bludgeon” the Democrats into “responding to us?”
Is the line of “ultra-left” where we no longer speak truth to power, but start speaking the truth of power?
I have tremendous difficulty even conceiving of Obama/Hillary/Edwards taking anything like a position I would support, let alone taking the time to “bludgeon” them… It’s like shaving with a butterknife.
18 January 2006, 10:45 amStan:
Or praying for a weedless garden.
18 January 2006, 11:59 amEric Odell:
> How exactly do we “bludgeon†the Democrats into “responding to us?â€
By demonstrating in the streets, occupying their offices, marching to New Orleans, etc. How else? My point is that a strategy specifically targeting the Democrats for destruction rather than targeting them in proportion to the actual role they play would be in my view incorrect for a number of reasons.
> Is the line of “ultra-left†where we no longer speak truth to power, but start speaking the truth of power?
I don’t conceive of strategy as being mainly about “speaking.” It’s fundamentally about struggle, about organizing and fighting to hurt the enemy and achieve near-term gains for the people that are partly oriented to put us in a more advantageous position in terms of the balance of forces in order to win bigger gains down the road, and eventually everything.
The ultra-”left” line I refer to is the idea that we should primarily target the liberals within the bourgeoisie as the main enemy because the pretense that they are on our side is preventing the masses from flocking to our banner. This is a complementary error to the rightist one that lets them off the hook because we think they really are on our side and will start demonstrating it any day now.
As I said, I think the correct line is one that targets different sectors of the class enemy in proportion to the actual role they’re playing in practice. And we use the struggle of the masses to target them. When the level of mass struggle is high, the entire playing field shifts in our direction, liberals and conservatives alike. It happens unevenly at any particular moment, but that’s the overall process. When struggle is low, the whole spectrum shifts in the other direction. That’s why we had Nixon supporting things like affirmative action and welfare back in the day at the height of the movements, and why we had Clinton destroying such things at the low point of the struggle in the ’90s.
18 January 2006, 2:25 pmGary Goodman:
I would like to invite anyone very astute in the ways and means of Marxism and popular revolution — but esp. Stan — to contact Alex Jones and see about getting on his show.
I mention that in this article because it mentions the devout anti-communism of the Dems. Jones comes from a family of Birchites, and rejects Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and Castro — as well as makes fun of the RCP in his Martial Law documentary — but he has been forced by some callers to concede that some socialist websites have good news articles and I managed to get him into a conversation where he agreed that “seizing the means of production” such as corporate media and some of our basic infrastructure such as water, GM food, and energy back from the scam artist New World Order is essential for even basic Constitutional Liberty.
He covered KATRINA not as a FEMA fuckup, but as a FEMA Martial Law DRILL. In other words, the needed to create disaster and CHAOS to bring in their ORDER.
Depending on what rant you happen on to, he might sound “weird”, but I find him eminently reasonable, esp after he explains what he means. I just saw one he did about supporting Police — but not police corruption.
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/alex_jones_reports.html
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/articles/december2005/031205jonesreport.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.tv/articles/october2005/271005jonesreport.htm
I would ESPECIALLY invite Stan to reach Jones because Jones needs to understand that real communism is not the RCP cult. Also, he has on a lot of Military dissidents, he had on one guy (anonymous) talking about training for Martial Law situations, detention camps, etc.
Alex could be a good ally, and he supposedly gets more hits than Rush Limbaugh.
Coming from an OLD-conservative perspective, he makes fun of “liberals” but also cracks on the dumb ‘ol boys who send him hate mail and threats because they think that Bush is a conservative.
An alliance between real marxists and real conservatives would DEFINITELY be revolutionary.
18 January 2006, 7:48 pmStan:
Eric,
I would agree with you if that were what was being said… about flocking to banners and all. That’s a straw man.
I’m totally with you on the necessity to strengthen the social movements. I’m one that’s been arguing for a couple of years now that the left has the responsibility to unite with feminists for that very reason (this is the greates latent socialmovement we have, and the left participated to some degree in its marginalization).
But the biggest issue in the US right now is the war, and not just the US. The loss of Iraq and the weakening of the US state will contribute immeasurably to the space needed by mass movements that are objectively anti-imperialist all over the world… which, by the way, constitutes a good deal more human beings than just us.
On the issue specifically of the war, the majority of the US is now to the LEFT of the Democrats… WAY to the left of them. These same Democrats are trying to sideline the issue of the war out of election year opportunism (and the kn owledge in some cases that thedefeat in Iraq WILL weaken American world dominance). The Republicans are not going to oppose this war. The Democrats are objectively vulnerable to the demands of the anti-war movement, and that vulnerability will disappear in November.
If we don’t make a credible threat right now to tear the carpet out from under them, we are NOT uniting with the masses, but participating in their betrayal.. and not only in the US, but everywhere. We are asking them to contain themselves within an electoral strategy that takes away this moment of leverage (power).
I’m not promoting ultra-leftism, especially of the white variety that seems to have no clue about the contradictory relationship between the Black Nation and the Democratic Party. Definitely not a fan of categorical tactics (which is stupid and schematic in the extreme). There may be circumstances where uniting with Democrats is important… unless one is a petit bourgeois moralist.
That time is not now, and our threat must be credible.
The idea is not to tear down the Democratic Party (as an institution) so everyone will “flock to our banner.” It’s to get them out of the way so the people can raise their own banner. We cannot mistake the very ephemeral political hegemony of the Republicans for anything except what it is… a gasp of imperial mortality.
And we cannot fail as internationalists.
18 January 2006, 8:00 pmCOMPANERO:
Dear Stan,
Your comments about fascism and the middle class, specifically the one about the real estate bubble and the financial TITANIC that the middle and upper middle classes of this nation have created for themselve were diamond bullets of thought.
Could you please elaborate on the coming collapse of the housing market, the US dollar as a reserve-petro currency, and how the indebted middle white class may react politically, and what alliances may form due to a catastrophic financial KATRINA.
IN THE SPIRIT OF JOHN BROWN, KEEP FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT!! SLAVERY NEVER ENDED..IT SIMPLY SHAPE-SHIFTED. (EMPLOYEE=SLAVE)
19 January 2006, 3:27 pmEric Odell:
> I would agree with you if that were what was being said… about flocking to banners and all. That’s a straw man.
You’re right, I shouldn’t tar you with the brush of Trotskyist thinking. Your plan is more subtle. Unfortunately, though, it seems to me to end up in just about the same place with regards to electoral politics.
> But the biggest issue in the US right now is the war, and not just the US. The loss of Iraq and the weakening of the US state will contribute immeasurably to the space needed by mass movements that are objectively anti-imperialist all over the world… which, by the way, constitutes a good deal more human beings than just us.
> On the issue specifically of the war, the majority of the US is now to the LEFT of the Democrats… WAY to the left of them. These same Democrats are trying to sideline the issue of the war out of election year opportunism (and the knowledge in some cases that the defeat in Iraq WILL weaken American world dominance). The Republicans are not going to oppose this war. The Democrats are objectively vulnerable to the demands of the anti-war movement, and that vulnerability will disappear in November.
I think part of the problem is in thinking about the Reps and Dems a little too much as monolithic institutions. As I noted in my previous post, they’re really much more of a pair of loose conglomerations. And they both contain substantial contradictions within them along a number of lines. (I know you know that well.)
While there is certainly no substantial division on the war amongst the Republicans at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one start to emerge before the end. So I guess I would somewhat disagree with you on that point.
However, you’re also overlooking an even more important point: Republican pro-war incumbents can easily be kicked out in the fall by Democrats running on an anti-war platform (in certain combination with an anti-corruption, anti-torture, etc. program). The Republicans are very vulnerable right now. Attacking particularly vulnerable Republicans would send just as strong a message, both to the Republicans and to the Democrats, about what they’d better do, if it’s clear that any pro-war congressperson is in danger.
We’ve already seen that start to emerge as a phenomenon, with Paul Hackett in Ohio in particular; I’m sure we’ll see a number of such candidates in the fall (mixed in, of course, with a larger number of Democrats dodging the issue, as you point out). If the war is the most important issue, as you write, I think we would be nuts to avoid attacking vulnerable Republican incumbents to help drive them out of office in favor of following a mechanical strategy of only attacking Democrats. In my view, that would be a disservice to the anti-war, anti-occupation movement, both in terms of reduced immediate gains and a less advantageous position down the road to influence subsequent votes.
It would be essential to push a strong line of independence from the Democrats in the movement, of course. Tailing the Democrats is certainly one danger, but I just don’t believe any other basic strategy is correct. We shouldn’t play favorites in either direction.
> The idea is not to tear down the Democratic Party (as an institution) so everyone will “flock to our banner.†It’s to get them out of the way so the people can raise their own banner.
I guess I don’t understand what you mean by this. What does “getting them out of the way” mean concretely? Maybe I’m misinterpreting the stuff you wrote in your original post, but I just perceive a certain amount of voluntarism. It would be great if we could sweep the Democrats and Republicans away, but do you really think we have the forces on our side right now to do anything along those lines?
We need to carry out a strategy of winning what we think we can in the near term, based on the forces we have now and think we can develop within that near term. Along with that, we build boldly for the medium term based on our knowledge that most of the country is on our side and some decent fraction of them can surely be mobilized. That’s the “left” spirit that I unite with in your post. But boldness on its own apart from a hard-assed materialist assessment of the actual balance of forces leads to voluntarism (and, in other circumstances, adventurism).
19 January 2006, 5:04 pmStan:
I don’t have any diamond bullets, and surely not a crystal ball.
The alarm about fictional value bubbles is not being sounded by the left (that seems relatively oblivious to it), but by people from Morgan Stanley, etc. Ditto on the question of massive US national debt owned by places like China.
My hypothesis is that what the ruling class is most proficient at in crises is boiling frogs.
You know how that old saying goes, you boil a frog very slowly, so he never knows he being boiled.
The ruling class looks around and asks, which frogs have the least potential to destabilize us politically, or theleast ability to fight back, and they choose those frogs to export their crises onto.
The American white “middle” class, who are proletarians with a lot of imperial privilege in the form of color tv’s and water parks and other consumer cocaine, nurtured from birth on negrophobia and the like, that forms the popular base of the Republican Party and a significant chunk of the DP. They are LAST in line for the froggy pot. The weakest and most ill-positioned go first.
The housing market may drop like it was shot through the brain stem, or it may stutter in for a hair-raising but successful landing like a badly flown Cessna. Butthat fictional value has to go somewhere, or like the dotcom crash, it gets shunted off onto the rest of us indirectly.
There are too many variables, and too many of them subject to human intervention to predict. But at each step along the way, it certainly sems important to contend with the ruling class for the attention and loyalty of key members of that “middle” class.
19 January 2006, 5:56 pmchip sommer:
Hi Stan
I wish to comment on one aspect of this discussion- I’ll lead by quoting one of your posts
“So there are two schools of thought on this risk of fascism thing. One is to work harder to convince the white working class that their interests lie with a Black and White Unite and Fight program. The other is that white workers *generally* reject this as long as they enjoy their privileges, that they will follow their material interests, and that the way to forge unity is to strengthen Black and Brown political power first.
I’m with the second school.”
Personally, I am in between those schools- and here’s why.
“as long as they enjoy their privileges” Well hell, those privileges seem to be getting less and less every day. In fact, they only exist for many in comparison to the outright homeless or the poor of Bangladesh (I exaggerate here, somewhat). The main privilege many working people, white and otherwise, seem to have these days is to work more and more for less and less. And many of them know it. The question becomes- who to blame? The rich, or the fill in the blank- Blacks, Arabs, uppity women, dope fiends, The Jews, Satan…. (actually, Satan places pretty high on my list, and I am not a Christian
The question does become,as you note, where will people land when they fall off the cliff? What direction will they be facing?
People will “follow their material interests”, but even with TV and debt it is a harder and harder sell to make people believe they are doing well, when their day to day reality is the opposite.
If the system is failing to deliver(and it is) - on even a minimum level for many, both white and otherwise, the material interests argument holds less force.
I would also say that this point of view reminds me of the Weather Underground (see Ron Jacobs’ excellent study ‘The Way the Wind Blew’) - and to some extent might rest on a construct of ‘white working class’ that was perhaps more valid in 1968, when a unionised George Meanyized white male working class with a decent standard of living maintained by one job was what people had in mind when they mentally pictured ‘white working class’ “Hardhats vs Hippies”, anyone?
OTOH, I know a lot of white working people(some of my personal friends, actually, though certainly not most of them) who cling to the spar of identification with their oppressors, or at least to GWB and the stinking war, no matter unaffordable healthcare, housing, few opportunities, prison, the whole lousy deal. Crummy education, mucho TV……
I just don’t know- miles to go before I sleep.
regards as ever
19 January 2006, 6:11 pmStan:
Answering both posts briefly.
For Chip, Eric and I are both familiar, as you may well be, with a piece called The Road Not Taken, which shows clearly that every time in American history that the white working class has been presneted with the choice beteen solidrity with fellow Black workers and white bosses, the ultimate choice has been to side with the white bosses. This lesson cannot be easily ignored. The white bosses had the political power to weild both carrot and stick. Black workers were given the stick and white the carrot. I don’t see how one gets past that without the prior empowerment of African America.
To Eric, I have never advocated attacking anti-war Democrats. We should campaign for them like they were our rich first cousins.
But I’ll make a bet right here that the VAST majority of Democrats, barring a credible threat to boycott them, will evade the issue of the war this election cycle like the avian flu. These marching orders are from the DL fucken C.
Look at the Stepford clones they are grooming for 2008 if you don’t believe me. Schumer? Clinton? It’s obscene, really. Even from their own standpoint. The only thing they know how to do at this point is snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
And we have to be clear what it means to be anti-war. The demand that will be made by the community I work with now will be (1) not one more day, (2) not one more dime. Haydenesque “exit strategies” are offensive to us. They insult our intelligence. Especially the families with someone over there.
Which ones of us get a very unwelcome visit from a military sedan while these protracted “exit strategies” are being implemented?
So we’ll be targeting Democrats (no, not anti-war Democrats), BECAUSE they are the ones who can give us what we want… a refusal to continue to fund the war.
We have NO power over the Republicans right now. And the greatest need of the antiwar movement now is to escalate. We haven’t pinched them enough, and our strength is growing. The election is EXACTLY what gives us the leverage we have. Asking us to lay off pro-war or vacillating Democrats (I don’t think you’re saying that.) just to defeat some Republicans, is demanding we surrender this temporally-circumscribed power at a critical moment.
The Democrats need the Georgetown shit scared out of them right now. I plan on doing that with some other foks in March, when we stand in front of David Price’s office and burn our voter registration cards.
Having a kid in Iraq will make one a little adventurist.
19 January 2006, 7:40 pmMark:
“But I’ll make a bet right here that the VAST majority of Democrats, barring a credible threat to boycott them, will evade the issue of the war this election cycle like the avian flu.”
You’re not kidding. I’ve been scouring the websites of Democratic challengers here in my state (Missouri) and there’s not a word to be found about the war. They’re going up against some of the most reactionary Republicans and they seem pathologically incapable of discussing the giant, shitting elephant in the middle of the room. You’d think at least those who are getting no support from the DNC because their districts aren’t seen as “competitive” would have the guts to say something…anything!
Whatever happened to weathervane politicians? It’s glaringly obvious which way the wind is blowing in relation to public opinion on the war, yet the Dems don’t even seem capable of being opportunistic anymore. Hell, I’d welcome every bandwagon jumping politico we could get.
20 January 2006, 3:29 pmchip sommer:
Good point regarding history- the regrettable history of white- black populist alliance in the South,for instance, as embodied in the career of Pitchfork Ben Tillman is indicative at least.
But not dispositive, as the lawyers might say. I could also point to various CP-led efforts in the South during Depression days which didn’t follow the pattern. And to the post-Reconstruction Southern Populist movements before they were hijacked into racism and subverted by the offensive of big money and the promise of personal gain for the leaders. But you could just as easily say that in the long run, they didn’t amount to much. and you would probably be right. One step forward, two steps back.
Point is though, through their own sheer greed, they are running out of carrots for many, whites included, and you can’t maintain the facade on sticks alone.
The boiled frog analogy is very correct- if you had the drop in standard of living between 1973 and today compressed into a couple of years, there would have been a political earthquake. The boiling trick that I like the most is the way in which ‘middle class’family income has been maintained by forcing families into two or more full time jobs just to get by, while convincing many people that this was “Women’s Liberation”. Of course, the full participation of women in the workforce is liberating, unless you have no real choice in the matter. Or unless the job is awful, as so many jobs are.
It’s hard to define working class vs middle class(or petty bourgeois, if you will) anymore - -ownership/nonownership of the means of production, or having a ‘profession’ requiring some degree of education, or a small business, is not as much the defining factor in my mind as is personal wealth. If missing a month’s pay means you are in serious deep trouble, you are working class, even if you don’t know it, and even if you own your own pickup truck and tools (or your own computer)
Reckon you can be both at once in today’s world, educated with professional status, but still broke. Or you can be a line worker at Boeing, making good money but definitely meeting the Marxist criteria for working class status, working in a factory under industrial discipline. Not sure if it really makes a difference most ways anymore.
If everyone is ‘middle class’, than maybe no one is, especially when you consider the pervasive economic insecurity that many live with although they are educated and have fairly decent jobs, these jobs can disappear at any time, and people have to work harder and harder to hold them, to the exclusion of their families and participation in the civic sphere.
Many professional sorts, highly educated, are still just selling their labor, skilled as it might be, to companies that are just as uncaring as any classical Taylorite-Dickens piss factory. And many are on the same economic knife edge as any lunchpail fellow, or woman, working at ‘the point of production’, at least until they move said point of production overseas. I’m not saying that working in a chicken plant for $ 6.50 an hr is no worse than working in a cubicle hive for 60K per annum. There are most certainly differences of both kind and degree.
One more thing- could you consider asking your web designer to make the RSS comment window bigger?
Thanks again
chip
20 January 2006, 5:03 pmStan:
Tillman brings out my point exactly! Excellent book is Democracy Betrayed, Cecelski, that covers this whole exciting, then sorry, episode.
I would also add, there is a gender dimension to this color line, and Tillman et al were masterful in exploiting it. The myth of the Black satyr was the fuel for anti-Black violence — commmited in the name of protecting “white womanhood.” Folks want to treat this as a kind of propaganda curiosity. It’s not. It underwrites white supremacy to this very day.
One of a legion of examples of masculinity constructed as violence.
20 January 2006, 9:31 pmthe burningman:
I don’t know if it’s praying for a “weedless garden” to say that apple seeds won’t grow you an orange, that they never have and never will.
There’s also a connection between mocking even the notion of communist-party building and proximity to the Democrats (or, in other countries whatever party fills that role). Orienting towards the best wing of the Democrats has been the “trick” that’s eaten the North American left alive, over and over again.
The CP became the militant wing of the New Deal coalition. Many who started out as communists in the 1970s moved into accomodation with the Democrats, more or less, in the 1980s via the Jesse Jackson campaigns.
Once politics is viewed as ultimately playing out inside the realm of the existing state, with the existing poltiical parties viewed as legitimate — or more cynically the only possible game in town — radicals learn to temper themselves not to “reality,” but to the necessities of that left wing of capital.
Instead of contending with the liberals for leadership, we are to conspire with them — and the tail really doesn’t wag the dog.
The situation is rough now. With the hard right pushing and twisting everything in government and the larger society to nefarious ends, liberal Democrats aren’t the enemy. But if you’re working with them amid their profound crisis, I hope there is some means for struggling with the followers of liberalism that “another world is possible,” and that we need our own organizations and direction.
I don’t believe the liberal Democrats will be able to hold the line against all that Bush represents. The first president I remember was late Reagan, and since then the Democrats have tacked to the right as fast as the Republicans could pull them. It got so bad that people who viewed themselves as on the left continued to support Clinton after he bullied through NAFTA, doubled the prison population and demolished welfare.
There will be many flags on the field. At least I hope those pragmatic activists who do work in the shadow of the Democratic Party find an ounce of comradeship for the analysis that thinks we’ll win more by creating new facts than re-arranging what’s already out there.
21 January 2006, 12:18 pmStan:
Let’s see… so this means that the struggle is based on the correct ideological line… and the masses?
This sounds like plain garden-variety philosphical idealism.
The fact is, the metropolitan left, including the ones who adhere to the fetish of “Leninism,” whichever deefintion you prefer, has never led a successful revolutionary struggle… period!!!
The majority of the people we will need in any struggle now and the future are in some ways dependent on the Democratic Party. I’m talking tactics, not some lefty-version of moral purity.
Liberal Democrats, in the rank and file, are people. They have the capacity to change. That change is generally wrought by conditions, not the elegance and internal consistency of our lines. They also happen to be the people among the working class, oppressed nationalities, and women (many overlaps here) who are the ones we should be engaged with to win them over to a more thorough and advanced understanding of how the system actually works.
21 January 2006, 1:03 pmBlake:
I agree with STAN. Workers are key (including women workers) who are royally getting screwed and squeezed.Obscene executive salaries combined with executive corruption, outsourcing and downsizing are setting the stage for a workers revolt - not bloodshed but leftist/democratic political victories.(despite the political corruption scandals) Health care a huge issue. Agree with Stan- tactically move the Dems to workers side and it’s a sure win in the 06 and 08 elections.Workers are fed up and justifiably scared and are going take this crap much longer
22 January 2006, 12:25 amthe burningman:
Mocking the “correct line” is easy enough when ideas are treated as mere utility. It’s even easier when we promote what are “incorrect ideas” and hope for the best. Garden-variety idealism here in the USA is “pragmatism.” It’s almost totalitarian this pragmatic instinct to make the best of what IS, not what can be.
Everyone has a line — and all organized forces operate by one, whether its explicit or assumed, “correct” or ass-backwards.
There is a difference between the social base that the Democrats (sometimes) pander to, and their own interests.
You are absolutely right about changing consciousness and our responsibility. I just don’t think we should stop when we get to where it hurts. We aren’t going to win the world through analysis and argument. But… we also won’t do what we can by merely corralling people based on what they already know and (helping) deliver their outrage and hopes to a political party that is not ours.
Revolutionary organization will not descend from outer space, or through being better liberals than the Dems.
The Democrats will not “move” to represent the people’s interest. The history of radicals trying to “move” them has shown, what I see anyway, as a STRONG tendency for the movers themselves to get disarmed politically.
I prefer the definition of Leninism that has made revoltuions: about the need for leadership organizations, proletarian internationalism, anti-imperialism, and his scathing critique of the Social-Democrats for their pragmatic fetish of bourgeois democracy to the exclusion of revolutionary possibilities.
You can put Leninism in quotes, Stan, and act like its all just hooey — but you are disarming people from some of the richest historical (and methodological) thinking the socialist movement has produced.
Lenin (et al) didn’t have a road-map for us to follow and the archiving Trotskyite grouplets having been able to assemble one from aphorisms.
But if you equate “charting the uncharted course” of revolution in the USA with culty hectoring ON PRINCIPLE, then you’re blaming raincoats for the weather.
22 January 2006, 2:16 pmthe burningman:
Just so we’re not talking past each other, I said nothing about “moral purity.” Or about not working with those who still hold illusions about the role of the Democratic Party. Or about what is the (mythical) “one true way.”
There is a profound difference between demagogues and those they appeal to, just as there is a real (line) difference between said demagogues and those who lead people based on their own interests — whether that is recognized at every straw poll or not.
22 January 2006, 2:50 pmStan:
Not speaking for Blake, as I think our statements were conflated here.
Lenin was not a Leninist:
http://www.marxmail.org/DemocraticCentralism.pdf
Lenin belonged to a social-democratic party.
Lenin led a revolution in an only-partially proletarianized, mostly peasant, backward Eurasian nation at the turn of the 20th Century, before the advent of modern anticommunism, and on the heels of a ruinous European war.
Lenin is dead, and the capacity for revolutionary thought did not die with him.
Lenin was not omniscient.
Lenin would probably agree with me right now.
Is what’s going on in Venezuela right now “Leninist”?
All the comments about outer space and delivering to Democrats are straw men.
And not to introduce too much of a distraction around “secondary contradictons,” as soon as the Leninist left shows me that they have the least clue about gender as a class system, I will start to take them more seriously.
We aren’t presented with the War of the Roses, and we are not being presented with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Give me some form of broad socialist alliance in this country right now, and I’ll die happy.
The possibility, under current conditions in the US, for a genuinely mass revolutionary party are about the equivalent of me walking out in my front yard and being killed by a meteorite.
Lenin was very big on recognizing these kinds of realities. Because the question before us, at all times, is:
What is to be done?
That’s my Leninism.
Right now, we are planning a march on the Gulf Coast. The goal, along with other campaigns, is to stop the war.
22 January 2006, 6:07 pmthe burningman:
What’s happening in Venezuela is not Leninist — but so what?
It’s fascinating, open-ended and is changing the game. I’m not wed to forcing reality into a conceptual framework — but I also think that we should be careful about “wish fulfillment,” even and especially in those places that are most exciting.
The idea that we (or I) sit in judgement over movements and say what is worthy is not the same as dogged criticism. Will Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution provide a model? Is standing up to US imperialism’s poltical maneuvering the same as breaking the internatinal capitialist system?
A friend of mine put it like this: Chavez doesn’t look nearly as radical from Madrid as he does from DC… and there is more than a little truth to that.
The same way here.
Do you think we can wait until we need a party to DEPLOY in order to start building it? Aren’t revolutionary parties built through struggle in non-revolutionary times? Isn’t an essential part of that process questions of line and orientation?
While Lenin was in a social-democratic party, he founded the communist movement as such and BROKE with them. He encouraged splits internationally, advocated periodic “house-keeping” of political parties based on the sharpest line distinctions — and demonstrated how opportunism in times of weakness trained for abdications in times of strength.
All I’m really saying, Stan, is not to snipe so hard at your left. There is room for principled disagreement, and those who can’t wait (or don’t think we should) aren’t simply fools talking to themselves.
Regarding the question of gender and class: One thing I think the Maoist movement has demonstrated throughout the world is the primacy of women’s liberation. It is how the social question is put at the fore. Demanding that largely peasant armies accept political AND military leadership from women is earth-shaking.
I don’t know if it involves the conceptual break you are currently advocating, and I eagerly await your book so I can see exactly what you’re getting at.
Speaking personally, I can’t even imagine a socialist movement that doesn’t foster and create the immediate liberation of women. From my experience with Leninist organizations, and forgive me if yours is different, I’ve seem that they are largely led by women at every level and view women’s emancipation as intrinsic to socialism, not an “issue” to be “dealt with.”
23 January 2006, 3:14 pmelaina:
I for one am glad to see Stan “sniping hard” at the left, especially in the arena of gender conflict, which is what it is.
I’m not a veteran of the field when it comes to radical politics. I’ve been involved for what, 3 years or something like that. The last 2 years that I was in college. I kinda developed my own radical politics, then went out looking for groups to become involved with. So when I was 24, I started doing organizing, etc.
Now. Even at the age of 24, as a non-traditional student, working very hard to make ends meet and NOT AT ALL ABLE TO COUNT ON MY FAMILY FOR MONEY (caps is ’cause that’s important to remember) I can say that for all the lip service that was given my lived experience, and all the lip service that is given to making sure that women have leadership positions in orgs, feminist process at meetings, what have you; I can honestly say that I still felt alienated and I still felt like I didn’t belong. My working full-time is something that conflicts TO THIS DAY with my wish to be involved in political and community organizing. I have never had a “day” job, that is, one with hours to facilitate going to meetings and that sort of thing. In college, I worked a lot of 36-40 hour weekends that kept me from “socializing” with folks.
I’ve not felt as alienated from workmates or from people in the same type of situation.
SO what I’m getting at with all this is maybe the left needs a few hard nips at it’s toes to get it stepping in the right direction, which is forward.
24 January 2006, 2:02 amL Crow:
Somewhere along the way some have forgotten what this is all about -
A march for our brothers and sisters that have lost everything and seem to have not even have a prayer for replacement!!!!!
Come on people lets get with the program and bring our troops home now.
Oh yes, Elaina - go get’em girl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
27 January 2006, 10:37 pmBlake:
Hey Y’all. Don’t want to take the steam out of your MarchMarch but GORE IS GREEN AND GORE IS LABOR-He’s got the goods to let you die happy without a bloody revolution.
5 February 2006, 6:15 pmStan:
Uuuhhhh… right!
Is Gore committed to stop the war in the process of taking us all to the promised land?
5 February 2006, 7:00 pmRandy Morris:
There is no salvation to be sought from anyone who cleaves to the Establishment parties. I am in the midst of it and I see only minimal effort, and that is almost universally applied in a vain attempt to maintain the destructive, dehumanizing system that is carrying us over the edge.
Gore doesn’t want to change the System–up until a few months ago he wasn’t even willing to criticize its current avatars. Gore wants to replace Bush, but he is far from labor (with a little “l,” as Labor with a big “L” is drawing its last breath in this nation) and he is FAAAAR from Green.
Gore is a believer in the Democratic Party. I never really understood the power, the sweet, seductive, hypnotic power that participating in one of the Establishment parties could exert. Now I know–and now I will forever understand the effect. Gore is one of them. McCain is one of them. Feingold is, Boxer is, Leiberman is, ad nauseum… They all believe that the Eighties can be brought back, that environmental and social degradation don’t necessarily have to be permanently linked with capitalism. They all believe in the miracle of the Market in all things (with a little tweaking here and there).
The people at the bottom of the party with me are good people, but most can’t see what’s really happening. Lord knows, I’ve tried to help them, as have many others. And the few who begin to catch a glimmer of the real depths, the true antipathy the system carries for them usually withdraw in despair. As I will soon.
Gore is no saviour. There are no political saviours, with the exception of–and I say this with knowledge that I am quite…trite–us. The people. The scum. The workers. The thing they fear more than anything else in the whole world.
Randy
5 February 2006, 9:33 pmBlake:
enjoy your march- hopefully you will have many workers and women and people of color with you.PS- Bush is toast- the next three years, if he doesn’t get impeached, will be painful for all. If Gore runs in 08 he’s a sure win. You folks aren’t gonna bring him or this nation down. But I admire your passion and your committment to a cause.Sure beats sitting in front of the boob tube munchin on wings and other shit
10 February 2006, 11:23 pmJoel Smith:
Power to the people,all the people
24 December 2006, 4:41 pmCurt:
Yes I supose that I said way to much when I worked at Panzer Kasern. But who, outside of US Generals and maybe Colonels could have known that the US was preparing to launch a war of agression in the near east in the not so distant future.
15 July 2010, 11:03 am