Date: Sun, 29 Dec 1996 08:13:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Don't blame the bus-drivers, blame us


I keep coming back to Bukharin's very profound observation that the 
working-class, as opposed to the bourgeoisie, is too impoverished 
intellectually and politically to take over the reins of society directly 
the way that the bourgeoisie did in the 18th and 19th century.

The bourgeoisie has institutions that serve to preserve its historical 
legacy and hand down priceless knowledge about the most effective 
ways to keep its domination intact. These institutions such as Yale, 
Harvard, Columbia train the government officials of the ruling-class. 
Powerful publishing houses and think tanks put out thousands of 
publications each year to inform this milieu about how to keep the 
subordinate classes subordinate. They have Foreign Affairs, The 
Financial Times, Le Monde, Hoover Institute books, etc. What do we 
have? Social Text and the Spartacist League newspaper. No wonder 
the working-class is in dreadful shape.

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels formed the First International, 
they hoped that finally the working-class would have institutions that 
would serve to impart its own historical legacy from one generation to 
the next. Parties of this International would be as clear-sighted and as 
class-conscious as their bourgeois counterparts. Above all, these 
parties must have an absolutely unsentimental and scientific devotion 
to the truth. The idea of censorship, prejudice or tradition has no place 
in the workers movement.

What we have ended up with is nothing of the kind. Instead the 
working-class has been saddled with institutions for the last 126 years 
that have much more in common with religions than think-tanks. 
They have Yale while we have "Marxist-Leninist" parties that rely 
more on Authority than the average fundamentalist Christian sect.

In today's NY Times there was an article about genital rites that some 
Muslim immigrants follow in the United States. Ahmad Guled, a 
recent arrival who was a *mathematics teacher* in Somalia, believes 
"that his daughters must have their clitorises cut off and their genital 
lips stitched together to preserve their virginity and to follow what he 
believes his Muslim faith requires of him."

Meanwhile, we have Christian sects in the Appalachians that practice 
snake-handling, including rattlesnakes, during services. They believe 
that god will protect them from lethal bites. When somebody 
occasionally gets a nasty bite, they attribute that to insufficient faith.

The largest sect is called the Catholic Church. It believes that a human 
being is created at the very moment a sperm fertilizes an egg and that 
it is murder to destroy the fertilized egg. This belief is much more 
dangerous than snake-handling.

Our problem is that we have parties that are based on "Marxism-
Leninism" that are just as unquestioning, superstitious and backward 
as these religious sects. Every party that identifies itself as the living 
continuation of the Bolshevik Party suffers from this faith-based 
approach.

Unfortunately, the end results are not snake-bites and the occasional 
illegal abortion, as horrifying as these phenomena are. What we have 
to live with is Official History. Someone like Richard Bos--bless his 
soul--is just as convinced of the timelessness of Stalin's "Foundations 
of Leninism" as Hugh Rodwell was of "The Transitional Program". 
(His soul shall remain unblessed.)

In order to apply Marxism in a critical and undogmatic manner, it is 
necessary to operate outside the boundaries of such organizations. The 
problem, however, is that as independent Marxist thinkers we can not 
have the impact that an organized current can have. Our task, as it was 
in Lenin's day, is to construct a socialist party out of the milieu of 
independent Marxist thinkers that number in the tens of thousands in 
nearly every advanced capitalist country.

The lack of such a party means that we are constantly making big 
mistakes that allow the ruling-class to get off the hook. We are always 
shooting ourselves in the foot.. The other side has a council of elders 
that can advise bourgeois politicians on how a radical movement can 
be countered. We, on the other hand, have wizards in coned hats throwing
bat wings into the fire. If the fire glows green, then call for a Labor Party 
Now!!!! If it glows orange, then call for a General Strike!!!!

Trotskyists think that the only source of counter-productive politics is 
"Stalinism". If had not been for those dastardly Stalinists, the 
American workers would have built a Labor Party in the 1930s instead 
of supporting the bourgeois Roosevelt. If a Labor Party had been 
around in the 1960s, then the antiwar movement might have had a 
proletarian orientation. These "might haves" and "could haves" don't 
go far enough.

Just as the 1960s paid for mistakes made in the 1930s, so the 1980s 
and 90s are paying for mistakes of the 1960s made by Trotskyists and 
Maoists. I lived through these mistakes in the largest and most 
important Trotskyist party in the history, the Socialist Workers Party. 
The mistakes were of a general sectarian nature in the 1960s and 
1970s as this group oriented to the "social movements". As the social 
movements waned, the SWP turned in a workerist direction and has 
since pretty much disappeared from the American political landscape 
except for an occasional literature table at a demonstration or 
conference.

Blame can be equally assigned to the Maoist comrades who got on the 
workerist bandwagon early on. Dozens of "New Communist Parties" 
dotted the American landscape. In factories everywhere, you could 
find a recent graduate of Harvard or Yale preaching the wisdom of 
Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Enver Hoxha to the bemused 
assembly-line worker. These missionary expeditions were largely 
harmless. Our own Professor Hans Ehrbar was one such missionary in 
something called the Communist Labor Party. The NYC chapter used 
to meet in a cavern in the sewers as I understand it. Nobody knew each 
other's real name. They didn't even use numbers like MIM does. These guys
didn't kid around. They used graphical symbols like the singer who used to be 
called Prince. Hans was known as an inverted heart with an eye in the 
middle.

Maoism proved to be really destructive, however, in the Black 
Liberation struggle. Nearly every black revolutionary had the same 
kind of religious fervor about Mao's Red Book that Trotskyists of today 
have for the Transitional Program. Maoism, of course, is virtually 
useless for revolutionaries operating in an advanced capitalist country 
like the United States. All it fosters is a sort of vulgar Marxism that is 
supercharged with fanatical ultraleftism. The result is calculated to 
isolate the activist from normal society. It is very much the stuff of a 
Godard movie.

Black Maoists, unlike White Maoists, did have the ear of the black 
working-class, however. Formations such as the Dodge Revolutionary 
Union Movement (DRUM) were led by Maoists and Black Nationalists. These
caucuses had enormous influence in auto plants all through plants in 
Detroit, Dearborn and elsewhere. They led nowhere, however, because 
Black Maoists made all the sorts of mistakes typical of infantile leftists.

The most destructive aspect of Maoism, however, was the tendency to 
imitate the worst features of the Cultural Revolution. Black Panthers 
thought they had the right to do to their political opponents in the 
black community what the Red Guards did in China in 1967. Needless 
to say, the FBI was only too happy to send in infiltrators to hasten the 
self-destructive process.

Why am I sharing all of these flashbacks with the Marxism list? 
Should we all go out now and rent a copy of "Woodstock"?

The point I am making is that just as the working-class quiescence of 
the 1950s can be blamed partly on the errors of the Communists of the 
1930s, the depoliticization of the black community--with the rap 
music, the bourgeois nationalism, etc.--can be blamed on the stupidity 
of Maoism and Trotskyism in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. That is our
responsibility and nobody else's. 

Trotskyism went off on its own self-destructive binge in the 1970s and 
1980s and what we are left with are social movements without a Marxist 
presence. This of course was the main contribution that the SWP was making 
in the 1960s and 1970s, providing Marxist leadership to these movements 
albeit with a heavy patina of sectarianism. The current cult leadership 
regarded this involvement with the social movements as a "detour" from an 
orientation to the unions of basic industry. As it turned out, the "turn" 
toward basic industry was the real detour, if not a skid off the road 
headlong into a telephone pole.

The average working-class person or social activist does not think in 
class terms. This is worth repeating: THE AVERAGE WORKING-CLASS PERSON 
OR SOCIAL ACTIVIST DOES NOT THINK IN CLASS TERMS. That is the job of the 
socialist movement, to impart this perspective. What we have instead of 
such a movement is one that has more in common with the snake-handlers 
and the fetus-fetishists. Instead of using ordinary language to get across
basic ideas about class independence, we have jargon-spouting lunatics
obsessed with revolutions of other times and other places. The average
worker would find a member of the Reunification Church more easy to relate
to than a member of LCMCRCMCRCI or MIM.

If the working-class and social movements is not provided inspiring 
and intelligent leadership, its natural tendency is to retreat and become 
depoliticized. If you kill Malcom X, you end up with H. Rap Brown. If 
H. Rap Brown acts out a Maoist fantasy and then ends up as a 
common criminal, what is the black community left with? Answer: 
Marion Barry.

The question of the quiescence of the white and black American 
working-class can not be separated from the faliure of the subjective
factor. As long as we have party leaderships that are so unscientific, 
tradition-bound and uncreative, no wonder we will end up with a relatively
complacent population.

There is motion in the American working-class today, but is one to the 
right. I would not blame the workers themselves for this. If the 
Michigan SDS hadn't gone off on an ultraleft binge in the 60s and 70s, 
but had moved in a Marxist direction, perhaps those thousands of 
Marxists today would be providing an attractive political alternative to 
the distressed workers who are checking out the militias.

If the black movement hadn't been led by people running around with 
the idiotic "pick up the gun" rhetoric but by Marxists who were 
younger versions of CLR James, we would be seeing huge demonstrations 
against police brutality instead of the showboating antics of Al Sharpton.

The last people I would blame, however, for the state we are in today 
is the bus-driver who picks me up to take me to Columbia each 
morning or the unionists at Columbia who marched in the picket-lines 
at Barnard to defend health-care. The fault lies with our own 
generation and it is about time to get our house in order to prepare for 
the time when a new radicalization occurs.

Louis Proyect



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---