Date: Tue, 6 Jan 1998 20:43:39 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: The Struggle at Wounded Knee



Lou Proyect concludes his excellent post with:

>One of the most important expressions of this was
>the Maoist movement that, along with the Trotskyist movement, turned its
>back on the social movements in order to "make the revolution." As it turns
>out, the most revolutionary thing that the left could have done was to work
>with AIM in its just struggle. Instead the Maoists decided to denounce AIM
>as a bunch of romantic primitives who didn't understand the need for
>progress. This scandalous debate is the subject of my next post.


One thing the Left (in my part of the world anyway) has never learned is the
fine art of lending *critical* support to struggles on behalf of a wide
gamut of often competing groups and individuals.  The CPUSA suffers,
especially, from this disease.  I recall a few years ago the leadership of
the Maoist sect, the "Revolutionary Communist Party-USA", coming out with a
particularly idiotic position on same-sex sex as a "bourgeois abberation"
and a practice unworthy of "real" revolutionaries (like, presumably,
themselves).  These nitwits, in a single stroke, undid years and years of
work by their drudging rank-and-file in the gay communities of Boston, San
Francisco, and New York.  One could point to the Trotskys and their abjuring
of struggles around Farm Aid, or those "hard-line" revolutionaries who
shrink from work in the trade unions.

Like the AIM movement, not only do these struggles fail to develop in
desirable [read: "inclusive"] directions, but their often venal leadership,
surrounded by sycophants (and worse) and free of any principled criticism,
is allowed to vitiate the movement with a surfeit of egotism, graft and
favoritism that seriously weakens it as an effective force for change.

Could the bourgeoisie ask for better allies than these shirkers?

Louis Godena 



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