Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 10:24:10 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Leaders and Caudillos of the Left


Ben Seattle:
>If anyone believes that a genuine communist
>organization of any type (much less a party)
>can be created without the most relentless
>struggle against the reformist ideology--they
>are certainly dreaming.

I think one of the most barren aspects of the contemporary self-declared
"Marxist-Leninist" movement is its "relentless struggle against the
reformist ideology." This is mostly what characterizes the interventions of
Trotskyists, State Capitalists and Maoists alike on the Internet. There is
not a day that goes by without somebody screeching about reformist
betrayals.  They are for COMMUNISM, not any piddling,
class-collaborationist, sellout maneuvers. The problem is that everybody
agrees on the final goal of COMMUNISM, but very few people have solid ideas
about how to advance the class struggle forward from its present somnolent
state.

In 1900 Lenin was engaged in polemics with the Economist trend in the
Social Democracy; later on with the Mensheviks. The tendency today is to
focus on his polemical attacks on what his opponents stood for. If this was
all that Lenin ever produced, then we never would have had seen a
proletarian revolution in Russia. Mostly Lenin was preoccupied with trying
to move the class struggle forward. This meant developing a keener
understanding of the tasks of the democratic revolution than his opponents.
Lenin understood the importance of the national question and agrarian
reform in the socialist revolution better than anybody.

Today's Lenin impersonators actually produce very little in the way of
constructive analysis of how to move the class struggle forward in the
United States. Railing against Jesse Jackson or Gloria Steinem does not
move the class struggle forward. What is required is a thoughtful Marxist
analysis of American society to uncover faultlines which allow our class to
take advantage of weakness or contradictions in the ruling class. One of
the reasons I have been writing about American Indians is that I am
convinced that this is such a faultline. When I produced Rand Corporation
material on Indian land claims versus military operations, it was to
illustrate this. This is the kind of research Marxists should be producing.
Yesterday's NY Times had a very long interesting article that unfortunately
was not reproduced on their Web Page. It was about the Mexicans living in
NYC, who now number over 200,000. They are fleeing economic depression and
work for a pittance in NYC. Most of the money they make is sent home to
help keep their family alive. It turns out that many of them do not even
speak Spanish. They speak an Indian language called Mixteca, one of
Mexico's 100+ Indian languages. So here you have a phenomenon of a huge,
oppressed, Indian minority living in NYC. Most demographic experts predict
that the US will have more and more people living like this in years to
come. This will have an impact on national politics. What it means is that
there is a possible hookup between people living in Chiapas and people
living in NYC and people living in northern Montana and people living in
Canada who have similar sorts of oppression. This has enormous political
consequences. Does the "Marxist-Leninist" press pay attention to any of
this. Not at all. They are too busy railing against easy targets like Jesse
Jackson and Gloria Steinem and Bernie Sanders.

Louis Proyect



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