Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 13:19:57 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Don Quixote rides again


In message <199711302336.MAA17551-AT-mailhost.auckland.ac.nz>, Dave
Bedggood <dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz> writes
>In response to James;
>
>I think its becoming more clear as this exchange develops that the 
>RCP's abandoment of marxist categories like "reformism" and "class 
>struggle" are an abandonment of Marxism. This has to be seen as part 
>of the demoralisation of much of the radical left under the pressure 
>of the defeats of neo-liberalism and the restoration of capitalism in 
>the DWS's [however "actually existing socialism" is conceived].
> Robert is on target when he also attributes this 
>dissillusionment to illusions held by the post-war Trotskyist left in 
>the first place. This is a criticism I have made of the RCP on these 
>lists in recent months.  If the RCP virtually disbands as an organised left 
>group on the strength of the Thatcherite defeats, they could not have 
>had much fight in them to start with. Could they have hacked it in 1923 
>when a  serious defeat occurred in Germany which sealed the 
>fate of the Russian revolution, and much of the course of the 20th 
>century. Could they have hacked it in 1945 when Trotskyists were 
>isolated and almost powerless to make a difference? 

Dave's sweeping statements cover up a few important facts. Far from
'giving up' Living Marxism makes a far more decisive intervention into
society than the RCP did in the eighties, or Dave's unknown organisation
does to this day. Living Marxism was alone amongst the left in opposing
Western intervention in Bosnia. I say alone with confidence, because I
do not count publishing articles in unread publications as opposition.

It was LM, not any other publication that pushed ITN, Britain's largest
news corporation onto the defensive over their fabricated war
propaganda. No other publication has faced the barrage of libel writs,
threats of legal action against our printers (to the extent where we are
forceed to print abroad), or press campaigns against us in the Observer,
Guardian and New Statesman. Thomas Deichmann's story of how ITN
concocted their camps story has featured in major newpapers throughout
Europe, as well as featuring in the Nation in the US.

Last night it was LM contributor Frank Furedi, who appeared on prime
time TV to attack the Western monopoly upon technology and its
deleterious effects on the third world. 

Dave sees any departure from the dwindling pond of left-wing activity
around trades union branches and other archaic social institutions as a
retreat. But that backwater that you occupy is the retreat. Instead of
real social engagement, in arenas that count for the mass of people, you
prefer the arcane world of the old left's small group mentality. My
charge against you is that you have made the empty husk of the model of
political intervention, into an excuse for not intervening in a society
that has moved on.

Dave thinks that thinking anew is a betrayal of Marxism. I would have
said that refusing to think anew is a betrayal of Marxism. Marxism is
not a dogma to be forced upon events regardless of whether they fit the
dogma or not, it it is a way of analysing the world. More precisely it
is a way of analysing society in terms of its dynamic aspects, not an
insistence that nothing ever changes. If Marxism really were impervious
to the recognition of real world events, than it would be a sectarian
dogma.

In utter ignorance of what Marx really did say, Dave insists that
Marxism is the class struggle. What Marx says (in a letter to
Weydemeyer) is this 'no credit is due to me for discovering the
existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them...
long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical
development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the
economic anatomy of the classes.' On the contrary, Marx's approach is
quite distinct from Dave's who sees class struggle as an ever present
condition. What Marx claims he did show was that 'the existence of
classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the
development of production'.

Clearly in economic terms there is a subject strata that is the human
basis of exploitation. But it does not follow that this social group can
consolidate itself into a class. Marx is often misquoted to have made
the distinction between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself.
Veteran Marx scholar Hal Draper pointed out that this is in fact a
mistranslation. What Marx wrote was that the distinction was to be made
between 'mass-in-itself' and 'class-for-itself'.

Not wishing to descend too far into pedantry, the distnction is
important for this reason: To become a class is not simply an objective
process. The fact of exploitation alone does not make the working class
a class. There is also the subjective side, in which the working class
makes itself in opposition to capital, with collective interests. This
is the process that the Labour historians rightly pointed too, the role
of the working class as subject in its own creation. Without that
subjective self-creation the putative class remains simply a mass -
exploited, but without the common outlook and experiences to achieve
even the most basic consciousness of its own common interests.



More than that, the real history of the working class is discontinuous,
not continuous. Again and again the working class has been made, torn
apart and remade. Bear in mind that when the white settlers of New
Caledonia slaughtered the Kanaki Liberation fighters, those settlers
were the descendants of exiled Communards. Between the highpoint of
Chartism and the creation of the new model unions stretches a barren
period of working class organisation of more than twenty years. When the
new model unions did reorganise themselves, the old craft unions were a
barrier that had to be pushed out of the way, but continued to exercise
a negative influence on working class self-organisation.

It should be said that in this period Marx wound up the First
International (under the pretext of relocating it to the US), precisely
because the disputes between anarchists and German emigres had descended
into a sectish attitude as they were isolated from real struggle. Was
Marx running away? Or was he recognising that different conditions
demand different kinds of intervention.

Today's disaggregation of the working class is not something that took
place overnight. It is the consequence of a series of defeats following
the peak of its post war influence in the early seventies. Those defeats
have a cumulative effect, quite as profound as the defeat of Chartism
did a century earlier.

As to Dave's psychological diagnosis of the RCP's 'illusions' in the
project of building a revolutionary party, they only serve to justify
his own organisation's rather limited social impact.

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield


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