Date: Sat, 29 Apr 1995 10:00:09 -0400 (EDT) From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us> Subject: Who's a Marxist? I said that disputess over the term "MarxisT" are fruitless, what counts is whether we are correct, justified, and useful to the oppressed. On Sat, 29 Apr 1995, Guy Yasko wrote: > You are correct that the name doesn't really matter. However, I still > think you're overly broad here. How do you decide whether someone > or something is of service to the working class? It sounds to me > like you have a list of criteria. There's no a priori list of criteria which can be drawn up in advance and applied mechnaically regardless of the circumstances. We make appraisals about the cogency of our views and the adequacy of our practice based on the best evidence and argumet available to us, test them against objections and put them into practice to see if they work. If not we revise them. I used to accept the "inside-outside" view of political organizxing, which holds that leftists ought to wotk inside the Democratic Party as well as outside it in the movements. The idea is to either split or take over the DP, based on the notion that in a period of decline the Party is weake and susceptoble to such an approach, and on the assessment that the winner-take-all big money structure of American politics precludes effective third party organizing. I worked as an organizer in the Jackson campaigns (Jesse not Henry) and as an activist in my local (Ann Arbor) DP. This taught me that the I-O approach won't work. The party is owned by big money; its real masters are more or less happy to use socialists to organize for them, but will give them nothing. And if our forces are too weak to get independent movements and parties off the grounnd, they are too weak to take the DP away from its owners. These conclusions are supported by a readind of the history of I-O attempts by the CPUSA, the SP, DSOC/DSA, etc. to employ this strategy, as well as by careful analysis of the financial and political structure of the party--see e.g., Joel Rogers and Thomas Fergeson's Right Turn. I made a study of these things to explain the results of my experiences in the DP. Of course no obserbation can refute a hypothesis by itself. You can always explain an observation away and maintain the hypothesis come what may. Many leftists do just this to hold the I-O view because they think we bad as the DP is, we have no alternative if we want to make a difference in real world politics. I decided, though, that at some point you have to fish or cut bait. In 1988 I used as my p[ersonal criterion whether Jackson, having mounted the most effective internal insurgency the DP ever say, got anything at all out of the 1988 DP Convention. He didn't, so I resigned from the DP with great fanfare--"Death to the Democrats" op=ed pieces in the Ann Arbor News, etc. (AA is a small enough town that the carryings-on of a modertaely well-known local acativist, which I was, are mildly newsworthy.) And I joined Solidarity, which maintains a position of strict political independence--that is, we don't do Democrats (or Republicans), but we do do independent electoral politics. Of course the obstacles to Third Party organizing remain. So it is still an open question whether Solidarity's strategy turns out to be the best way to serve the people. But experience and theory suggests that I-O is not agood way to do it. This was not something that could be known a priori, although one doesn't need to go through a period as a DP activist, as I did, to find this out. So the criteria are: do what;s best based on the evidencxe and arguments you have--which is pretty empty. All the work is handled by the substantive conntent of the evidence and arguments in the particular case to hand. --Justin Schwartz --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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