Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 09:38:25 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Re: Vanguardism and 2 Clarifictions to Hugh


Jerry wrote:

>>1 finger movement of Soviet proletariat = 100 Argentinian revolutions
>(1)
>>
>>Equation (1) seems somewhat erroneous in retrospect. Would you not
>agree?

Carlos explained:

>    Not in the context it was made.  The Argentinian MAS was embarked
>    in a utopian. electoralist, quasi-reformist frenzy disguised with
>    "revolutionary" phraseology.  It was no revolution or revolutionary
>    situation going on (note the year, 1987).
>
>    So, It wasn't even a point of couterposing the " finger" to a
>    revolution in a semicolonial country with barely 1.3 million
>    industrial workers.  Was a "finger" of a colossus confronting
>    nothingness.
>
>    BTW, if the proletariat in the FSU had moved a "finger" of its
>    100 million-strong proletariat to stop counterrevolution we would
>    be better now (at the world scale) than the fullfillment of an
>    empty prophecy about revolution in Argentina.

But I think Carlos is going a bit too far. He's mixing up two distinct
factors here.

The first is related to Marx's remark in his letter to Bracke of 5 May 1875
re the Gotha Programme, that 'Every step of real movement is more important
than a dozen programmes'. Where Carlos assumes, too strongly in my opinion,
that there was no real movement in Argentina at the time. The problem was
one of organizing and *keeping* the forces that were moving. The MAS
failed, not to *make use of opportunities* - it did - but to *build
strongholds*. When crisis struck, the gains vanished. The fault lay in an
objectivist view of revolution - the movement of the workers and the
popular masses will do the job for us. As opposed to the pessimism in
relation to the working class manifested by the Pablo/Mandel version of
objectivism, the MAS version was characterized by 'revolutionary optimism'.
If the MAS had been able to succeed in *building strongholds* and
establishing a firm revolutionary presence in Argentina, it would have
shifted the world balance of forces in favour of revolutionary Marxism to
the extent that it would have led to the setting up of similar strongholds
elsewhere in the Southern Cone and the world. But it didn't, and the
failure holds lessons for us all.

The second aspect is related to a comparison of the relative strengths of
the Soviet and the Argentine proletariats. Carlos is absolutely right here
- the working class in the Soviet Union (and FSU today) belongs to the big
battalions of the world proletariat. If a superpower proletariat were to
just turn over in bed, so to speak, it would send shockwaves round the
world. But again, we mustn't objectivize things. If there isn't a
revolutionary socialist leadership, the giant will just go back to sleep
and keep on snoring - although given the current world crisis of
capitalism, none of the giants will enjoy peaceful slumbers for very long.
All of the big events of the past decade (and I'll just name one or two
almost at random) such as the miners' strike and the anti-Poll-Tax movement
in Britain, the recent strikes in France, the anti-privatization movements
in Poland and other countries being subjected to the restoration of
capitalism, and perhaps most dramatically the huge mobilizations of the
miners in the ex-Soviet Union - all of these events have had a huge
potential for carrying the movement for a socialist transformation of
society forward that has not been realized because of the absence of a
consciously revolutionary leadership.

To sum up - real movements in semi-colonial countries can have an enormous
impact. Argentina could easily have had more impact than Cuba if a real
revolutionary crisis (as opposed to revolutionary situation) had developed
there - just look at the impact of Chile under the Allende regime! Real
movements in superpowers will have not just an enormous impact, but a
decisive impact.

Cheers,

Hugh




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