Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 11:40:53 -0400
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: Bombings, Surveillance, and Free Societies (fwd)


At 5:46 PM 3/6/96, rakesh bhandari wrote:

>But as I suggested, I think something else is going on--a crisis in left
>vision.
>It seems to me that some actually see something in the Militias themselves
>worth affirming.  There have been those who have argued that radicals must
>now speak in a different register--not proletarian dictatorship and class
>consciousness but the principles of community, autonomy, federalism, and
>anti-statism.

I suppose I may be included in that collective "some," so I want to make
several things perfectly clear. The thing worth affirming in "The Militias"
- and I must again urge more precision in the use of that label - is a
spirit of resistance born of profound alienation. There should be
tremendous potential appeal for a truly radical message among the
population that people recklessly refer to as "The Militias." If there
isn't, then we might as well give up on radical politics in America.

One of the mistakes people make in talking about "The Militias" is to
assume that their ideology is uniformly fascist. Certainly there are some
of them who are recongizably fascist and racist in their ideology, some
consciously, some unconsiously. But that isn't the whole story. Much of
their ideology is profoundly anti-statist and anti-fascist -
libertarian/individualist in the classic American mode, raised to a wild
extreme. Confronting the profoundly individualistic nature of much American
thought is a major problem for the non-populist left.

Obviously, I'm against any compromise or coalition with racists and/or
fascists. But it's just not right to say "The Militias" are all racist and
fascist.

I agree that much of the quasi-left talk about "community" is empty, as is
the newfound interest in civil society. (Hobsbawm, in The Age of Extremes,
said: "The strange calls for an otherwise unidentified 'civil society,' for
'community' were the voice of lost and drifting generations. They were
heard in an age when such words, having lost their traditional meanings,
became vapid phrases.") But at its best, the CPUSA of the 1930s organized
schools and clubs - inclusive, liberatory communities, rather than the
oppressive, parochial ones advocated by communitarians. We need some way to
make socialism social, as Bob Fitch says.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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