[Marxism] About "some other stuff"

[Walter Lippmann]

As I look back on those years in the SWP and the movement against the
Vietnam war I do sometimes wonder if we weren't too obsessed with the
"single-vs. multi issue" debate. It was a long time ago and it's not
meaningful to me now to try to place myself back in that time period
to see if it was the best tactic to follow. My sense is that what we
wanted was to keep the ant-war movement focused in the Vietnam War,
and not have its political focus blunted into a broad, reformistical
mish-mash, which would have led to support for the Democratic Party.

That seems still to have been a reasonable strategic perspective for
the SWP to have followed at that time. I don't mean to say that every
one of the tactical prescriptions which we put forth were necessarily
the best, but the goal was to keep the movement both independent of
the Democrats and visible and out in the streets. That was all good.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the restoration of capitalism
there and in Eastern Europe, the political landscape of the planet is
radically different today.

The SWP's political hostility toward the leadership of the Vietnamese
struggle was distinctly secondary to all of its other activities then
of building a mass anti-war movement. If only the SWP had even some
vague notion of doing that today... Today's world is, however, very,
very different. 

Furthermore, far, far fewer people from the U.S. have so far been put
in body-bags for their return to the United States than was the case
during the Vietnam War (4000 now, 58,000 then), not to speak of the
Black liberation movement which at that time demanded both political
reform and social advancement. The Jena 6 struggle hasn't generated
the impact of the civil rights and Black power movements of the 60s,
up to this point. A new movement, that of the immigrant workers her
developed, but that movement - though no fault of its own, obviously,
 - runs up against the nationalism which many, perhaps most people in
the U.S. working class continue to identify with the interests of the
"national homeland" of which they are citizens. The growing movement
for immigrants rights, which is led by immigrants from Mexico and 
other Latin American countries, may well provide a bridge for those
advancing and left-ward moving countries of Latin America right into
the heartland of the United States. This is what Alarcon was talking
about in his discussion about that two years ago called Karl Marx and
the Work of the 21st Century.

A few days ago a news article came to my attention which explained 
that the Black population of New Orleans had declined to 58% and in
the latest election, a Black council member was replaced by a white
person, giving whites the first electoral majority they've had in
the Big Easy in decades. This is a fact which may cause some useful
political reflections as it demonstrates the effects within the US
of the Shock Doctrine which Naomi Klein has been writing about so
eloquently in recent times. It's no wonder that Washington didn't
want Cuban doctors treating all of those undocumented Mexican and
Central American workers who were brought in to rebuild New Orleans.

Who knows just what it will take to bring about a new movement of
working class and socialist struggles in the Unite States? I wish
I did, but I have to admit that I don't. Something will come about
as the way we live in the United States really isn't sustainable.

In Los Angeles the streets and freeways are constantly packed with
cars now, much more so than when I moved there 40 years ago, and 
as property values continue to rise, how any ordinary person can
buy, or even rent a house, is all but impossible to imagine now.
Even though the newspapers which serve the Latino communities in
Los Angeles are completely capitalist in orientation, they still
provide more of an opening to the broader world than do papers
like the L.A. Times and the Daily News. There IS another world,
but most of us can't seem to actually see it. We need to learn
how to do that. 

End of rant.


Walter Lippmann
Havana, Cuba