[Marxism] NEP a retreat?

[Aaron Aarons]

>Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:23:38 -0400
>From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
>
>(forwarded from David McDonald)
>
>NEP a retreat?

[SNIP]

>It is interesting to me that Americans spend almost no time or
>thought on the question of unity, how it is achieved, how it is
>maintained, how it is deepened. In the 1960's, for instance,
>unity was on no one's agenda, not the SWP's not the CP's, not
>the Maoists, not anybodys'.

Actually, the "unity" mantra was constantly raised by the likes
of the SWP and the CP as a reason to try to suppress radical
anti-imperialist politics. In fact, the SWP-led coalition that
organized the large anti-war demo in Manhattan on October 15,
1965 tried to impose a list of six slogans that would be the
only ones carried. (I certainly don't remember the specific
approved slogans, but you can be sure that none of them called
for support to the Vietnamese against the U.S.) We in the
Spartacist group decided to defy that decision and march with
our own slogans, which we did! (I say "we" but, for the record,
I have to admit that I, for not-very-good personal reasons,
actually missed the march, after having been one of the most
adamant in insisting that we defy the restriction!)

>Yet when I look back at it, it seems to me that we squandered
>the energies of tens of thousands of revolutionary-minded
>people without ever honestly grappling with the question of why
>we were not bent on creating one gigantic fist, when we had the
>forces to make such a fist.

The "we" that McDonald refers to was a disparate collection
of groups and social strata. If it had created "one gigantic
fist", the fingers of that fist would have all been going in
different directions; some fingers would have been trying to
tear down the AmeriKKKan empire while others would have been
trying to save "the Great American Democracy" by getting the
U.S. out of Vietnam through a negotiated peace, which meant
NOT demanding immediate and/or unconditional withdrawl of
U.S. troops.

>And yet the real revolutionaries, the Lenins, the Fidels, the
>Correas, the Evos, are totally consumed with how to create the
>unities needed to seize power and hold onto it.

The only unity Lenin favored was unity around HIS program.
Almost everything he said and did (at least from around 1903
onward) was basically AGAINST unity with non-revolutionary
forces, including the Mensheviks. (The latter, BTW, were far to
the left of Correa and Evo.)

As for Evo, if he doesn't stop trying to unite the opposing
social classes in Bolivia and instead organize and arm the
peasants and workers in preparation for civil war, he'll
probably end up like Allende.

>David McDonald

 - Aaron Aarons