[Marxism] (no subject)

[Joaquín Bustelo]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:53 PM, abu hartal <abuhartal at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Don't see what is Maoist about Fletcher's critical support of Obama or how
> his putatively being a Maoist invalidates that critical support.

Fletcher is well known as being a friend, I think is the word the
comrades use, of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a
regroupment of various groups that emerged from the shipwreck of the
New Communist Movement in the 1970's, commonly called the Maoists by
other currents on the left as they looked to China and Mao Tse Tung
thought for inspiration and political lessons.

Their web site carries articles by him and I know his thinking has a
lot of influence in their circles. If you go to freedomroad.org, you
will see that on their home page they feature an article by him. If
you look at their columns page, you'll see that he has the most
columns posted, six.

I think Fletcher's approach is clearly marked by the thinking of
Maoist currents of the 1970s, in particular, his counterposition of
the politics that don't exit to the politics that do. The electoral
politics that do exist are strictly bourgeois-imperialist politics, as
I am sure you yourself must realize from the small-change reforms you
have cited as reasons to back Barrack. Certainly Bill understands this
also, although he tries to avoid this sort of terminology so that his
articles are more accessible to a broader layer of people.

Illuminating Bill's approach is the idea of forming a multi-class
progressive or left movement or block, which the Obama campaign
represents a step towards, in his view. That is his strategic
perspective. But does something that remains within a
bourgeois-imperialist framework in this country really deserve to be
called "progressive" in some fundamental way?

Illuminating the perspective of many of the people on this list,
certainly the majority among long term subscribers who are posters, is
that the strategic road is a different one: cohering the working class
into a social movement allied with other social movements that
achieves political independence and struggles for political power.

Be it said in relation to Bill's approach that something like it is
valid in developing countries that suffer economic and political
domination by imperialism whether they are formally independent or
not. That gives rise to national movements which, by their very
nature, are multi-class, and the struggle between social classes then
is for hegemony of the national movement. That is a struggle which is
fought out within the movement and on the terms of the national
movement, rather than on explicitly class terms to begin with. But
contrary to the Maoist theses, I do not believe there is some separate
stage of economic or social development and political forms that
corresponds to "the national movement" as distinct from a
national-democratic revolution led by the working class, i.e.,
displacing capitalist property relations with ones that, in principle,
point towards building socialism.

I think the logic of such movements was demonstrated in an almost
clean-room, laboratory way by the Cuban revolution, which, as it was
posed prior to Jan 1., 1959, when the dictator Batista fled, seemed to
aim for purely democratic reforms that did not challenge the
capitalist framework of Cuban society, and looking backwards a couple
of years later, after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961, looks
like it was always meant to be a socialist revolution that tackled
democratic tasks --eliminating racial discrimination, achieving real
national independence, agrarian reform, etc.-- almost in passing, as a
byproduct of the socialist transformation.

There is a parallelism to the situation of oppressed peoples in the
United States, such as Black and Latinos. That makes political
questions, including electoral tactics, more complicated, because
you're not dealing with just the question of the working class
movement, but also the movements of oppressed peoples, national
movements.

But there is no parallelism to the U.S. as a whole. There is no
overall national-democratic structural transformation that is needed
in the United States as such to consolidate it as a country, prevent
its natural wealth from being looted by other countries and so on.
Indeed, the U.S. is not in the slightest oppressed as a country, but
is rather an oppressor country, the chief oppressor country, in fact.

This puts a rather different light on Fletcher's dismissal of the
politics that don't exist in the United States. Fletcher cites a
"concrete analysis" of how undemocratic US elections are,
winner-take-all and the rest of it, to justify his strategic approach,
which, in my view, is superficial. In my view, the real obstacle is
the extremely strong political-ideological hegemony the imperialists
wield over this society, a hegemony rooted in the tremendously
privileged position of people in the U.S. in general --including
working people generally but especially white males-- in relation to
regular people the world over.

And although you can say in the last analysis working people do not
benefit from imperialism and so on, that isn't true in an immediate
way. For example, working people in this country would directly and
materially benefit if "their" imperialists had greater control over
the world's oil resources, and could dictate prices and production
levels, as well as limit supplies to other countries that compete with
the US for oil supplies and drive up the price. This would result in
lower prices for gasoline and an easing of price pressures overall.

This identification of working people with the interests of what we
consider their class enemy is not new. Marx and Engels observed
something similar in Britain where they lived during the second half
of the 1800's, and saw its roots in Britain's dominant position in the
world market. While details and mechanisms are different, the sort of
situation that led to what might be called a "bourgeoisification" of
British workers in the second half of the 1800's have been reproduced
in the countries that today we call imperialist, and most of all here
in the USA.

Be it said in favor of the US "Maoist" currents, that among them there
was often a greater sensitivity to and understanding of issues of
privilege and its corrupting influence in the working class,
especially as it relates to the Black question in the United States.
Despite that, I do not believe any of those currents succeeded in
charting a clear strategic approach to U.S. politics, and in FRSO's
case in particular, they have wound up politically with a very similar
approach to that of the CPUSA, which these currents originally started
out rejecting as reformist (meaning, limiting the struggle to reforms
of the system, although some groups took this too far and rejected the
struggle for reforms altogether).

I don't believe any group or current has yet successfully described a
comprehensive and fairly complete outline of a strategic perspective
for the United States. But certainly a central axis has to be to get
to independent political expressions of working people including in
the electoral arena. It might be that the motion that Obama has
stirred among young people and in the Black community may eventually
wind up there, but for now, Obama's campaign is clearly NOT it. Obama
is presenting, at most, a different way of defending imperialist
interests abroad and at home, one that he projects as being more
thoughtful, considerate, ameliorating a little extremes of wealth and
poverty and so on. Compared even to many of the proposals accepted by
the capitalist parties in the 1960's and 70's, when there was a large
radicalization in this country, or in the 1930's, his program falls
way short of the mark. And compared to Clinton and Edwards, the
programs are very similar, the centerpiece being a health care reform
idea that basically Edwards and his folks came up with.

But there are two additional aspects of Obama's campaign that should
be noted. One is his mantra about change, and the change being about
the way politics is done in this country. His appeals for unity, for a
different sort of political climate and governance find widespread
resonance, but there are two visions of this: what's good for working
people is good for the country and what's good for GM is good for the
country. That's why I stressed earlier that there are no big
progressive national tasks for the U.S. as a whole in contrast to
developing countries, where there are. So those two visions of what is
good for the country don't really share any common ground. And that's
also why I stressed that in an immediate sense, many working people
back "their own" imperialism because they benefit from living in one
of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, country in the world. Even
though strategically it is entirely against their interests.

The other is the fact that he is Black. Because Black people
historically in this country, and even within living memory, have been
denied the right to political participation and representation, and
even the right to vote. The struggle by Blacks to be represented is a
progressive struggle of Black people that Marxists should look for
ways to support, even when it takes place through the framework of the
capitalist parties. Because experience shows that it does make a
difference to the Black community whether the government is full of
Blacks or whites --not all the difference in the world, not nearly as
much as it should, but some. Otherwise the behavior of the Black
community, which votes in much larger numbers than the comparable
white socio-economic strata, and votes Black pretty much every chance
it gets of putting a Black person in office, is simply inexplicable.