[Marxism] (no subject)

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Michael Smith quotes: 

>  The
> Black Panther Party railed against police brutality and established 
> breakfast programs because this is what mattered to the people. In the 
> process, thousands became radicalized.

and then comments: "And radicals could still do that, if they wanted --
Obama or no Obama."

This is what most troubles me about the left -- all of it. The Black
Panthers were a party with a mass base and audience that grew out of a
decade-long upsurge of struggles in Black communities across the country. 

"Radicals" can't "still do that," first, because the overwhelming majority
are not Black, but even more, because the upsurge in the Black community
does not exist, nor has the community gone through a decade of mass
struggles like those that preceded the emergence of the Panthers and
prepared the ground for an organization like that to quickly establish a
mass base.

A lot of the discussions here suffer from this idealist Guevaraism -- in
traditional Guevaraism, it was we just need to apply Cuban tactics to win.
The problem was that without Cuban conditions, and most especially the
implantation and roots of the July 26 Movement, its prestige and following,
Cuban tactics couldn't work. 

Now we say, let's replicate the tactics of the Panthers, or the anti-Vietnam
War Movement, or the trade union organizing of the 1930s, but unfortunately
history has not provided us with the sorts of circumstances which made those
past efforts significant or successful.

Joaquin