[Marxism] Waiting for Gobama

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Louis writes: "I think that Joaquin is on the right track by looking at
privilege, but there is not an unmediated relationship between wages and
consciousness."

I agree with Louis on this. I think it is complicated, and not as
simplistically determined as comrades might think from my posts. 

The reason for that is that I feel that before getting into all the
sophisticated stuff about dew points, relative humidity, permeability of the
soil, rates of absorption and evaporation and so on, I think it is necessary
for people to understand that the basic reason why the ground is wet is that
it rained cats and dogs all night.

While so many comrades are caught up in voluntaristic/idealist fantasies
INSTEAD of having at least a first APPROXIMATION of the ACTUAL state of
play, we're unlikely to get a critical mass around an effort like the greens
or the French anticapitalists.

But the material conditions ALSO have a certain amount to do with the
political/ideological weaknesses/mistakes/missed opportunities that Louis
points to. Basically, the absence of a class movement among even a sliver of
the masses, and in the more recent decades, the absence of social movements
at least on the scale of the 60's, means in a certain sense that Marxist
politics --especially as formulated and inherited from the pre-WWII period,
but even to some degree from the 60's-- are sectarian politics, in the sense
of being radically divorced from the actual experience of any sector of the
masses (even if only a small one) and not even making proposals that make
sense, and thus CUT OFF from the necessary corrective feedback from the
actual movement.

"Wait a minute," I hear you say, "isn't the problem that the 'actual
movement' hasn't really cohered and found expression -- especially on the
higher level of a political movement, or a social movement with a political
expression?" Yes. I think there ARE feedback loops in society. We don't get
very good feedback BECAUSE our politics (collectively, of the radical left
taken as a whole) aren't very good, and a factor that influences the poverty
of our politics is lack of adequate feedback.

Take, for example, the "Labor Party based on the Unions"  -- yes, please,
take it, and as far away as possible. How can THAT possibly communicate
working class independence and militancy with THESE unions?

But never mind that question, how could ANYTHING communicate "class"
independence and "class" militancy when there's been so little of it in THIS
country in living memory?

It's the bad feedback loop again: we raise an abstract, inaccessible slogan
with no relation to actual day-to-day US reality to try to communicate class
militancy and independence, but we don't realize that our slogan is an
abstract cipher PRECISELY BECAUSE "class militancy and independence" is ALSO
completely abstract, as it applies to the US today, even to us radicals. 

What we really need to be focusing on are what are the most advanced
expressions of the immediate struggles of working people in defense of their
standard of living (or a projection thereof immediately accessible with no
further elaboration to at least a significant minority of working people). 

To bring this down from a high level of abstraction, let me do a for
instance. RIGHT NOW (that I am aware of) there is no movement/group with a
broad audience demanding a moratorium on foreclosures. But if you say, "what
we need right now is what was done in the 1930's to put a moratorium on
foreclosures of occupied homes while this economic crisis lasts," lots of
people will understand that and find it immediately accessible in a way that
"we demand nationalization of the banks, but not under the control of
Gaithner and Bernanke but the bank workers themselves" is NOT accessible.

I believe one of the reasons for the (relative) power and prominence of
social movements in the past half century has been the decline in the
largely wages-and-hours focused labor movement in the advanced capitalist
countries. Many *social* questions that would be at the heart of social
revolutions, with the working class movement closed off to it, found
expression through social and protest movements.

It may have been PREFERABLE to have those issues posed as straight-up class
questions, or channeled through the class movement, I'm not going to debate
that. Reality is that they found other avenues for expression since the
straight-up class movement was closed off to them. 

But what does that mean about the social-political-movement aspect of the
labor party proposal, a big part of its CONTENT? If this were to really
happen, "a labor party based on the unions" is not likely to be a better
option than a third party base on social movements. 

Louis posits that something like the French anticapitalist party COULD have
been built in this country. But we should also be conscious that, had a big
enough sector of the left been clear enough to attempt it, it is possible,
even likely that the eventual outcome would have resembled more the German
Greens than the French anticapitalists. 

Joaquin