[Marxism] (no subject)

[Shacht at aol.com]

I thought that what one did was what truly conferred the category of  "social 
democrat" on someone. Otherwise it is nothing but an epithet hurled in  the 
Trotskyist movement: centrist, left social democrat, left centrist,  sectarian, 
Stalinoid, Stalinist, Deutscherite, Pabloite, Cannonite, Posadistda,  
Cochronite, even Vernite (there were three of them), opportunist, social  chauvinist, 
litterary fadist, petty bourgeois and social patriot.
 
Words have meaning only in the context of acivity or proposed activity  
towards some goal, movement, object, grouping.
 
So...what's a social democratic discussion group? (Which assumes social  
democrats have something to discuss).
 
A great deal of the content on this list seems to be related to "Third  World 
Politics" in the sense that the commentators are often residents of the  U.S. 
commenting on, but not from, other nation states. And often, in this  
commentary, there is a tone of adulation (I use that term in the sense that  Lenin 
was wont to "bend the twig" to get a reader's attention) of revolutionary  
regimes, a decided lack of willingness to criticize in any way. This resonates  in 
the way that some recent commentaries lash out at Sam Farber whose  
committment to socialist revolution in the United States I would never question.  I 
think it was Pete Camejo who, in his evolution away from the SWP milieu  concluded 
that one's attitude to a particular foreign regime is not the  touchstone to 
admit or exclude someone from the socialist movement in  America.
 
I first began getting the Militant in 1957 and followed it for years. The  
SWP probably could have had me then - if they ever had anyone at their Polk  
Street office in San Francisco, but it was always closed. And I count myself  
fortunate. The Militant covered nationalist movements, foreign opposition to  
American imperialism and the colonial revolution. This was important and  
necessary. But there was also some truth to the Wohlforth/Robertson charges of  
"tail-ending" petty-bourgeois movements.
 
There are seizures of power, military coups, political revolutions and  
social revolutions. None of them necessarily entail the socialist revolution.  Our 
attraction to these movements, the virtual need that many of us felt over  the 
decades for some sense of advance at least somewhere - especially some  
decades back - focused our attention away from concrete analysis of the United  
States, from capitalism as such, and led us to overlook blemishes, flaws, faults  
and even anti-socialist measures of foreign revolutionary movements. 
 
The mere fact of a blow against American hegemony (first a Gramscian term,  
then a precious adademic term for domination) is struck by a foreign power, an  
opposition group, a guerilla or nationalist group or a revolutionary regime  
should not preclude us as socialist from criticism or their conduct in other  
areas.
 
Calling Eastern Europe or Russia a socialist country - which is what  Cochran 
inaugurated into maintstream Trotskyism in the US reflected his  orientation 
and his program and was a logical extension of orthodox Trotskyism.  I happen 
to think it was wrong - his orientation, that is. His lack of  sectarianism 
was commendable but that's another matter. Once  accepting these as socialist 
states, however, led to the same refusal  and need not to  be critical of them 
in the same ways social democrats  would come to reject criticism of American 
capitalism. In this sense, Cochranism  and Shachtmanism in its later evolution 
were symetrical phenomena. Each of them  was en route to giving up the 
perspective of revolutionary socialism in the near  future.

I think as Marxists, we should eschew character assaults - that's a  
Trotskyist relic as is "Third Worldism" as a substitute for revolutionary action  
(which includes thought) and Gramsci would call praxis (for academics).
In closing, I recall that in the course of saying something critical of  
Farber about a year ago Joaquin mentioned that although a gusano Farber might be  
pleasant to have a drink with but politically....Well, I knew Sam Farber forty 
 years ago and doubt he has changed that much, he does not know how to  drink.
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