-----Original Message----- From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>My orientation to these questions comes from experience in the Vietnam
>antiwar movement, which I consider a model for Marxist participation in the
>mass movement. The goal of the movement was withdrawal of American troops.
>As the mass movement grew, the opportunities for developing socialist
>consciousness also grew.
But if the anti-Vietnam War movement was such a model, why does the decline in progressive power data from its existence? In its wake, the 1970s did see a number of good grassroots organizations making some real strides - especially in environmental, consumer and feminist directions - but it would be hard to argue that those gains were more significant than the civil rights and Great Society gains made before the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
And at the core economic level, the class level, real wages and unionization rates began to plummet and the Right gained greater and greater ascendancy.
The Vietnam War itself did not end for years, and even when our troops pulled back, our bombers kept going, launching genocidal bombing in Cambodia. And while there was a short interregnum in US imperialist adventures, by the late 1970s, military spending began cranking up with Reagan launching full-scale interventions around the world.
The 1930s seemed to have a different result with the combination of CIO militancy and overall political organization tied to Popular Front mobilization. It left an integration of organization and political mobilization that, despite the ravages of McCarthyism still blunted the drive by corporations for any pre-New Deal restoration and in fact pushed forward a number of expansions of the welfare state even in the 50s, from education to transportation (however cloaked in "defense" terms).
Now, there are obviously differences in the global economic context of these two eras, but as someone who deals with the legacies of both the 1930s and the 1960s only as historical, not personal eras, I am ultimately unimpressed with the fruits of the antiwar movement and this relates, I think, to this issue of civil society.
The issue of the priority of "consciousness" versus organization (ie. civil society)seems like a critical one in debates in the Left, even if it is sometimes obscured by overlaid debates on how to approach issues on principle, which in turn mask whether we pragmatically want folks to flock to a specific organization or instead desire changes in consciousness from a "pure" message.
The antiwar movement, like much of the New Left, seemed to emphasize the purity of message over long-term organization tied to broad political power. The result was a flowering of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of separate organizations, but with no glue holding them together. It is that broader glue that was missing. Now, many of the "party building" formations of the 1970s sought to supply that glue, but they in many ways in their own purity of message merely duplicated the reasons for the lack of institutional glue.
I tend to think that Gramsci had the best take on this whole issue, with his rather pragmatic view of "common sense" theory to bind together the mass of working class institutions to broader political mobilization. Gramsci seemed to have the most Catholic view (literally) of how to simultaneously support the multiple expressions of popular discontent and culture while binding them together in a cohesive force to fight the capitalist state on multiple fronts.
In "State and Civil Society" he specifically criticizes Trotsky as the prime proponent of "frontal attacks" in a period of trench warfare. (See p 238 in SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS, International Publishers). Gramsci saw the party, the Modern Prince in his view, less as a pure expression of principles than as a guiding force in balancing the conflicting interests of civil society into a force for revolutionary change. Gramsci attacked "party fanaticism" that in its purity would undermine the "continuous reorganization and development" of those multiple aspects of civil society integrated into a leftwing party pushing social change.
The antiwar movement seemed to combine the rigity of its single-issue message surrounded by a sea of party fanaticism - a combination lacking any real institutional glue that could carry the movement forward beyond the specific crisis of the war.
Whether Gramsci's view of party was ultimately democratic enough for my tastes is an open question given the shades of censorship on his prison writings, but his general approach appeals to me in a vision of a broad unity of our diversity of progressive organizations tied together by the discipline of central organization. In this viewpoint, broad left consciousness emerges out of the day-to-day coordination of those diverse consitutent elements of our counter-hegemonic civil society, not out of starting from the "correct" theoretical stance and agitating for each individual group to adopt it as first principles. It is the latter position, common to sectarian Marxist groups and single-issue nonprofits, that seems all too prevalent and ultimately disabling to our political power in society.
--Nathan Newman