Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> You don't build unity in practice by denouncing people as sickening. You
> start on building unity in practice by trying to find common ground with
> people who are more or less on your side, instead of trying to find the
> mote in their eye.
I'm not sure what "unity in practice" means here. Does "practice" mean something like "reality," so it means, "Really, you don't get to unity that way," or does "practice" here mean, the organizing of political activity around particular issues at particular times in particular nations, regions, or localities?
Now I will assume the latter meaning, for the former is trivial.
Now I think you are being extremely dogmatic here, by which I mean the assumption that abstract principle can directly inform practice. (Dogmatism in this sense is destructive whether the principles at issue be true or false, but it is only serious when the principles are true. When they are false, who cares -- one merely fights them.)
And of all the fundamental principles of working class history, the most dangerous and destructive to affirm dogmatically is that of solidarity. You can recognize the idiocy of Maoist slogans (though most of them do encapsulate quite true, even commonplace, abstract principles), but Alex's original post was exactly the kind of idiocy that offends one in the Maoists.
Dogmatic use of the principle of solidarity (that is, assuming that the principle translates directly into practice) is particularly nasty because of its concrete history for nearly two centuries in the United States (and you have fought against this as hard as anyone on this lists). In practice, the assertion of solidarity has all too often meant the trivialization or blunt suppression of the interests of african americans, of women, of gays, of every segment of the working class except those who fit the old image of the strongshouldered, dirty-faced white male.
The attempt to make solidarity an immediate source of practice also subverts the kind of spontaneism (of which Father Gopan will perhaps stand as a permanent symbol) the honoring of which, I have argued, is at the very core of Lenin's political theory. When I made this argument you changed the subject in your response, by bringing up the issue of Lenin on "trade union consciousness," and of course he was correct on the absolute necessity of the intervention of theory from "outside" the working class for the development of consciousness. But that is irrelevant here. I am arguing that Lenin argued (and that this is always an assumption in his work from the beginning to his death) for the absolute necessity of spontaneous working class ACTIVITY. (Many of us on these lists wear two hats, as marxist theorists and as class activists. It works sometimes, but under the best of conditions there will never be enough marxists, so the class has to depend for the most part on spontaneous militants.)
Last spring at the Socialist Scholars Conference you and I chatted briefly on where in the hell some group of sectarians (I think specifically Maoists) got their slogans. My provisional reply now would be from exactly the same place Alex gets his.
To give a more recent instance, records of which should still be in the archives of the leninist-international list, you were engaged along with Yoshie and Lou and me in the fight with the self-labelled stalinists there whose battle cry was precisely working class unity -- and who denounced any concern with gay or women's rights as anti-unity. It's an old song. How do you distinguish it from Alex's plaintive cry?
Principle does not make practice. (The absence of principle of course destroys everything, but that is anothe issue.) The illusion that it does constitutes dogmatism.
And these maillists are not a working political coalition. They are a bunch of isolated individuals (isolated from each other at any rate) talking in something of a vacuum. The cry for unity is mildly ludicrous in such a context.
All that said, "disgusitng" was an incorrect term, not because it was too strong, but simply because it is a psychological or moral rather than political term. So that part of my post was silly but not in any way an offense against unity.
Carrol