<HTML>Michael P. writes: << One of the cites from Peter Waterman's great website. An ex-Communist who did not turn neo-con ouit of disillusionment with Stalinism. http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hopeful.html Waterman, Peter. 1991a. 'Understanding Socialist and Proletarian Internationalism: The Impossible Past and Possible Future of Emancipation on a World Scale', Working Paper, No. 97. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. 66 pp >> Michael cites what I believe to the best web site one can find on internationalism and trade unionism, Peter Waterman's Global Solidarity Dialogue. The problem is that while Peter's brand of 'proletarian internationalism' has the merit of completely eschewing a thoroughly unprincipled, not to mention politically suicidal, return to Leninist-Trotskyist-Stalinist politics, the alternative he poses is at such a high level of generality that it is really hard to figure what it would mean concretely for a trade union to adopt such a posture. As best as I can figure it, all that it involves is the current and historical discrete acts of solidarity with particular struggles in another nation and memberships in international union bodies, along with the newer tack of encouraging networking -- international union communication and information sharing -- via the Internet. This is unobjectionable, but where does it take us? Not very fair, I am afraid. Consider the opening and closing paragraphs of the article, entitled "rootless, cosmopolitan, petty-bourgeois -- and internationalist" to which Michael refers us. << Like Alain Lipietz (1992), I feel that the 21st century has begun, presaged by Berlin, Baghdad and Rio. As a lifelong socialist I cannot but feel a responsibility for what collapsed in Berlin, even if I left the Communist Party in 1970. And as a lifelong anti-imperialist I feel the same responsibility for not having been at least prepared for Gulf War. I rejoice at the rise of the green 'global solidarity' expressed by the ecological movement. And I see a possible and necessary role for a new kind of labour movement amongst this and other new internationalisms (Waterman 1991a, b). But the earthquakes of 1989-92 have certainly given me cause to reflect on my own itinerary as an internationalist. >> << It has occured to me that the active agents of even 'proletarian' internationalism have customarily been people like myself, 'rootless petty-bourgeois cosmopolitans': Flora Tristan, Marx and Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lenin, Emma Goldman, Pablo Neruda. The quoted phrase is, of course, from the vocabulary of Hitler and Stalin, and it customarily referred to Jews, whether the word was spelled JEW (Hitler) or ZIONIST (Stalin). Many of the major and minor agents of socialist internationalism have also, like myself, been Jews. Yet even if those who played these roles over the last one to two hundred years were customarily 'petty-bourgeois cosmopolitans', they have not necessarily always been rootless or Jewish. Today they are more likely to be nationally-rooted Liberation Christians than stateless Jewish socialists. Nor, it seems to me, would the relationship of these with the movements of their days be similar. I would, indeed, tentatively suggest a tripartite historical typology, corresponding to succeeding periods of capitalist and statist development: the c19th Agitator, the c20th Agent and the c21st Networker. Having played all these roles (though neither in the 19th nor the 21st century), I feel that some self-reflection may throw light on at least the red internationalists, or provide a trial sketch for a more general study. >> << From now on I would have to create my own international solidarity, community, movement. Although I continued to travel widely -- and hopefully -- for my work after 1972, my internationalist itinerary would represent something less of a search for the crucial geographical place and a privileged political base, something more of the creation of a new international social space. In the coming period what would be required, firstly, was an `international of the imagination', secondly an understanding that communication was more crucial to a new internationalism than organisation, thirdly the discovery that the new crucial role of the internationalist was less that of the Agitator or the Agent than that of the Networker. >> Now there are things to recommend about this posture, not the least of which is the simple political honesty of telling the truth about the ill-conceived romance of the left with "proletarian internationalism" a la Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and the lack of pretense that waving the banner of "proletarian internationalism" can be a substitute for programmatic politics of international working class solidarity. But it will remain nothing more of a utopian vision than a politics if it is not translated, in a meaningful way, into a coherent set of policies and programs that can be enacted on the ground in a daily way. I suspect that Waterman would agree entirely with me on that question. It would be interesting to hear Doug's reactions to the substance of the various papers at Zizek's Leninist shindig -- for my part, if only to see how much they conformed to my hermeneutic prejudice about Zizekian politics in general. That is, my suspicion is that "Lenin" is for Zizek not so much the leading representative of a certain tradition of politic practice, that one can analyze, critique and then either adopt or reject, on part or in toto, but a 'floating signifier' of a left politics 'radically' outside of the mainstream, "bourgeois democratic" consensus. Like the paintings I saw being sold in the streets of Moscow when I visited last September, with the visage of Lenin and the Coca-Cola logo "arm-in-arm," this is a vision of Lenin as icon, as -- in Zizek's Hegelian twists -- the iconclastic icon. We are not about to see doctrines of "democratic de-centerism" to update "democratic decentralism," and that sort, because it is really Lacan which remains in command in Zizek's Lacanian-Leninism, and what Zizek offers is an entirely Lacanian reading of Lenin as a contemporary political signifier, not an attempt to somehow combine the political or philosophical and political insights of Lenin and Lacan. But it tells us something about the depth of Zizek's democratic sensibilities [much too shallow, I fear] that it would be Lenin that he seizes upon as this signifier, and that what he finds interesting in Lenin -- at least in his conference call -- is Lenin's refusal to be circumscribed by "bourgeois legality and respectability." He might just as well have joined Telos and other fallen away leftists in seizing upon Carl Schmitt, who had a much more philosophically nuanced critique of "bourgeois" politics than Lenin. If politics is to be reduced to some form of visceral antagonism with bourgeois sensibilities [the old shock the bourgeois routine], of a decisionism which delights in violating constitutional norms and disregarding the rule of law, why stick with relatively crude philosophical and political legacy of Leninism, and its Trotskyist and Stalinist progeny? Sorelian myths work just as well on the authoritarian right as the authoritarian left. And that finally is what bothers me about the way in which "proletarian internationalism" is bandied about in these debates. Where it is not just a way of returning to the completely and deservedly discredited politics of the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist traditions, it operates as a free floating signifier, free of all practical programmatic concerns of how one actually builds bonds of international solidarity, for a politics "radically" outside the global corporate power system. But that is, in the final analysis, simply a politics of "gestural defiance." Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>