Nathan and Imperialsim

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Sep 24 16:03:15 PDT 2002


Max Elbaum's, _Revolution in the Air_, which I have been browsing in for a couple of days, seems on the whole to be a powerful contribution to the self-critique of the "New Communist Movement" (the movement in which Jand & I spent over 20 years in one way or another), and lbo-posters might read it to see the difference between serious internal left criticism and mere carping from the sidelines from an assumed position of superiority to the silly people down below. I am interested here in one brief passage near the end:

***

Valuable as they are, lessons from the negative side of the movement's experience are not the ones most in danger of being forgotten today.Warnings about the perils of taking any of Lenin's ideas seriously and the dangers of anticipating any kind of system-shaking upheavals (not just in the near future but anytime, anywhere) are commonplace. Pragmatic "left wing of the possible" and "there is no alternative" thinking holds sway.

But it is a disservice to history and today's left to dismiss the New Communist Movement's experience as entirely negative. Despite a flawed theoretical framework, it managed to maintain itself as a militant, anticapitalist current for longer than most other tendencies that came out of the upheavals of the 1960s. Organisers whose outlook and skills were developed in the movement bolstered numerous important struggles over more than two decades, and many continue to do so today. The movement's most sophisticated components survived to make a stronger contribution to the main progressive upsurge of the 1980s -- the Jackson/Rainbow movement -- than any other trend on the socialist left. These accomplishments were possible because the New Communist Movement was on the right track in several important respects.

The movement's strengths centered on three crucial issues that -- albeit in altered form -- remain pivotal to any future attempt at left renewal: commitment to internationalism and anti-imperialism; the centrality of the fight against racism; and the urgency of developing cadre and creating organizations capable of mobilizint working people and the oppressed. (pg. 326)****

It will be a while before I will be able to read the book, but glancing through it Elbaum seems to be concerned to identify the NCM's weaknesses and errors (in theory and practice) as well as its strengths in so far as those features contributed to or hampered development around these three principles.

Carrol



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