Heh, thx. Added to my fan mail file.
Deserves a triple heh.
Do you prefer an "anti-war" movement like this below? http://www.troopsoutnow.org/photos/recruiting1.jpg Led by "Tankies, " that supported the suppression of the Hungarian Revolt of '56, the Prague Spring of '68 and Tienamen Square of '91?
Or is bashing a journal you've likely never read feel better, in terms of shoring up your militant identity? http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg66260.html The living dead (was: RE: [Marxism] TONC: Is Unity Possible?) he divisions and fractioning of the revolutionary socialist movement in the United States is an absolute plague. We have grouplets of one hundred or a couple of hundred people --or even a thousand people-- active in a handful of cities trying to build an organization *against* everyone who is just like them. In a country of three hundred million, with hundreds of urban centers, this does not even rise to the level of a joke, not even a sick one.
The WWP/PSL split is just one more indication of how absolutely politically wrong the revolutionary left in the United States is. Not just wrong on one or another question, but wrong, dead wrong, full stop.
More, I would say it shows that we do not have in fact any revolutionary left AT ALL. If the left were truly revolutionary, it would not occur to anyone in it to think it was okay to split without as much as one word of real explanation. Today, splitting is considered so absolutely *normal* a thing for a few dozen leftists to do that neither side in this case even bothered of going through the motions of trying to place the onus for the division on the other one. I don't mean that they didn't seriously try: they didn't even *pretend* to try.
And the working class is supposed to find THIS attractive?
Yes, yes, I know, you don't belong to the Menshevik-Trotkyite-Maoist-revisionist-ultraleft-reformist-Oehlerite True Revolutionary Party (we hates it forever!), but to the one and only genuine Bolshevik-Leninist Truly Revolutionary Party.
Don't we all.
To the best of my knowledge, save for the ISO, which is chronologically younger, but is otherwise plagued by the same senility, the "really existing" left in the United States has an expiration date. I am turning 54 in a few days. And I am by far not the youngest member of the leadership of the group I am in (Solidarity), and I suspect half or more of the membership is my age or older.
Our generation especially --the generation of the 60's and 70's-- have, I believe, one more great historic service we could perform for the working class movement. And that is to kill off OUR left, the left of two, three ... many vanguard parties, the left of sectarian purity and division and impotence, the left of the XX Century, the Cold War world, the left of the "anti-Stalinist" and "anti-revisionist" struggle, the left of the struggle against "Trotskyite wreckers and splitters" the left of the "Third Camp" and the "two class camps," of being loyal to "really existing socialism" and of fighting to the death against "bureaucratic degeneration," the left of "Dear Great Respected and Beloved Leader," and the Left of "socialism from below."
Not because I consider all these positions equivalent, or their counterposition false. But I do believe the ways in which questions were posed in the preceding historical epoch has been superseded, we will NOT face the same questions in the same way, the issues going forward will be different. I firmly believe these ideological circles formed in the Cold War world --and that is really what ALL of our groups are-- are not the groups that will be able to cope with the challenges of the XXI Century.
I don't present that as a hypothesis to be tested but as a conclusion after substantial experience. It's been 15 years since the Berlin Wall fell; more than a decade since the red hammer-and-sickle flag last waved over the Kremlin.
That world is now far, far behind us: why do we still have the same groups? Worse, why do we still function in the same way?
"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living," Marx remarked in The 18th Brumaire. Although we are still living, we don't seem to have a clue that we're part of a dead generation. http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/msg66261.html Our "left" makes no sense. Not even to ourselves. If it were merely utterly and completely useless, lacking even a shred of redeeming social or political import, THAT would be progress. Our "left" is worse then useless, it is an *obstacle* to the emergence of working class consciousness, it sucks so much that if it were a vacuum cleaner we'd win prizes for industrial design.
Yes, my True Revolutionary Party and your Truly Revolutionary Party and the comrades of the Party of True Revolutionaries and the Revolutionary True Party and the Party of True Revolutionaries, considered in the abstract, programmatically, and in isolation, are all plausible groups. But as an ensemble they are a complete, utter and irremediable disaster. And that is IN FACT what they are. Is this REALLY so hard to understand? Are we so incapable of seeing ourselves as OTHERS see us?
Joaquín
-- Michael Pugliese
