Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>
> Yes, but, as a matter of curiousity, why do you use Gould's language to
> describe what appears to simply be the Marxist concept of a revolutionary
> period dressed up in scientific jargon. Is there a difference?
Actually, I hadn't thought of it as scientific jargon, but as a way of avoiding political jargon that was open to misunderstanding (or deliberate distortion). A simple dislike for such an enthusiastic supporter of military advenurism as Senator Obama of Illinois gets labelled, for example, as an expression of "revolutionary purism." There is also a substantive reason: I would see actual revolutionary periods as being special cases of what I've termed political punctuations. The late '50s-early '70s were a politically explosive period, but never approached an actual "revolutionary period."
> This does not represent a politics of mere
> > quietism or "attentisme," however, but rather calls for constant efforts
> > by leftists of various tendencies to push various forms of resistance to
> > capital. Whether the current struggles around Bring the Troops Home Now!
> > will develop into such a punctuation remains to be seen, but currently
> > it's the best game in town as it were.
>
> Yes and no. In periods where there is no "spontaneous political activity on
> the part of the working class", this just strikes me as substitutionism,
> often very frenetic and unproductive. We've all done this in the past, a few
> still do. In these cases, it's a harmless matter of personal choice - mostly
> whether you like spending your time meeting, polemicizing, and demonstrating
> in small groups. Where there are genuine mass campaigns around military
> intervention or attacks on social programs and rights,
But the difference can not be recognized in advance. Moreover, the civil rights struggle and the subsequent anti-war and womens liberation struggles depended far more than is often recognized on the work of the CPUSA during the '40s and '50s. Stanley Aronowitz once pointed out in a forum in Chicago that without the CPUSA the songs of Guthrie might not ever have come to the attention of Bob Dylan. Many of the leaders of the SCLC owed a debt to the CP. As pissed off as I am at both ANSWER and UFPJ, I'm glad they exist.
Carrol