Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Marxism] Cretinism, electoral and otherwise Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:55:22 -0400 From: Joaquin Bustelo <jbustelo at gmail.com> Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu> To: unlisted-recipients: ; (no To-header on input) CC: 'Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition' <marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Nestor and other comrades have expressed surprise at Luko's outburst against "electoral cretinism" on this list, and ask, "what is electoral cretinism anyways?"
"Electoral cretinism" is a form of a disease first described by Doctor Karl Marx as "parliamentary cretinism" and it is perhaps useful to go back to Dr. Marx's original description of the condition. He spotted a particularly virulent outbreak among the Left or Democratic party in the Frankfurt Assembly, a parliamentary body set up during the German Revolution of 1848-1849:
"They had, from the beginning of their legislative career," Marx wrote, "been more imbued than any other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady Parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside the walls of their house—wars, revolutions, railway-constructing, colonizing of whole new continents, California gold discoveries, Central American canals, Russian armies, and whatever else may have some little claim to influence upon the destinies of mankind—is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house."
"Electoral cretinism" in its purest form is parliamentary cretinism by proxy. It is the delusion that the (usually extremely distorted) parliamentary reflection of the clash of real social forces IS the actual battle, and therefore that the outcome of the battle depends on who the Left succeeds in getting elected to legislatures, rather than the outcome of the parliamentary battle depends on the relationship of forces in broader society.
However much THAT disease may be rampant on the U.S. Left (and there is no question but that it is, the QUANGO/non-profiteers, labor bureaucracy, and Stalinists of various flavors being more-or-less permanent reservoirs of infection) that is clearly not what Luko meant nor is it something you'll find much of on this list.
I believe that what Luko was referring to is the derivative of "parliamentary cretinism by proxy," in other words, electoral cretinism, the illusion that some electoral initiative or combination can somehow reverse the deepening crisis of the U.S. Left.
I believe the use of the term "electoral cretinism" is legitimate, because the illusion arises from the idea that since so many of the masses suffer from full-fledged "electoral cretinism," by going into the electoral arena we can attract the attention of the masses, some followers, and thereby reverse what appears to be a death spiral.
Like Luko, I just plain don't believe it, and postulating some magical, Deus-ex-machina united left ticket in 2008 is simply one MORE way of not facing up to the crisis.
* * *
Decades ago, I think it was in the 1977 interview with Barbara Walters, Fidel was asked whether he thought there would be a socialist revolution in the United States, and he answered yes, but that he thought it would take 300 years, although perhaps American revolutionaries would not agree with him on that.
I remember thinking then that Fidel was wrong, or perhaps he was just trying to telegraph that he was being diplomatic with his aside about American revolutionaries. And that certainly, not in a few years, but within my lifetime, there would be a revolution in the United States.
I have since developed a much keener sense of the possibility for historical twists to surprise me, but also, I think, a keener sense of actual historical possibilities, or at least likelihoods.
And looking back at the 30 years since Fidel made that statement, I'd have to say that history has once again absolved him.
Looking at it socially and politically, and not chronologically, we'd have to say we are further away from a socialist revolution is the United States today than then. The left of 1977 was qualitatively stronger in every way than it is today. The unions were stronger. The social movements were stronger. The socialist political organizations were stronger. And it's not a question of how many decades or centuries, the essence of Fidel's assessment was that it was so far away you couldn't even see it from here.
There are objective reasons for this, but there are also subjective ones, and they are the ones I worry about. The left in the United States squanders the BULK or its potential and resources. Our organized socialist groups have dozens, hundreds or perhaps --in the case of the ISO-- one thousand members. I believe there easily could have been a socialist group in the United States today with five, ten or fifteen thousand active members. The people exist, even today. What doesn't exist is the group that would make it possible. Nor, I have become gradually convinced over the past few years, do the OBJECTIVE conditions exist that would make it possible to easily or quickly overcome the SUBJECTIVE reasons that make that unity impossible.
So my conclusion is that it is going to be a tough, hard road that we will have to travel, a road that will have to be made by walking, but that it will be possible to advance on only with a machete in one hand and a pick and shovel in the other, constantly slashing away at the underbrush and somehow going over, under or through all sorts of other obstacles.
And therein lies, I think, the frustration I felt, and I suspect also Luko, with the discussion of the imaginary united left ticket for the 2008 elections.
It's like that scene at the end of "The Sun also Rises" (Hemingway's "Fiesta," as it is known in other latitudes) where Jake Barnes and Brett are back in Madrid, and they're in a horse-drawn cab together and she turns to him and says, "Oh Jake, we could have been so happy together."
And he answers, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so."
Pretty, but it ain't going to happen.
Except, at least in Hemingway's story, we know why.
* * *
We need to know WHY the left in the United States has failed. Dogmatism and sectarianism. Of course. But WHY do we have so much of it, why is it so virulent? Bad social (class) composition. But why is the composition so heavily skewed to the intelligentsia? Unrecognized and uncombatted rampant white and especially (I am increasingly convinced) male privilege. OK, but why?
Why don't we learn? Why don't we conclude in a group of a few dozen or a few hundred, that sets as its aim to change the world, that if we've been unable to change OURSELVES, then perhaps the best contribution we can make to changing the world is to dissolve, and clear the way for someone who will do better?
Why did Marx and Engels find it so EASY to resist joining the League of the Just UNTIL it was ready to become the Communist League, and so EASY to set it aside when revolution broke out, and so EASY to dissolve it when there didn't seem to be much for it to do in the next few years? Why did they find it so easy to pretty much abstain from organized political group activities for a decade or more, and then, Marx having pretty much been the architect of the International, why he found it so easy to just pack it up?
Why don't WE ever do that?
There are all kinds of questions, dozens, hundreds or thousands of them. These are URGENT questions. We constantly seem to be humming Fleetwood Mac. "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." But we made our today with our yesterday. And if tomorrow is anything like today, we'd better stop thinking about where inertia is taking us tomorrow and think about our whole trajectory.
* * *
I doubt anyone noticed, but there was something unlike me in what I wrote above about Fidel, and the general character of the period, or in reality, era, in the United States. Most usually when I write about these sorts of issues, I'm talking about things like the disappearance of a real social movement of the working class, and my time frame isn't 30 years but 60 years.
But there is a reason why I stuck to 30 years, apart from the natural bracketing provided by Fidel's interview. I could not have said the decline of the left between 1947 and 2007, because between 1947 and 1977, there was an entirely different kind of period, commonly referred to as "the 60's," when there was not just in this country but throughout the world a rare historical moment that I see as like what must have moved Wordsworth to write:
"Bliss was in that new dawn to be alive "But to be young was very heaven."
Comrade Ricardo Alarcón, dedicating the statue of John Lennon in Havana seven years ago, captured the same thing:
"Nostalgia does not bring us together. We are not inaugurating a monument to the past, nor a site to commemorate something that disappeared.
"This place will always be a testimonial to struggle, a summoning to humanism. It will also be a permanent homage to a generation that wanted to transform the world, and to the rebellious spirit, innovative, of the artist who helped forge that generation and at the same time is one of its most authentic symbols.
"The Sixties were much more than a period in a century that is ending. Before anything else, they were an attitude toward life that profoundly affected the culture, the society and politics, and crossed all borders. Their renewing impulse rose up, victorious, overwhelming the decade, but it had been born before that time and has not stopped even up to today.
"To these years we turn our sights with the tenderness of first love, with the loyalty that all combatants feel for their earliest and most distant battle. With obstinate antagonism, some still denigrate that time -- those who know that to kill history, they must first tear out its most luminous and hopeful moment."
* * *
I know at least some of the factors that made those years what they were. The anticolonial revolution. The tremendous economic expansion. The Bomb. The War. Freedom. Justice.
But I do not know why the 60's happened. I don't even know how it could have been possible for the 60's to happen. But they did. And if they happened once, they can happen again. And if the 60's could happen in the 60's, they could certainly happen now. And much more easily.
I feel --and feel very strongly-- that it is the responsibility of those of us who had the enormous privilege of being part of that generation to give a true account, and especially a true account of where we were wrong -- politically, socially, culturally and organizationally.
We will not agree. There will be no new "Foundations of Leninism" or "Little Red Book" that can be presented to the generation of the new 60's with the assurances that here is what there is to know. They will have to find their own road by making it. But at least in some obscure corner of the Internet, in an article someone saved or a blog someone else decided to continue, or something they read years before and stuck with them, they will be freed from having to repeat at least some of our mistakes, and perhaps inspired by some of the struggles we lived through.
Joaquín
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