[lbo-talk] Response to MG -- Was Poll....

brad babscritique at gmail.com
Tue Jul 5 06:01:56 PDT 2011



>And my main ARGUMENT or THHESIS is simply that when such fissures appear or seem to appear what leftists do is plung into action, attempting to build on those "successes" (illusory or real). Neither Marv nor Brad seems very interested in the question of WITBD _now_, each in his/her local situation.
>
> Carrol


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Which goes against 547 other posts by Carrol in which he claims that we should not attempt to reach out and build anything, but focus narrowly on those who are already leftists.

I also have no idea why Carrol thinks that Wisconsin is a fissure, or more accurately, why he doesn't see 1000 fissures everyday. Is Wisconsin the only place where people are resisting capitalism today or do people resist capitalism almost constantly. One lacks the necessary creativity if their only means to be engaged in struggle is to wait for something that fits their predetermined form of a movement toward revolution.

As for what leftists do: if you think for one second that anything in Wisconsin happened without leftists building it from the very start, you miss the whole point. We don't wait and "plung into action" we are the fucking action. We are the seed. There is no action without the initial work of leftists. To sit by and wait and then be reactive, is what causes reactionary action.

On the DP: I don't think anyone said that we should in advance label movements as reformist. However if their outcome is reform and their stated goal was reform then the proper conclusion should be that they were never more then reform movements (that does not mean that they lacked the potential to become otherwise). The DP does not have its stated or even unstated goal to soak up radical movements and turn them into reformist movements. In a social system where politics is formally separated from economic activity any political system will structurally do that (it is incorrect to view this formal separation as real!). That is the very nature of capitalism and that is its strength. The goal is to reconnect through action the political (in all its guises) with the economic. I don't narrowly define the DP as simply an electoral device and I see fissures whenever I put myself into those circles. It is these fissures and the people I connect with there that convince me that it isn't the grave yard of social movements but can and sometimes does act as the source of social movements if even through defeat and disillusionment.

Brad



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