At 02:10 PM 1/10/01 +0200, you wrote:
>Dear Stan
>
>I think you have taken some of the points that were made by me and others
earlier way too personally. It seems to me that if I got to know you I
would like you a lot, so don't get so easily insulted by strong debate. The
points of disagreement are purely political, and seeing as they are rather
important points of principle I will reply once more.
I agree to changing the tone of the debate, but will insist that objections
to logical fallacies--which are themselves often a switch to personal
judgements in the stead of responding to the merits of an argument. That's
not strong debate, but counterfeit debate. I will take responsibility for
using bad judgement, and digressing from this very rule, in referring to
anarchists and trots in a clause--which you referred to as ritual
denunciation. We all have to get better at not pushing one another's buttons.
>
>>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/08 3:21 PM >>>
>No one said anything about "stages." You're putting words in my mouth.
>What "stages" might be appropriate in what places at what times depends on
>a host of variables. The question is what mobilizes masses in a
>progressive direction. Are you seriously arguing that the overthrow of
>codified apartheid was not progress, even with all the difficulties not yet
>overcome?
>
>Tahir: What is instructive about the South African case is how an
essentially nationalist settlement BLOCKS any social progress beyond
underdeveloped capitalism. Since 1994 unemployment has increased and so has
economic inequality, mainly due to the highly intensified levels of
commodification with the liberalisation of the economy which the ANC
government presides over so enthusiastically. None of the country's targets
in housing, health, education or security have even come close to being met.
Stan: I think the direction taken by the ANC right now is abominable, and
it has drawn heavy fire from COSATU and the SACP. But it's important to
account for external pressures, internal causative agents, and the dynamic
relationship between them, by following developments with a great deal of
specificity, and not relying on theoretical determinism, ie, nationalism=bad.
Your critique of the current situation is a judgement with an implication.
But it still doesn't address the questions of (1) should the struggle
against apartheid have taken place, (2) could that strugle have taken place
effectively without the alliances, and (3) would demands as specifically
ideological as you imply have mobilized adequate force to see the struggle
through, or would that specificity have fractured alliances? Even these
queries are far too general to be useful, and are posited here as a point
of departure only.
Nationalism means a lot of things. It's very important to make
distinctions and provide context, or we fall into the trap of semantic
generalization.
Haiti is at a conjuncture right now, and the demand for sovereignty is the
demand that can mobilize resistance. Are there dangers on this path? You
bet. Is there a greater danger in not pursuing it? Far greater. Allowing
the consolidation of neocolonial power in the absence of resistance.
Should Chavez in Venezuela give it back over to COPEI and the neoliberals?
Certainly the basis of his power and incredible popularity at this point in
time is the issue of sovereignty.
I think we err badly when we are impatient. The struggles in Africa and
elsewhere are not over. When an interviewer asked a Chinese diplomat once,
What was the final result of the French Revolution? he thought a moment
and replied, Too early to tell.
First things first. The target of every blow, IMHO, right now, must be the
political-military establishemnt of the USA.
>
Tahir: >I believe that this is not an unfamiliar scenario - it is
basically the outcome of any nationalist led struggle. Check out Africa and
tell me which countries have shown social progress in the post-colonial
epoch. If they haven't shown any, then then one perhaps has to ask whether
this is possible within the global division of power as estalished by
capitalism and the system of nation states. This is why I cannot agree that
a national liberation struggle which is divorced from the social question
can be described unproblematically as "progressive".
>
Stan: Nothing is unproblematic. But the global division of power is
hardly a division now.
Tahir: >One needs to be clear here - it is not just that one is
disappointed about a struggle being arrested at a particular point. It is
arrested by design. Leaders of national liberation movements, once they
take power tend to enter into a whole new shift in their class
identification. It is a cultural, psychological and political phenomenon
that has been described by many African intellectuals, such as Cabral and
Fanon, and is not exactly a mystery at this time. Read Fanon's chapter in
The Wretched of the Earth on the pitfalls of the national consciousness. In
South Africa today we witness, for example, a public discourse that is
extremely hostile to socialist thought or even intellectualism of any kind.
>
Stan: Fanon is one of my favorites. But that this tendency emerges
doesn't strike me as an argument against national liberation struggle, but
part of a strategic analysis--which we are suing right now in Haiti--to be
more proactive in preventing this tendency from derailing the revolution.
It may be--given the CONTEXT (which I think you are under-emphasizing)--an
obstacle that has to be passed.
Tahir: >But I would like to go further and to say that 'national
liberation' is a contradiction in terms. An essential part of the global
oppressive machinery of capitalism is the system of nation states. You work
within that system and then you become an oppressor, maybe a slightly more
or less oppressive figure than some other, but that's just a matter of
degree and detail. "Progress" in any substantive sense needs to shift the
dismantling of nations states right up the agenda.
>
Stan: Generalization. All "nation-states" are not equal. And advancing
"dismantling" up the agenda strikes me as one of those notions that's easy
to articulate so long as we don't have to explain what the steps are to get
the job done or the real conditions in which they will be taken. This is
precisely my problem with this kind of detatched theorizing. It doesn't
emphasize real conditions, and theory not grounded on material reality is a
sterile exercise, and it doesn't tell us what to do NOW. Generally, what
it tells us to do right now is continue theorizing or decry the masses for
their ignorance in not doing what we think they should. This is not meant
as a personal critique, but as a critique of this line of reasoning.
>Stan: anyone who claims they know what socialism
>will look like, provided we are wise enough to get THERE at all, is a fool
>or a liar. Now you've put me in a category, then you tell me I have a lot
>to answer for. This is all fallacy at its best.
>
>Tahir: I dunno what the last bit whas referring to, but surely you are not
saying that we don't have a clue as to what a socialist society should be
like. If that were the case we shouldn't use the word and should indeed
confine ourselves to a discussion of democracy and equity. And we would get
precisely nowhere because we would not have challenged the system that
oppresses us in any way. Capitalism can live with non-racialism, with
democracy, with non-sexism, etc., etc. on a purely discursive level.
Stan: I emphatically disagree. Racism here and there is so completely
inextricable with existing capitalist structures that the destruction of
racism would necessarily imply the destruction of capitalism. We are not
confining ourselves to any discussion. I am objecting to disembodied
theory. I don't care if hypothetical capitalism could exist without
racism. There's no such thing as hypothetical capitalism. This strikes me
as a reversion to idealism of a sort. The real live division of labor upon
which captialist structures really exist most certainly DO depend upon
racism, sexism, and the legitimizing function of technical bourgeois
democracy.
Tahir: I see no reason why Bill Clinton or Al Gore, or even Bush for that
matter, would disagree with what you have said on a rhetorical level.
Stan: Whether they would agree or disagree is irrelevant at any level.
That's not an argument.
Tahir: But that rhetoric is just peeing in the wind, because the system at
a deeper level reproduces every kind of chauvinism, discrimination and
petty prejudice. What it cannot live with is socialism and communism in the
marxist sense, because the latter means an end to wage labour, to commodity
production, to nation states.
Stan: We all know what it means. But this is in itself rhetoric. It
doesn't tell us anything about HOW to advance a struggle in the real world.
Tahir: It is in that struggle that there is a real chance of ending the
last vestiges of backward consciousness. But you know this, don't you Stan?
Or do you think that "national liberation" is attainable as an end within
an unreconstructed global capitalist system. If you think so then you
should come out clearly and say so, but after about 100 years or so of talk
of national liberation within the communist movement and about 80 years
since Lenin branded as 'infantile' any talk of staying outside of electoral
politics there's not an awful lot to crow about. Affirmative action maybe?
Stan: What struggle? You have advanced a thesis with no hint as to how it
would be practically carried out. Lenin's critique was aimed at a specific
group in a specific context and should not be re-articulated as a
principle. It's a straw man. And by "rolling the niverse into a ball" as
you have done the entire 20th Century, your arguemtn has fallen prey to
grossly over-generalized historical determinism.
>
>Stan: Marx gives us a toolbox, not a blueprint.
>
>Tahir: A toolbox to do what?
>
Stan: To analyze.
>Stan: One should never go into a gunfight without ammunition. And one should
>never engage in a debate with theory and no facts. The struggle against
>slavery in Haiti was anything but a struggle for capitalism. You obviously
>have no idea what you are talking about. Haiti adopted a feudal economic
>form, which still holds sway over many sectors today--a fact directly
>responsible for its backward development. The situation--as I pointed out
>earlier--was and is far more complicated than someones pre-ordained social
>teleology.
>
>Tahir: Unlike you, I'm not reading a book about Haiti right now and I must
confess I never have either. I wasn't aware that I had said anything at all
about Haiti. The debate we were having was about the historical
significance of the franchise, remember? I presented this as part of the
historical movement to capitalism, together with certain other bourgeois
democratic freedoms, such as equality before the law or abstract right. I
do not, and did not, deny that there are many cases in the world where this
movement is incomplete even today. Remember I live in South Africa, so I
know what backward pre-capitalist thinking is like, believe me. And it has
many interesting facets, including racism, tribalism and xenophobia (all of
which nationalism does nothing to alleviate in my experience). No-one is
saying that extreme forms of backward consciousness must not be struggled
against. What I seriously questioned was the utterly preposterous notion
put forward by Mark and apparently supported by you that the franchise
should be the key to all efforts of struggle right now.
Stan: Neither Mark nor I said the struggle was the franchise, nor did we
say that it is the "key." We said democracy, which is a far broader and
more useful field of battle, and the one where the enemy has concentrated
himself and is weak. Sorry for the extended military metaphor, but I am an
old military man.
Tahir: I think the key is anti-capitalism and the target should be its key
institutions. I think furthermore that the struggle is tending in this
direction, or at least the most significant events are.
>
Stan: Fine. Tell me HOW!!!!!! we target these key institutions, WHERE,
and with WHOM, and for WHAT they will be mobilized. You can come here to
the states and go to the most oppressed communities we have and utter the
word "communism" and they will slam the door in your face. So I guess
until they all become conscious, we should just go home and endlessly
elaborate theories. The rollback of voting rights in the US, among
African-Americans, IS the most significant event right now.
Best,
Stan
"I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
"Am I to be cursed forever with becoming
somebody else on the way to myself?
-Audre Lorde
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