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II. Colonies Politics require the ability to do what is in front of us, pushing for a struggle to pass through all its phases so that the next phases does not have to travel the path of the "longest way around." Demanding that revolutionaries fight for the independence of the proletariat when such might not be possible, is an exercise in futility. Comrade SA should explain how he has in the flesh fought fort the independence of the proletariat in America. I can only tell you why we failed and why such was not possible. Without question the historic victims of the "oppressing people and states of the imperialist country's" hold a special disdain for their imperial murderers. This disdain becomes institutionalized because of continuing inequality and very real "imperial militarism." With few exceptions, equality has the been the inescapable form of the proletarian revolution. This is because of colonies, because women are not equal and one section of the workers are not equal with the other sections and of course the color factor. Equality is why workers fight for trade unions as organizations to dampen wage inequality amongst themselves and seek a greater share of the social product. At every stage in the rise and fall of the industrial union form, the unions as a whole acted as imperial chauvanists. This most certainly included many of the black and brown members. Such was the inherent nature of trade unions. It was not just the union leaders or the bureaucracy. The conception of union as primary fighting organizations of the proletariat was imported into Marxism by way of syndicalism. I also fell victim to syndicalism but did not stay in this swamp. In the former colonies and amongst the oppressed the proletarian struggles must manifest the long standing struggle against imperialism as a condition for its existence. We witnessed in America a form of this insurgency in 2006, when six million people protested the attempt to pass anti-immigration legislation. The very foundation of society are being shaken. Something much more intense that a cyclical crisis is unfolding in real time. The entire superstructure encompassing American society is being tossed in the air different than anything I have witnessed. As things come into focus it becomes easier to write about what is in front of us. A new form of struggle embracing the equality form but different than in the past is emerging from that section of our proletariat increasingly shut out of production. Some of us are going to follow this line of march and see what happens in the next twenty years or so. If this leads to another blind alley that is alright. It is one less avenue we have to try again. The national-colonial question is a subject of great discord, with some not accepting the language called "national-colonial" coined by Lenin in the post WW I period. In my view "the national question" long ago exited history, was subsumed and morphed into the colonial question in general. Hence such terms as "semi-colonial," which arose in the post WW I period. The world of today is much different than pre-WW II China. The politics of this era - the KMT and the CPC contains very little useful for us today, although this policy was 100% correct before the death of Sun Yat Sen. After this death and the murder of the left wing policy shift was in order. The only other alternative was for the proletariat in the colonizing states to overthrow their bourgeoisie. Such would have realigned the class forces world wide. Sartesian is simply wrong and devoid of a concept of national-colonial. He demands that others do what he - we, could not and did not do. A liberated China governed by capitalist is infinitely better than one governed by imperialists. One can always ask the Chinese people. To understand the material/political relations between the proletarians/capitalist, as collusion and collision with capital - all capital, some of us focus on evolution of the working class at the front of the curve of industrial/capitalist development. I do not suggest that one must bend to the dictates or ideas of those of us as individual and organizations occupying the conditions of existence in the imperial center. One must do what is in front of them at all times and not give in to flights of fancy and pompous phrases about independence of the proletariat. . One must locate their place in history and measure the moment or boundary of the existing struggle. During a period of leap - transition, such as is taking place skipping a phase of consolidation means ones destruction, by braking their connection with the masses as they exist. Today, we can not really entertain the idea of an independent proletarian movement, but the material platform for impendence has come into existence. We can try and chart developments in real time. Very little in the history of the revolutionary movement of the past century can help us. In the past century the world was completing the leap - transition, from agriculture to industry and social revolution and insurrection broke out at the back of the curve of the industrial revolution. What we face in America is a massive bureaucracy and intelligence agencies honed in a century of counterrevolution. Our history may or may not provide lessons about the conditions under which the independence of the proletariat struggle can be realized. Why have these workers at the front - in the American and British Empire, never have been able to fight "independent" of their bourgeoisie? The abstract theory answer is that capital lives based on wage labor and wage labor rest exclusively on competition of the proletarians for wages, which sets one section of the working class against another. This means that one section of the proletarians are locked into a battle to preserve their unity - interactions, with capital. A class cannot just get up and walk out of a material relation of production. The concrete answers requires unraveling how this social contract evolves through all its stages. In the main the Trade unions, most certainly after roughly 1910, evolved more than less with the blessing of a section of the state and later as appendages to the state department. Consider this: an early union organization in America called itself "The Knights of Labor, also known as "Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor," was one of the most important American labor organizations of the 19th century. The evolution of how the proletariat understood itself, not just how the tiny Marxist detachment understood "class struggle," is important. Marxists altered our history with socialist ideas and striving for a different kind of labor organization, with a different subjective disposition but this could not last for any length of time under conditions of an expanding economy. The best we could do was fight along the line of transition to the industrial union form. The old Knights avoided the colonial areas of America like the plantation South as did all the "great unions" in our history. Some unionization took place in the South but virtually none in the plantation South. The failure to "organize the unorganized," is worthy of a separate treatment. Our union movement was consolidated based on complicity in colonial exploitation beginning right here in America. Later, in the post WW II period witnessed the universal growth and entrenchment of business unionism. What is business unionism other than a semi-fascist labor front, making permanent the organizations of mediation between labor and capital in an industry? We could not break this material bond riveting labor to capital. No one can break this connection at the front once the industrial bourgeoisie consolidated its hegemony over society. Conditions can arise where the bond is broken - dislocation, as was the case in WWI and II. Blaming the CPUSA, and I have never been a cheer leaders for them, or anyone else for the state of the working class movement in America is unwarranted. WL. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
