On 11/30/06, Julio Huato <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You may know Stan Goff. He's a serious radical activist and essayist
with an interesting and diverse life experience. Every now and then,
he publishes articles on the Huffington Post. I respect him deeply.
He just wrote a very rich and thoughtful essay, where he submits his
personal rejection of organized Marxism in the U.S.
<snip>
Stan's
essay can be read here, along with some very thoughtful comments:
http://stangoff.com/?p=423
Thank you for posting Stan's essay. A couple of comments on some
specific points Stan makes:
On Primary Contradiction
Stan writes: "The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class
represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary
contradiction — a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing
as a 'scientific doctrine' — of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to
override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper,
and more durable 'contradiction,' that the most turbulent and
transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the
leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that
they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not
proletarians."
The dialectic of capital-wage labor is indeed what makes capitalism
what it is, and it is therefore the primary contradiction at the level
of theory, but that theory does not imply that people can or must
organize themselves in practice along the line of the primary
contradiction which is an abstraction. In reality, all social
movements under capitalism -- including successful revolutionary ones
-- have been cross-class movements, with more or less eclectic sources
of influence (from religion to feminism), and they always will be and
should be. Theoretical tools developed in the Marxist tradition can
merely help us understand and participate in social movements better
than without them. In short, the tools are not meant for purifying
cross-class movements into a movement of, by, and for "the
proletariat" in the abstract.
So, Stan is right to reject the "doctrine" in question, except that I
do not think that's a doctrine inherent in the Marxist tradition,
though indeed it probably is the one that governs Marxist-Leninist
organizations in the USA, none of which I have ever joined.
On the State
Stan write: "First, our conception of socialism as a blueprint for
state power that addresses the questions rasied by dualism and
industrialism only after some imagined political victory ignores what
we haven't studied (or have selectively ignored as a 'deviation') from
Ivan Illich to Alf Hornborg to Maria Mies. This inherently
patriarchal, industrial, state-socialist 'theory' is as dead as my
great grandfathers."
The state is necessary if you want to have modernity and civilization
under class society, especially if you want women to enjoy the
benefits of modernity and civilization. The primary effect of
imperialism today is to erode and destroy the state on the periphery.
On Trade Unions and White Male Workers in the USA
Stan writes:
<blockquote>Second, the trade union movement is not the whole working
class, and the trade unions in the US have chosen — more often than
not — patriarchy and-or white supremacy and-or reactionary nationalism
at almost every turn. The exceptions do not disprove the rule. There
is a reason for that. An imperial working class has imperial
privilege, and their livelihoods are lashed to the survival of a
system designed for domination and war. As a friend — Joaquin Bustelo
— recently put it:
"I can't imagine how it is possible to deny that there is not now nor
has there been for a very long time a working class movement worthy of
the name in the United States (a "class-for-itself" movement). Does
anyone disagree? Does someone want to correct me on the half-century
long decline in union membership, the decline in the number of
strike-days, etc.? Does someone want to let me know about the
thousands of Anglo workers who organized their workplaces to walk out
last May Day in solidarity with Latino and immigrant protests?
"That white male workers would try to decert their union because they
don't want to be in the same collective as Blacks and Latinos, doesn't
that tell you something? That's going on right now, TODAY in my area.
And things like that have been going on day after day, week after
week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade for a
VERY long time in the United States. ('Things like that' = white Anglo
male workers identifying their interests with those of their
nationality, gender and ruling class instead of with their class. But
this isn't an exclusively white, male thing. You will find varying
degrees and sorts of privilege –male privilege, 'legal' privilege,
'citizen' privilege, age privilege– among women, Blacks, Latinos, and
so on, where it also tends to have a corrupting influence but that is
a much more complicated discussion.)</blockquote>
Trade unions are not the whole of the working class, but where workers
are trying to organize one, or where workers are trying to get what
they want or defend what they got through one, it's our job to join
them. Exceptions do exist for me, however, e.g., when top
metropolitan trade union officials use money from the US government
and its allied civil society institutions to influence the direction
of workers' struggle in foreign countries, when US trade unions try to
make US economy protectionist, and when workers of a dominant group
(e.g., white male workers) seek to use their trade unions to exclude
workers of subordinated groups.
Trade unions, at least in the USA, are not the primary institution in
which working-class people participate in politics, however, nor can
they probably be. The bigger social institutions where working-class
people are found en masse are schools -- from kindergartens to
colleges and universities -- and churches, mosques, synagogues and
other religious institutions.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
