Jim Devine wrote: > > > do you really think that the strategies applied to build up an > anti-(Iraq War) movement represent the application of some sort of > Marxism?
The emphasis should be on "Some sort," and with that qualification I would say Yes to your question. I _think_ that "sort" of marxism is pretty screwed up, but also to avoid platonizing Marxism we have acknowledge that the marxist tradition branches out pretty luxruiantly (or chaotically), and that _most_ of the branches have _some_ sort of grounding in some of the core elements of that tradition. I would also suggest that maybe we should speak of the socialist rather than the marxist tradition. That would allow a bit more room for varieties of "marxism" and other socialist tendencies to talk and work with each other. > It seems to me that the sectarians who organized some of the > demos (the Workers' World Party and its later incarnations) were > applying the worst kind of Marxism. _And it didn't involve > single-issue politics_. I think Yoshie's response to this is roughly accurate. But _also_, where the "single-issue dogma" binds is not so much at the large central demos (regional or national) but in the localities where the organizing for those demos is done. There a single-issue focus (whether it incorporates, e.g., Palestine or not) frustrates political organizing for the long haul. The "single-issue" slogan, it is well to remember, was not just an anti-war tactic, it had from the git-go in the '60s a sectarian purpose of confining "real" politics within the closed circle of the SWP. Mass mobilizations around a series of single-issues were supposed to incorporate more and more of the population in an essentially passive way, who would then take their political perspective from the 'true socialists' at the center. And as Yoshie also notices, the "Laundry-List" politics which are/were presented as the alternative were equally sectarian. Here the traditional definitions (but not the labels themselves) of "opportunism (left and right)" can be useful. Left-opportunism consists in an over-estimation of the power of capital; right opportunism consists in an under-estimation of the power of capital. The single-issue approach so _over-estimates_ the power of capital that it judges politics too complicated for ordinary people, who must be kept content with simple immediate goals, like "Out Now." (I'm not objecting to that slogan, I think it the only appropriate one; I'm objecting to confining the thought of the "masses" to that level.) The Laundry-List approach (which can and in the u.s. for 70 years has gone along with tailing the DP) so _under-estimates_ the power of capital that it believes no particular politics at all are needed but merely a collection of people demanding that nice things happen. I'm not wholly convinced by Yoshie's formulation of the alternative (beginning with "whole lives of whole individuals," but that might not be a bad rhetorical heading to begin conversation. ? I remember that at one march, they delayed the > march clearly in order to induce us to listen to a bunch of speeches > on all sorts of issues (including South Korea) that reflected the WWP > party line and had no direct connection with the Iraq War. I think this can still be correctly labelled a "single-issue" strategy: roughly, it aims at making anti-imperialism the single mass issue about which the movement could coalesce. The implicit premise here (though I doubt WWP would accept this description) is that capital is so overwhelmingly powerful that it can be opposed only by those who unify around a 100% anti-capitalist theory. Hence the tightly controlled coalitions the WWP forms, as opposed to the looser coalitions aimed at in the '60s by both the CP & the SWP. But we still need to keep working away at building opposition to the war, and the _general_ idea of building political consciousness inside that opposition is valid, though WWP's approach to that is obviously useless. > (In one of > the very few times my personal actions actually affected the world, by > the way, I and another guy (who I don't know) got the labor contingent > to start chanting "no more speeches! let us march!" or something like > that.) That reminds me of what I guess was my single sweetest moment of the '60s, when Bruce Franklin and I came close to causing a riot in the lobby of the Americana Hotel in NYC, simply by chanting "Drop the Charges" until the lobby was full of people chanting drop the charges. It did get the MLA bigwigs to come flurrying around to shepherd us into a side room for "discussion of the issues." :-) On the subject line: The troops are going to be there for a very long time indeed. And while u.s. imperialism may or may not be a paper tiger, that tiger has nuclear teeth. It will be less willing to withdraw from the middle east than it was to withdraw from Vietnam. The next decade is going to be perilous. Carrol
