Obama: the American Dream Joaquin Bustelo jbustelo at gmail.com Mon Nov 24 11:02:12 MST 2008
Previous message: [Marxism] Obama: the American Dream Next message: [Marxism] Obama: the American Dream Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Louis writes: "Just go to http://www.marxists.org/admin/search/index.htm and enter "Lenin" in the archive to be searched, and "Cadet" and "bloc" in the 'With all the words' field. You will get 56 hits. Here's some excerpts from the 3 articles right at the top in relevance and allow Lenin to speak for himself." I think Louis does comrades a disservice by the way he is conducting this debate. The ORIGINAL point in dispute is whether and who to vote for is a TACTICAL question, as I maintain, or a question of "principle" where the are "class lines" that must never, ever be crossed, and doing so is like committing a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, except that in the revolutionary movement there's no such thing as the sacrament of confession. OBVIOUSLY tactics are GUIDED by principles, properly understood, and by strategic considerations. Nor are tactical questions unimportant. The road to defeat is paved with well-intentioned tactics. As part of his argument, Louis appealed to authority, saying Lenin never voted for bourgeois parties. I produced carefully researched DIRECT quotations from Lenin showing that this was simply NOT SO. Under certain, limited, specific, secondary or tertiary circumstances in the 1912 elections, Lenin did not object to making blocs AGAINST THE MONARCHISTS with the "liberals" even though the MAIN LINE of the campaign was to present an independent revolutionary-democratic pole led by the Bolsheviks and counterposed to BOTH the out-and-out monarchists AND the moderate "opposition" that wanted to cut a deal for a constitutional monarchy (the Cadets and "Progressists"). ONE of the things to be learned from this is precisely that electoral questions are tactical questions: at the service of an overall strategic approach, yes, but they are detailed, specific, concrete. Thus the Bolshevik Center LIMITED its "no blocs with the cadets" prohibition to the big cities ONLY, where they knew from past experience that all the scare talk about a Black Hundreds victory was a liberal lie to fool the revolutionary democrats. And they designated the campaign in St. Petersburgh the leading nation-wide voice because THERE the election was direct, and thus the clash of the main three trends (monarchists/liberals/revolutionary democrats) more open, uncomplicated by a two-stage election. And because the Bolsheviks had a daily paper, necessary to wage the kind of leading national campaign Lenin and his friends wanted. But when push came to shove, the social democrats DID cut deals with the cadets in some rural areas, reflected in the fact that three of the 14 social democratic deputies in the Duma got there thanks to those blocs. Louis's approach -- the approach all of us who went through the US SWP learned -- would have been to refuse any deals with the Cadets and let them gang up with the monarchists against the revolutionary democrats. Lenin said no, although the main line was for political independence and counterposition against BOTH those trends, the workers party ALSO had to USE the conflict between the cadets and the monarchists. Louis responds with a gusher of quotations to the effect that Lenin really, REALLY hated the Cadets and had nothing but scorn for people who advocated subordinating revolutionary democracy to the Cadets and their ilk. He presents this AS IF he had disproved or unmasked some sort of deception I had perpetrated. And there is a disturbing pattern here. Louis brands me an advocate of voting for lesser evil Democrats because I have advocated voting for ONE person on a Democrat party line (primary actually) Cynthia McKinney against a Democrat/Republican machine cabal financed to a significant degree by enemies of the Palestinian people with the aim of using Georgia's open primaries to galvanize the white republican minority in the north of the county into intervening in the Democrat primary because the pattern had been (it changed this year with Obama) that Black participation in primaries was much, much lower than in the general election. And the effect was to deny the Black majority of DeKalb County, Georgia's 4th CD, the democratic right of having the representative they wanted in Congress. And I noted an additional thing: there is a certain history to denying Black people their democratic right to political representation, which gave the assault on McKinney much greater importance than just the case of Republicans gaming the system against a Democrat. And that in the nature of things, the issue presented in the McKinney cases (for it happened not once but twice) could not have been exclusive or unique to her, and this issue --the democratic right of Black people to political inclusion and representation-- has to be TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT in determining electoral tactics. He uses the same inattentive approach, making and amalgam of the usual lesser-evil suspects with Fred Feldman because of his ANALYSIS of the significance of Obama's victory, EVEN THOUGH Fred urged a vote for McKinney. It is ONE thing to argue that the LOGIC or IMPLICATION of your opponent's position is such and such. It is ANOTHER to simply IMPUTE to those you are debating positions they do not, in fact, hold. And that's been going on for a while now, and continues, with the --frankly-- silly campaign to PROVE Obama is a bourgeois politician AS IF someone here had claimed he was the second coming of Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales. This causes a certain amount of annoyance and irritation, because it shows comrades on the other side of this discussion are approaching matters with all the open-mindedness of a brick wall. They don't even PRETEND to try to show that the IMPLICATION of what we actually do say is such and such -- they simply IMPUTE those positions to us and then deploy their polemical guns against fish in a barrel. Now, back to Louis's "answer" to me, such as it is. I've read most of this material, plus a bunch of other stuff, over the past 2-3 days. And assuming there are some comrades interested in how Lenin approached these issues, what he said, and what he and his friends did as a result, let me provide a guided reading list. One of the most interesting and useful article on the subject in dispute is "The Fourth Duma Election Campaign and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Social-Democrats." That is here: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/may/08.htm>. The concept that Louis seems to be unable to wrap his head around is the same one as in the closely related discussion over "critical support" to social democratic candidates, which is that what is involved in not a Lenin Seal of Approval. Quite the contrary. "The hegemony of the liberals in the Russian emancipation movement has always meant, and will always mean, defeat for this movement. The liberals manoeuvre between the monarchy of the Purishkeviches and the revolution of the workers and peasants, betraying the latter at every serious juncture. The task of the revolution is to use the liberals' fight against the government and to neutralise their vacillations and treachery. "The policy of the liberals is to scare Purishkevich and Romanov a little with the prospect of revolution, in order to share power with them and jointly suppress the revolution. And it is the class position of the bourgeoisie that determines this policy. Hence the Cadets' cheap 'democracy' and their actual fusion with the most moderate 'Progressists' of the type of Yefremov, Lvov, Ryabushinsky and Co. "The tactics of the proletarian Party should be to use the fight between the liberals and the Purishkeviches over the division of power-without in any way allowing 'faith' in the liberals to take hold among the people-in order to develop, intensify and reinforce the revolutionary onslaught of the masses, which overthrows the monarchy and entirely wipes out the Purishkeviches and Romanovs. "At the elections, its tactics should be to unite the democrats against the Rights and against the Cadets by 'using' the liberals' fight against the Rights in cases of a second ballot, in the press and at meetings." This concept -- "'using' the liberals' fight against the Rights" seems to be what Louis has such a hard time understanding. Remember, the question that gave rise to these exchanges IS NOT the overall strategic perspective and tone of the Bolshevik campaign as a whole, but rather whether Lenin ever considered it "permissible" to bloc with or vote for the "liberals" (meaning in this case "moderate" constitutional monarchist parties). For Louis, this was absolutely and utterly excluded as a matter of principle. Well, it was not for Lenin. In reality, Louis has discovered that Lenin rejected and the Mensheviks accepted an overall bloc with the liberals. Lenin said no, in the big cities, the monarchists (the Rights) had no strength and the political significance of such a bloc would be to subordinate the revolutionary elements to the compromising bourgeoisie who merely used the revolutionary democratic elements (working class and peasant based) to scare the monarchy into making more concessions TO THEM, the big bourgeoisie. But for Lenin, this did not exclude punctual, limited tactical agreements and blocs with the liberals AGAINST THE MONARCHISTS, for example in some rural areas. Much of the material I already quoted to this effect is from the article, "The Significance of the St. Petersburg Elections" here: http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/jul/01.htm. Finally, because in most of the country elections to the Duma were indirect, with the people voting for electors and the electors for deputies, in some areas where they were not strong enough to get THEIR OWN deputies directly elected, they made horse-trading deals for deputies with the liberals *against the monarchists,* which is also a form of an electoral bloc. This latter tactic is documented in Lenin's "Report to the International Socialist Bureau, 'Elections to the Fourth Duma,'" which is here: http://marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/11.htm, and where he says, "In the workers' curia, all electors are Social-Democrats. The ultra-reactionary gentry, with a majority in the gubernia electoral assemblies, have been forced to let in the Social-Democrats (in six gubernias, the law stipulates the election of one deputy from the workers; in other gubernias, the Social-Democrats obtain mandates through agreements with the liberals)." How could Lenin possibly justify such a thing? Because the Russian party would get a lot more mileage, including anti-Cadet mileage, by having a stronger fraction in the Duma, and given the way the elections were structured and contests decided, these tactical arrangements were necessary. Joaquin This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
