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On 9/10/2010 7:25 PM, waistli...@aol.com wrote:
> Most certainly world Troskyism has been discredited on the
> national-colonial factor from the standpoint of the majority of communist
> movement world wide and in the colonies for the past 70 years.
Which might be be given greater weight if it weren't true that "the
majority of communist movement world wide and in the colonies for the
past 70 years" has been an absolute train wreck.
In particular, the currents that descended from or identified with
Stalin's leadership of the USSR from the mid-1920s forward did
tremendous damage to the socialist cause by catastrophically botching
the job of building socialism. So much so that all the countries they
led have openly (USSR, Eastern Europe) or in all but name (China) gone
capitalist.
But it must be recognized at least part of the reason for the overall
failure of the communist movement has been that the currents that call
themselves Trotskyist have ALSO been pretty much a complete failure, and
this, judged on their own terms.
This failure of Trotskyism on a world scale over that same period of
about three-quarters of a century consists in the failure to achieve the
stated goal: the building of a revolutionary parties including ones
displacing the misleaders of "really existing [bureaucratic] socialism"
Trotskyist groups, broadly speaking, claim that having the correct
ideas/program is the key to success. But assuming for argument's sake
that this theses is true, the actual practical results show that, in
fact, the proposition is false.
Thus, on its own terms, by its own lights, Trotskyism failed. Or I
should stress, "also failed," for the record of the rest of the movement
is hardly inspiring.
The ONE current that did have *relatively* more success in the post-WWII
world includes much of what is usually dismissed in Trotskyist circles
as "Maoism" but I think should be much more appropriately called "third
world Marxism."
I don't think it should be called "Maoism" NOT because some/many of its
more representative forces or leaders did/did not identify with or look
to China from around 1950 and on for a quarter century as a
guide/inspiration/example/reference, but because using those sorts of
terms ("Guevaraism" "Maoism" "Trotskyism" "Castroism") perpetuates the
error of considering "third world Marxism" as primarily an *ideological*
phenomena rather than actual *movements.*
What kind of movements?
Frankly, here I think Waistline, despite my ideological disagreement
with him hit the nail on the head. These are all NATIONAL movements of
third world peoples against (most often) direct colonialism and more
generally imperialism. And most --but not all-- currents that trace
their origin back to the Trotskyist movement have adopted sectarian
positions towards these national movements.
I don't think it's particularly useful today to be looking back and
seeing which of the currents that descended first from Marx and Engels
and then the Comintern are "better" in the sense of serving as a model,
at least partly, for what is needed today.
The rebirth of revolutionary socialism or Marxism today is coming not
from a rediscovery or reshaping or resurgence of various 20th-Century
ideological trends within Communism, but from actual movements,
especially in Latin America, and viewed as an ideology, this rebirth is
not the continuation of those trends, but the ideological expression of
the new social movements.
"Chavismo" --if I can use that term-- did not present in the first
instance as a socialist current *at all* but rather as what a number of
folks on this list and in similar ideological spaces dismissively refer
to as "populism" or "Bonapartism."
What it was and remains is the national movement of a people dominated,
oppressed and exploited by imperialism. The idea of creating the
Socialism of the 21st Century, is something that the Bolivarian
Revolution --the Venezuelan national movement-- came to thanks to (in
part) the extraordinary leadership provided by Hugo Chavez and the
tremendous influence of the Cuban Revolution, the one socialist
revolution of the 20th Century that survived into the 21st Century as a
genuine revolution.
But it is very clear that Bolivarianism is not simply an outgrowth nor a
transplant of Fidelismo nor anything like that. The Bolivarian
Revolution came to similar conclusions as the Cuban Revolution in its
own way, on its own road --tremendously helped, it is true, by the
illumination provided by the Cuban experience in finding its way. But it
is not a clone, copy, adaptation or even application of the "Cuban model."
This is what Fidel was telling Goldberg when the journalist asked if the
Cuban model still worked for other countries. Fidel said it doesn't even
work for Cuba any more.
He said that because, really, Cuba never applied a "model," it is only
in retrospect that one can speak of a Cuban (or for that matter, a
Soviet or even Maoist "model"). And trying to stick to a "model" as
political and economic circumstances. It's the same sort of idea that
Silvio Rodríguez expressed in saying what needs to happen is that the
"r" needs to be clipped off from "revolution." Cuba doesn't need
revolution, it needs evolution rather than sticking to old ways of doing
things, to a frozen "model," even its own.
So the Bolivarian "Socialism of the 21st Century" cannot be the
implantation of the Cuban or some other model. But it is obviously,
transparently, very much part of a common phenomenon with Cuba and the
re-emerging revolutionary anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a
continental scale.
But of course, the Venezuelan national movement is not the only national
movement in the Third World. There are others in Latin America that are
to varying degrees similar. But national movements exist the world over.
In that connection, I just about had a cow last night when I read a post
describing Ahmadinejad as a right-wing populist.
What does that mean? TO ME, it means some comrades spend too much time
reading the imperialist press and absorbing its messages instead of
trying to *understand* what is behind them.
If I see some third world government accused of "populism" by the press,
my immediate gut reaction is, gee, I didn't realize this government had
a good side.
Invariably, when a government in the semi-colonial world is accused of
"populism," it means (at the very least) that it is less cooperative in
the robbery of the country's resources and the rape of its population
than the Wall Street bandits would prefer. And that is UNDOUBTEDLY what
it means in the Iran case.
This is NOT about backpackers and NOT about stoning as an appropriate
punishment for a woman implicated in the alleged murder of her husband
(as opposed to being fried in the electric chair, or poisoned
intravenously, as might be done in the USA).
Iran is a real horrorshow on this and other similar issues, but that is
NOT the reason we talk about it.
The reason we talk about it is because the imperialists use it as part
of their drive to strengthen their domination of that country. These
imperialist propaganda campaigns have NOTHING to do with defending human
rights or women's rights in general.
If that were the case we would, at least once in a very blue moon, see a
piece on CNN about one of the hundreds of beheadings in Saudi Arabia in
the past few years, or the legally sanctioned systematic use of torture
--including amputations of hand and feet, flogging and so on-- or the
gender apartheid imposed on women in that country.
In pretty much every way that the imperialists complain about in
relation to Iran, the Saudi Arabian state is way more backward and
barbarous than Iran.
This stuff about Iran is really about a country that for more than a
century has been a victim of Anglo-American imperialism and is tired of it.
As for the character of the Iranian leadership, before throwing a lot of
stones it needs to be understood that this is also OUR fault, the fault
of the Communist and workers and anti-imperialist movement of the last
100 years, the broad historical movement identified with the socialism
of Marx and Engels.
We collectively, sectarians and opportunists, social democrats and
communists, trots, stalinists, maoists, and the rest of it, succeeded in
making socialism so profoundly repulsive that leaders propounding the
obscurantist nonsense of religion were able to win hegemony within the
national movement in Iran and many other places.
Today socialism is re-emerging as the leading current in the national
movements of Latin America and perhaps it can even begin to be said of
the national movement of Latin America as a whole.
But how the very different ideological situation in the movements in the
Arab and Muslim world will begin to shift is far from clear.
In Latin America, secular revolutionary currents have succeeded in
grounding themselves in the deep historic roots of the drive to create
nations in reaction to foreign domination and exploitation (first by the
colonialists from the Iberian peninsula, later replaced by Whitehall and
the White House). This has been a key to their success.
In the rest of the world, other currents have already filled that
vacuum. That this needs to change is obvious, but I doubt greatly one
can come a single flea-hop closer to achieving it with denunciatory
propaganda. And there's a real problem when that propaganda is sparked
by or coincides with the themes of imperialist press campaigns.
At any rate, it's time to turn the page.
How to advance in the creation and development of the socialism of the
21st Century as a world phenomenon is what should preoccupy us, not
playing the blame game in relation to what happened in the last Century.
Joaquín
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