The point WL misses is that there have indeed been, are and will be
"communists" who split the class under the guise of claiming to unite
it against the main/common enemy. U.S. labour history is particularly
rife with examples --- if only because the bourgeois-individualist
entrepreneurial spirit runs rampant in U.S. society and someone is
always ready to launch yet another left-wing "enterprise" within the
workers' movement. ("Can you say: 'Lyn-don-La-rouche'?")
Within the workers' movement, these elements have desperately needed
the "communist" cover, and the prestige of building the Leninist
vanguard, for doing their dirty work. Earl Browder's claim that
communism was "20th century Americanism" was one such cover. This did
major damage not only in the U.S. but also in Tim Buck's CP of Canada
and Blas Roca's CP in pre-revolutionary Cuba, ultimately destroying
the Leninist party principle in each case and replaced the party with
an educational society/study. (Sound familiar, WL?)
Repeatedly, the workers fight and lose, maybe even under the
leadership of some of these Khrushchevite/Browderite worthies, or
some "militant trade unionists." But then, in the wake of the defeat,
as though to salve some of the wounds, a [meaningless] unity is
pathetically reasserted ("we're all still here fighting the good
fight..." etc") with a "wait'll next time!" defiant bravado ... just
before everything dissipates and dissolves. What was needed was
instead to sum up the mistakes, uncover the progressive core of
development, and elaborate PROGRAM and the line of march from that
new junction-point relative to the strategic goal of workers'
empowerment. Workers' empowerment is the starting-point for
society's thoroughgoing reorganisation from top to bottom and bottom
to top. So in other words: instead of each struggle building
something in a progressive direction that is summed up each time
further in the fighting section of the class itself, the fighting
elements themselves become self-liquidating. Meanwhile the passive
elements seem more passive and pathetic, not seeming to move or be
moved in any progressive direction. Thus it happens over time that,
as leaders of these self-bankrupting struggles carry on with their
"work," the impression grows among an ever-widening circle of
leftists and activists around these struggles that the workers as
mass are reactionary and hopeless and the best that anyone can hope
for is for an enlightened elite to become further enlightened until
the magic day comes when we are all saved glory hallelujah.
Not surprisingly the Browderites held ordinary workers in the
greatest contempt for their so-called "backwardness." They hated the
guts of real working class organizers like William Z Foster.
Everything was done to make sure the signal victories and
accomplishmemts, small or large, of Foster's organisational work in
the class on the one side and the work of the CPUSA in every other
field outside the workers' movement on the other side were kept
sealed off from one another in separate compartments. Howard Fast's
memoir "Being Red," about his years "in" and around the CPUSA, is ---
unconsciously --- highly instructive about this state of affairs.
Naturally Fast drips venom all over the party's work to organise the
real movement of the class, repeatedly declaring "liberalism" to be
the anteroom to communist "enlightenment." Fast is very keen to
proclaim the party's impact on the struggle against Jim Crow in the
workers' movement and in social life of both the North and the South
as a victory for its "enlightened," i.e., liberal-democratic,
understanding of the origins of American racism. He is much less keen
to point out that it was where Bill Foster's method prevailed in
workers' struggles --- the method of uniting workers against the main
enemy one struggle at a time while paying first-rate attention to the
actual psychological formation of the various national minorities
comprising the working class --- that the rest of the society could
be brought around to maintaining a stand against Jim Crow and block
those trying to reimpose it. Where such fights were not waged or
organised, Jim Crow stayed or managed to come back after suffering
some short-term defeat. In my part of the world, a labour organiser
by the name of J B McLachlan, a communist miner immigrated from
Scotland and possessing the same bent and talent as Bill Foster,
organised coal miners and steel workers in conditions very much like
those prevailing in Gary IN --- in fact, the notorious filthy schemes
of Carnegie and U.S. Steel / Elbridge Gary / JP Morgan in Gary were
exactly and faithfully duplicated in industrial Cape Breton in
eastern Canada. But the Black steelworkers there, imported mostly
from the U.S. South, and the Italian and Ukrainian immigrants and the
local Canadians almost entirely of Scottish Highland origins and
fervently Catholic in religion NEVER could be brought to fight one
another or split the unionising drives or strike struggles on racial
or ethnic lines. Indeed, when Marcus Garvey came to lecture, people
from all these backgrounds from across the entire region came out to
hear him speak and applaud his line that African-Americans should
stand up and fight for their right-to-be. When the Canadian
government in 1924, led at the time by a stooge and paid agent of the
Rockefellers by the name of Mackenzie King who had been involved in
liquidating the Homestead strike before returning to Canada to run
for political office, sent troops and a British Navy warship to
threaten a mass strike-walkout at the region's coal mines, the miners
took over the city hall at Glace Bay, the region's main coal mining
community, declared the Glace Bay Soviet and exchanged congratulatory
telegrams with JV Stalin.
In the international workers' movement, the liberal pseudo-elements
really took their cue from Tito and the "model" of Yugoslavia and
"workers' self-administration." Khrushchev's gang adapted this model
under the cover of retaining the outward appearances of a Leninist
party. Neither Titoites nor Khrushchevites would play the trotskyite
card of splitting for its own sake, recognising that this would get
them tossed out of the workers movement in a nanosecond. Generally
speaking, in the advanced capitalist countries, the popular-front
method of winning a section of the middle strata (from student and
antiwar movements, for example) to the leadership of the workers'
movement has been the arena in which trotskyites of one stripe or
another would run rampant. ("What do you get when two Trotskyites
meet? Three parties...")
Before hi-tech and robotics came along the workers knew all about
speed-up. In that key sense, what does it substantially man to
portray computerised automation as a new stage of development within
capitalism that has any effect whatsoever on the basic relationship
between Labour and Capital or any significant effect on the
fundamental contradictions of the capitalist Law of Value? Lenin's
thesis that our era is one of imperialism and the proletarian
revolution remains valid. The fact that many workplaces no longer
appear to produce surplus-value in the sense described by Marx
examining the English factory system of the mid-19th century does not
contradict the FACT that in today's global economy, monopolies
expropriate the social product and its surplus across entire national
economies and trading blocs. Has this enabled the capitaslists and
their monopolies and cartels to overcome the operation of the Law of
Value? On the evidence of what has happened in the global economy for
the last two years, evidently not at all. Lenin's warning in his
justly famous1908 article "Marxism and Revisionism" is very apt here
about wherein arises the temptation to "revise and update" Marx:
'every more or less "new" question, every more or less unexpected and
unforeseen turn of events, even though it change the basic line of
development only to an insignificant degree and only for the briefest
period, will always inevitably give rise to one variety of
revisionism or another'
Best wishes for 2011
P.S.: One of the ways out the muddle described in the third paragraph
above (begins "Repeatedly...") is the course followed by Local 1005
of the United Steelworkers in the Canadian steelmaking centre of
Hamilton, Ontario. (For those interested to learn more, hundreds of
articles about the ongoing struggles there have been published and
archived at http://www.cpcml.ca over the last several years. Right
now they are in the fight of their lives, resisting the lockout by
U.S. Steel which bought out the previous plant owners a couple of
years back. They are up against a management attempt to impose a
two-tier pension system.)
>This is the crux of the problem.... and indeed a "fertile ground for
>fascist propaganda" but not so much because those "who keep their
>jobs can only
>protect that toehold against disaster by inevitably moving closer to the
>ruling class" but because certain "communists" will try to create a political
> schism within the class already distraught by a crippling economic
>circumstance "akin" to capitalism. ...
>
>
>
>Comment
>
>a "fertile ground for fascist propaganda" . . . . because (of) certain
>"communists" . . . .
>
>WOW.
>
>Certain communists!
>
>I have a different read of the autoworkers union ...
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