Thanks Jurriaan for your comradely reply.
--- Message Received --- From: Jurriaan Bendien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 02:13:18 +0200 Subject: [PEN-L:25497] Importance of history Jurriaan: I don't see that there is anything wrong with a "class against class" policy... if the specific situation called for it, and if you have a realistic chance of realising it and winning it. Greg: Your points are mostly all agreeable, so forgive me for extending them a little and putting a slightly contrary point. As a policy it is niether here nor there, in a sense it is not a policy at but an abstract truth. If this leads to real working class self-organisation etc there is no problem where it leads to a purist disconnected and sectarian left it is. But I would say such statements as policy are at all times rather meaningless in themselves, the war is always class against class, the battles however in that war are always made up of smaller units not always so easily distinguished. Jurriaan: But that is the point, no strategy or tactic can be arrived at or evaluated independently from a specific context in which it is to be applied, let alone simply lifted from the history books. Italian or German fascism is not the same as French fascism and American fascism and so forth, their social base and historical roots are different. Modern fascism is also different from the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, ideologically and in terms of its financial base. Greg: Not even the slightest disagreement here, but again I will extend. Insofar as a group has an overaching and practical policy we could expect similar aspects to be more or less present in all contexts, ie have something to do with the world period and context within the development of capital. Hence at any particular period a gneral policy should but does not always come about, if for no other reason then uinting desperate elements across the globe into a single war. Jurriaan: Frequently middle class people panic about fascists while being oblivious to the oppressive conditions people face right under their noses. I find this repugnant and I don't see any point in panicking about fascists. Greg: Old style para-military fascism is dead. However, at risk at reviving an old and totally misused term "scoial fascism" ie a period of fascistic cultural and barabarism is very much on the rise and seems to leaking out of the pours of society especially from the growing section of managers (public and private). This is a clear and present danger and one which I believe masses of people are feeling is a fight which needs to be begun. I am not trying to pick a fight on this for I agree with what you are saying if this means the older style fascism, this is really poking a dead dog with a stick and is a middle class fantasy. On the other hand, the descent into barbarism is everywhere apparent and we seem to be doing stuff all about it. Jurriaan: As far as I am aware, there was no substantive fascist threat in Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, so if the movement picked up people, that was for other reasons. Greg: I cannot speak about NZ but in Australia there was a substantial and secret fascist movement sponsored by the military and in fact in pssession of more machine guns then the army itself. It is not well known and its course was completely different to that followed in Germany and Italy but perhaps not that different to what occured in Japan. D H Lawrences book Kangeroo is one easily obtained thought fictionalisied account of his contact with them when he lived in Wollongong for a short period. There is much else besides, there is nothing conspirtorial in this, but there was a real threat, but it never maifested itself openly and in the end passed away without fanfare. I would not blame anyone for overlooking it (few Asuatalians are aware of its existence let alone others), but the Labor Premier of NSW was removed do to their macinsations, and communist workers often had to face their thugs (especially those organising the unemployed during the depression). The story of Egon Kisch (a escapee from a Nazi concentration camp) and an important symbol of the Popular Front is also interesting in this regard. How much there was threat is difficult to guage, trucated by the war and in the face of growing support for the Popular Front. Jurriaan: In the case of New Zealand (where I lived for two decades), the CPNZ followed the "third period" line up until after the election of the first Labour Government in 1935 - supporters were told to screw up their ballots or write "Communist" on them. The reason was that the New Zealand delegate to the 7th World Congress only returned to New Zealand after the election, with the new political line from Moscow in his briefcase. Suddenly the Central Committee realised they had done it all wrong, and the political line was reversed (not without some opposition) so that the CPNZ became more like a "left-wing" sidekick of the Labour Government, supporting New Zealand participation in the world war and calling on workers not to strike. The Hitler-Stalin pact caused momentarily even more confusion, but after the war the CPNZ was able to pick up a considerable number of members (perhaps 1500) chiefly because of the successful Soviet fight against German fascism. After that though, membership quickly dwindled and eventually the party splintered into Maoist, anti-Maoist, pro-Russian and Albanian factions which became increasingly politically irrelevant (except for the Socialist Unity Party which had a substantial trade union base for some time). Greg: Someahte similar to what happened in Australia. Jurriaan: Here in Western Europe, the general drift of the political situation at the moment is indeed towards the right. That is rather logical, because the social democrats (insofar as you can still call them that) have been unable to solve the big social and economic issues. The stockmarket bubble just postponed the inevitable. What you get meanwhile is more and more social polarisation. Greg: The collapse of social-democracy and the rigtward creep is part and parcel of what I would label "social fascism" to distinguish it from merely a conservative period, which more often then ot was fairly liberal in essence - this is not the case toady. Jurriaan: Here in Holland we have since recently, a new rightwing petty-bourgeois party which routed the social democrats from their stronghold in the Rotterdam city council. This new party could get up to 20 seats in parliament after the elections on 15 May, and that could be sufficient for a liberal-christian democrat coalition government. Even so, there is no immediate "crisis" and fascists are a small minority. Indeed, the current lib-lab Dutch government saw fit to resign just recently on the principled ground that Dutch troops failed to prevent the slaughter of muslims at Sebrenica in Bosnia - thus attempting to demonstrate the integrity of Dutch governmental institutions. Greg: I have followed these events to a degree and with some lack of comprenhison, but Holland apears to following the same trend which I would argue is world wide. Jurriaan: It is common for Marxists to talk about the "capitalist crisis" as a single thing, but as a socialist I prefer to talk about four inter-linked crises (insofar as I use the term at all - it can be overused) briefly sketched as follows: - the economic crisis, which concerns depressed profits and markets, debts and the need to raise the rate of surplus-value to stay competitive, which produces unemployment and poverty; - the social crisis, which is the result of intensified competition for jobs, incomes and positions, generating racism, crime and leading to the disintegration of the old institutions and structures which used to bind people together (i.e. erosion of social solidarity); - the ideological-cultural crisis, which results from the breakdown of the previous consensus about how the world fits together, the inability to find solutions with the stock of ideas inherited from the past (from this you get e.g. postmodernism as a transitory phase, a retreat into individual-subjective solutions etc.); - the political crisis, which is both a crisis of political legitimacy (including voter "apathy", i.e. non-identification with the politicians, decline and shifts of party affiliation) and of political leadership and political structures (inability to form stable leaderships, continual changes in political personnel). Greg: I agree with this and it is also a nice and concise way of summing up the "crisis" and far better then the mythical collapse type crisis which seems to have stemmed from the experience of the Great Depression. But I would add Marx's warning about barabarism being the alternative to proletarian socialism once bourgeoisie society begins to exhaust its historical possiblities (decades or even longer, but there is something of a final period in all this - ie a general collapse) Jurriaan: I like this approach because if you talk about "the capitalist crisis" in general it can mean a variety of things, at varying levels of abstraction, and people may not know what you mean. Whereas if you break it down to these different dimensions, and show the links between them, you can relate the bigger picture more easily to people's lives. The other things is that one of the four dimensions may at a given time be more prominent than the others or even "overdetermine" the others (to use that old word). The different crises may have a different timing as well. So anyway then you don't get trapped in economism, into thinking that the crisis of capitalism is just about economics or that the economic side of things is necessarily politically decisive. Greg: I am in tiotal agreement with this and again very concise and well stated. Jurriaan: In the USA, for example, I would say the economic crisis does not weigh heavily right now, nevertheless there appears to be a substantial social crisis and an ideological crisis. If Bush has decided to devote a whole army to defending American soil, I imagine he isn't just worried about exploding Arabs in supermarkets but also about the erosion of the urban social fabric, about the stability of American society itself. It seems to be a step towards the militarisation of American society. Greg: I would add another element here a legacy of imperialism and the US being the single remaining super-power. In this the US has no real future hence it follows the well worn track of seeing slavation as never-ending war. I beleiev other contradictions towards bourgeois internationalism threaten US supremacy which for historical reasons it is unweilling to relquinish. Its policies thus appear to me bereft of real direction, rather they are policies designed mereely to uphold US unilateralism and by this aits arbitray power - it cannot go on for ever but I shiver at the amount ofblood that migt be spilt until it resolves itself. Jurriaan: As regards Lutte Ouvriere, I'm glad they got over 5 percent of the vote, because then at least (so I am told) they get their campaign money back. Voters who feel especially guilty about voting for the far left can always atone for their "ultraleftist" sins by voting for Chirac the second time round. I don't recommend it, but the possibility is there. The real point is that votes for a bourgeois government are not the essential thing to watch, they are merely an indicator of more profound social tendencies at work. Greg: Again in the main I agree with your view, but surely the question is to move past the passive, sectarian and oppositionalist left and move towards attacks on the state itself (for democratic reform, for a more proletarian outlook) afterall the whole thing was a by-product of a cocked system of representation - why can't we as a left assuat at least these structural problems rather then go through this nonsense which results from them. Here I would echo a Popular Front, not a nagative one against fascism and war but a Popular Front for a democratic state and democratised economy. Sorry to slip this one in Jurriaan it was a bit unfair, but I like how you have stepped back and summed up the current sitation, perhaps we should talk more on the political conclusions that can be drawn from it. I couch things in terms of Popular Front, but leave this aside altogether, why cannot the left come up with an overarching policy that reflects just thiose things you listed above, but not as problems, but in terms of resolutions. This type of thing is what I favour, getting out from the shadows stating clearly that these problems exist and that solutions are obvious and obtainable and then go about forming them into fighting ploitical platforms not necessarily restricted to the political. That is how I understand the essence of Popular Frontism and why I keep coming back to it - it just makes sense. Yours in comradely solidarity Greg ____________________________________________ Greg Schofield Perth Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ Modular And Integrated Design - programing power for all Lestec's MAID and LTMailer http://www.lestec.com.au also available at Amazon.com ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________
