Joseph Catron Friday, October 03, 2014 12:05 PM A query on single- vs. multi-issue activists
I've recently discussed whether activists who focus their efforts mostly on one issue, or those working on multiple fronts at once, accomplish more. (I'm inclined to think the former.) But it occurs to me that some Marxist grouping or another must have taken the time to examine this very question more scientifically when figuring out how to best steer its members. So what say you all? Has anyone actually looked at it methodically? .----------- Probably unanswerable. I’ve come down with a cold today & not thinking very clearly, but perhaps I can give a few observations. A. First some history. During the ‘60s the SWP insisted that anti-war coalitions be single issue. They gve various arguments for this but there were deeper grounds, ultra-left and sectarian, which generated this stand, and which _also_ grounded the SWP’s insistence that marches & rallies be peaceful and legal. (Note: “Peaceful” is radically different from “Non-violent”: the latter phrase is cut off at the neck; the complete phrase is “non-violent civil disobedience.” (As has been reported recently, MLK’s house had weapons in every room. Non-Violence for him was strictly a strategy, not a moral position. And he and others in the SCLC never objected to the quiet preparation of some grops to defend non-violent demonstrators.) Now, a peaceful, legal march and rally featuring only one issue (End the War Now) could be trusted as it were not to trigger debate and political discussion among the demonstrators. Why was this desirable? Well, the SWP believed that there was one and only one correct revolutionary theory, and that theory was the unique possession of the SWP. Workers and others could not be trusted on their own to reach the correct political perceptions. Rather, all political development must be under the care and guidance of the One True Faith: Trotsky as taught by the leadership of the SWP. This is the worst sort of ultra-leftism. (“Ultra-Leftism” refers or should r efer not to tactics but to the political understasnding generating the tactic. Ultra-leftism (or Left Opportunism) consists in over-estimating the strength of the capitalist class, under-estimating the strength of the working class. Now strength of course is not mere military strength; it is above all consciousness, subordination to or freedom from bourgeois ideology. (Excuse the jargon here, but we are dealing with the history which generated such jargon and not to use it would distort history.) Reading Lars Lih would help here; either his book or his response to critics in a Historical Materialism symposium on the book. He points out that the interpretation of WIBD both by bourgeois scholars _and_ by defenders of Democratic Centralism is that the book is grounded in profound distrust of workers. Lih pretty convincingly denies this interpretation, arguing rather that it showed a profound _trust_ of workers and a strong discontent with the failure of the RSDLP to give revolutionary workers the support they needed and desired. The Trotsky/bourgeois/Stalinist/”Maoist” tradition, then, assumed that workers were inacapable without close guidance of reaching a correct understanding of the world and of revolutionary practice. Capitalist Ideology would always prevail among workers not guided by a Party in possession of the One True Faith. This profound distrust of workers then was at the core of the SWP’s insistence that the anti-war movement be single issue, peaceful, and legal. Then the SWP could recruit form the masses thereby mobilized, and carefully instruct them in the True Line. This is the heart of sectarianism. [A footnote here. Rosa Luxemburg was unfair to WITBD, and Lenin’s response to her criticism was to point out that he said the opposite of what she saw in the work. (See Draper’s “What have they Done to What is To Be done.” Luxemburg was ultimately a more important theorist than Lenin – but no one is perfect.] B. [I’m feeling woozy. I’ll continue later.] Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
