cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/297928
As you have all noticed, this seems to be a point of contention here. This is a good thing, since it means someone will learn something.
Now we seem to be all over the place, with this general area of thought, provoking many questions. Whether or not PatSocs are socially conservative, what is position on social conservatism? Many of us are very young, both in age and ML experience, so an online discussion would be a great learning tool.
- Are socially conservative individuals allowed to be apart of the leftist movement?
- A. Are socially conservative individuals victims of bourgeois propaganda? -B. If socially conservative people are turned away by the left, where do they go? -C. How high of a position would a social conservative be allowed in a ML party? -D. How has or will MLs educate socially conservative folk? -E. &tc, &tc.
What exactly is Patriotism? -A. Does patriotism depend on culture? -B Is possible for a distinction between patriotism for a country and wanting to abolish the state? -C. Is patriotism corrupted in the Core? -D How have post imperialist countries with Communist experiments built patriotism? -E. &Tc &TC
Who even are the PatSocs? -A. If the label is too convuluted, should we make a distinction between Maupin and American exceptionalists? -B. Who of the leaders do we consider MLs? -C. Should patriotic socialist be distinct from socialism or is inherent in socialism? -D. How much do WE even know if PatSocs? -E. &Tc, &tc
We can look at the USSR and GDR for these questions. Remember the Hammer and Sickel came from somewhere.
Things to look out for about the US: -It is the imperialist power, AND a settler state. -Low levels of cultural development -The culture that is there is taken from marginalized groups. -Americas are the most propagandized people in the World. -It is huge and incredibly diverse
More questions about the US could follow: -Should the US be balkanized? If so how does patriotism be built in balkanized regions? -How does land back go about? Will indigenous countries emerge, and if so should we reconsider American MLs as different MLs for the Regions in North America. -If see different nations and regions in North America how does that affect culture? Is the question of how we view the land a prerequisite to discussing patriotism, is it contradictory to call yourself an American Patriot if you decide to divide up the land until regions?
There is so much potential for deep political for North American based Comrades, this is a rabbit hole I do want to delve into. I’ll cross post this to GZD but I want it mainly on Leftist Infighting.
There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.
The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92_01_06.htm
Ah yes. Marx was right, you know. What he did not seen, because he couldn’t, although he predicted it somewhat, was imperialism. As usual, the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. What Sakai suggest is basically “end of a history” for the part of class struggle, an undialectic nonsense.
What are you even talking about? Sakai has anti-imperial aims like every other communist and sprinkles Lenin quotes throughout his work. It is not un-marxist to believe that the United States cannot be rehabilitated. Lenin was right about the class contradictions in the US but he was objectively wrong in his optimism of the American working class given that western socialism failed where socialism in the global south didn’t.
The 32nd Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labour, as the association of trade unions is called, has come to a close in Rochester. Alongside the rapidly growing Socialist Party, this association is a living relic of the past: of the old craft-union, liberal-bourgeois traditions that hang full weight over America’s working-class aristocracy.
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For, strange as it may seem, in capitalist society even the working class can carry on a bourgeois policy, if it forgets about its emancipatory aims, puts up with wage-slavery and confines itself to seeking alliances now with one bourgeois party, now with another, for the sake of imaginary “improvements” in its indentured condition.
The principal historical cause of the particular prominence and (temporary) strength of bourgeois labour policy in Britain and America is the long-standing political liberty and the exceptionally favourable conditions, in comparison with other countries, for the deep-going and widespread development of capitalism. These conditions have tended to produce within the working class an aristocracy that has trailed behind the bourgeoisie, betraying its own class.
https://www.marxists.org/archive//lenin/works/1912/dec/07.htm
Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat.
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Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the “defenders of the fatherland” in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism. By exposing the fact that the opportunists and social-chauvinists are in reality betraying and selling the interests of the masses, that they are defending the temporary privileges of a minority of the workers, that they are the vehicles of bourgeois ideas and influences, that they are really allies and agents of the bourgeoisie, we teach the masses to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.
The only Marxist line in the world labour movement is to explain to the masses the inevitability and necessity of breaking with opportunism, to educate them for revolution by waging a relentless struggle against opportunism, to utilise the experience of the war to expose, not conceal, the utter vileness of national-liberal labour politics.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm
Compare with Sakai, who sounds almost exactly like Lenin but with a little Gramscian twist to account for the failures of 20th century western socialism:
The Euro-Amerikan “left” has completely mystified the question of class consciousness. They see in every labor strike, in the slightest twitch for reform, examples of proletarianism. Some “socialist scholars” (a self-awarded title, to be sure) conduct almost anthropological expeditions into the settler masses, seeing in every remembered folk song or cultural nuance some profound but hidden nuggets of working class consciousness. Others, who have spent years as working class “experts,” find proletarian vision in every joke about the bosses told during coffee breaks. This is not politics, whatever else it may be.
There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about real working class consciousness. It is the political awareness that the exploiting class and its state must be fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness. An action for higher wages or better working conditions need not embody any real class consciousness whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness of class interests. “More for me” is not the same slogan as “liberate humanity.”
Lenin wrote on this: “Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognizes the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government, does his struggle become a class struggle.”
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This thesis is not “anti-white” or “racialist” or “narrow nationalism.” Rather, it is the advocates of oppressor nation hegemony over all struggles of the masses that are promoting the narrowest of nationalisms — that of the U.S. settler nation. When we say that the principal characteristic of imperialism is parasitism, we are also saying that the principal characteristic of settler trade unionism is parasitism, and that the principal characteristic of settler radicalism is parasitism.
Every nation and people has its own contribution to make to the world revolution. This is true for all of us, and obviously for Euro-Amerikans as well. But this is another discussion, one that can only really take place in the context of breaking up the U.S. Empire and ending the U.S. oppressor nation.
I can also quote mine Lenin to “prove” various things. Like Martov did for example, or Trotsky.
I just can’t see where is this sakaism leading. To Black Hammer? To race war either instead or combined with class war? Nor i nor any other ML negates the importance of issue of race in USA, but Sakai just writes off majority of population of US. Also again, Sakai wrote his book in 1983. Even if it was 100% true back then, conditions changed dramatically in 1991, though it did added to his narration, so growing popularity of his book in 2010 up till now is understandable given the decades of the “end of history” but now the situation is changing.
Overall, we will see. I just hope that no one hopes for sudden change in US. It will come but as the dead center of imperialism, it will come last. Or maybe not last, who know. I don’t and book from 1983 certainly not either. Even Lenin was sometimes terribly wrong about major things less distant in time, like he predicted revolutionary victory in Europe in 1918+.
