Speaking to the anti-national liberation/non-anti-imperialist writers: please clarify for me--is it your position that all non-working class struggles are to be rejected? including women's liberation, African-American liberation, Gay liberation, anti-war movement, etc.? or are you only against national liberation? (Of course, all struggles and issues interact and overlap with class. All subsystems of oppression are intertwined and prop each other up. Many nonclass oppressions were originally created by class exploitation, e.g. racism. Nevertheless these oppressions and issues are not simply reducible to class exploitation.)
Yes, we reject them, but before we go on to explain why, we would first like to address your reply to Felix’s points on the issue.
You wrote:
Thanks to Felix Frost for responding to my question about whether you anti-national liberationists were also against movements against other nonclass forms of oppression. He writes, "No, I'm all in favour of women's liberation, gay liberation, etc. I'm also in favour of the Iraqi people being liberated from both US imperialism and the reactionary Iraqi resistance. The problem with "national liberation movements" is that they are in fact not liberatory, they only replace one set of rulers with another. And anti-imperialism isn't a real solution to the problem of imperialism..."
OK, but it is also true that the "women's liberation movement", dominated by bourgeois women with a liberal program, is "in fact not liberatory, they would only replace one set of rulers with another." That is, they would only win the right of well-off women to participate in business management, politics, and the military. The same is true of the gay liberation movement, led by liberal supporters of capitalism. So I do not see the difference. You have not explained why revolutionary libertarians would support women's liberation but not national liberation.
While we wouldn’t support those movements, and your accusations of inconsistency therefore don’t apply to us, we do see a difference between support for national liberation movements, and things like the women’s liberation movement. To us the difference is very clear. National liberation movements are directly involved in mobilising the working class for war.
You wrote:
Instead you reject national liberation movements because they use violence…You are for the peaceful civil rights struggles which call for reforms in the existing system, but not for revolutionary movements which use violence.
We don’t believe that Felix is against nationalist movements because they use violence, but because they are a part of a trend that leads to war, and is dragging the working class particularly in the Middle East into a deepening cycle of ethnic/sectarian conflict.
Whilst we disagree with his position on the Women’s Liberation Movement, we are in complete agreement with his position on nationalism. For us a rejection of national liberation movements is a class line. It is part of what separates the politics of the communists from all bourgeois factions. Those who support it are part of the ideological drive towards war.
Back to the main point, which is our rejection of support for all sorts of leftist ‘campaigns’, and ‘movements’
For us the disagreements go beyond the rights, or wrongs or arguments about the validity of different bourgeois campaigns, and go to the heart of the question of what revolutionary politics means today.
Wayne talks a lot about ‘supporting’ movements. We would like to ask what this support means in, for example, the case of the war in Iraq. We assume that he is not involved in collecting money for, or smuggling arms to the resistance in Iraq, so we can only assume that what he means by ‘support’ is political support. It seems to us to be quite ironic that for all the talk of ‘critical’ support, and whatever other nonsense, the only support that the these leftists end up giving to the nationalists is political support. Their theories about ‘social insertion’ lead them to tail end after every leftist, nationalist, or bourgeois campaign, but offering a ‘libertarian’, or anarchist ‘alternative’. It is as if the entire communist project were just some sort of radical extension of the social democratic movement.
From this then you must have grasped that we have a fundamentally different view of the tasks of revolutionaries today.
For us the main tasks of revolutionaries are three fold:
* To take part in and to intervene in the defensive struggles of the working class.
*To propagate communist ideas.
*To build communist political organisations in order to be able to perform the first two tasks more effectively.
We fail to understand how any of these tasks are served by supporting all of these identity politics movements.
As an example of how often people fall into following leftist or identity politics ‘campaigns’, and movements, We would like to discuss the recent ‘Reclaim the night’ demonstration that was a recent topic on Libcom. For us the strange thing about this topic was that nobody even questioned what relevance it had to building worker’s power. Nobody even asked what the point of this demonstration was. Instead the discussion was tracked into one criticising ‘bourgeois feminism’ for organising a women’s only march. This basic idea of the march itself was never even touched upon.
We ask openly, how does a march like this move the working class forward in any way? Our contention is that it does not. We also feel that if comrades thought about it deeply they would come to the same conclusions, or at the very least begin to question the whole ‘logic’ behind campaigns, and ‘identity’ politics. We don’t feel that it is our responsibility to prove that this has nothing to do with working class politics. Instead we feel it to be the responsibility of those who blindly follow such ‘movements’ to examine their positions, and prove that it does.
To ask this does not put us on the same side as social reactionaries, just as to reject national liberation struggles does not put us on the same side as the imperialists. What we advocate as an alternative is an activity that is based around the defence of worker’s living standards, and the development of the autonomy, and power of the working class..
We feel that one of the problems of certain anarchists is that they do not actually have a class analysis, but actually have an analysis of class. This is lumped together with a whole mixed bag of other ‘oppressions’. This sort of ‘anarchist’ supports the workers struggle as it is a struggle against ‘oppression’. For us it is not a question of such bourgeois concepts as ‘rights’, or ‘inequality’, but a question of which class holds power within society, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat.
We agree with that Platformists that there is a need for revolutionary organisations to have a unified intervention in struggles. Where we disagree is in judging the nature of those struggles. For us, communists intervene in the struggles of the working class. For the Platformists the intervention is in any struggles of the ‘masses’ that they see as being of a ‘progressive’ nature. This leads them into following all kinds of bourgeois campaigns. The ultimate logic of which leads them to join the bourgeois in cheerleading the working class being led to the slaughter for the ruling class in the name of national defence for that is the reality of what the position of those supporting Hezbollah, and other national liberation movement is.
). I don't want that happening again, with the EZLN setting internationalism back in Mexico and, say, the US.
)



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Er, should this be on the John... WSM thread?