Sort of a homecoming for me

[Gramthusser]

I'm in my early 60s and have been on the Left since high school. I live in the US, and started out as a Debsian socialist after reading a book about him. Became involved in the anti-war movement after it began to ebb in the early 1970s and have always regretted not being born even a couple years earlier.

After being exposed to the New Left, anarchism, and Marxism and witnessing the demise of the Left in the US after the Vietnam era, I read Lenin's What is to Be Done? and was deeply impressed, feeling it answered many of my questions.

I was in a classic M-L political formation for 5 years that attempted to insert what we understood as the Althusserian and Gramscian traditions into the US anti-dogmatist/anti-revisionist "party-building" movement. Those of you that have been in such a formation--or are in one right now--understand the level of commitment, time, and emotional energy it takes to maintain it. One day, almost out of nowhere, I emerged from a meeting convinced of the futility of this intervention. I had no disagreements with my comrades or our collective understanding of our mission in the conjuncture. I could simply no longer believe that the M-L movement at that time was amenable to our intervention.

I've spent the last 30 plus years raising a family, riding the crest of the illusory wave of late capitalist prosperity, and have found myself and my entire world washed ashore in a strange land where the relentless process of capital accumulation is destroying virtually everything I ever thought stable or valuable.

I am back. I am better than before, and I truly have nothing to lose but my chains and a world to win; and I know I can't go it alone. I don't know how I ever thought I could "go it alone" but that is what we are forced to do by this system that mangles and distorts everything it touches, isolating us from each other so the wolves of capitalism can pick us off one-by-one.

I am here to learn and to share what I have learned in the last 30 years.

[Q]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

What are your political ideas, 30 years onward? Still feeling close to ML politics?

[Gramthusser]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

What are your political ideas, 30 years onward? Still feeling close to ML politics?

Thanks for the welcome Q. I'll try to be brief.

I still find the raw outlines of Marxism the "untranscendable horizon" for understanding and changing the world. I subsume other, more local, discourses (Lacan, Freud, post-structuralism/modernism, Laclau etc.) into my larger understanding of Marxism for communicating the message of human liberation and building it in the here and now. I appreciate autonomism, aspects of anarchism, CLR James, council communism, horizontalism and the like, and even though I won't win any friends saying this, I still find room state power (because it's just not going to go away no matter how much I ignore or dislike it.) As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself…I contain multitudes."

I think the essence of dialectics is synthesis and totality, and I think we need to construct a popular discourse and social practice that reconciles different aspects of left traditions that are usually seen at odds with each other (if only because certain personality types or interpellated subject positions--you choose--need to hear the message that suits them best to encourage their entrance into the struggle). I think there is a way to do this in both theory and practice, although I am not myself wise enough to know how to go about it. I think it will be a collective process and history itself that achieves this synthesis. I know this sounds like a cop out, but Marx could not foresee what communism would look like because he could not foresee the constellation of conditions and balance of forces from which it would emerge. I am certainly no Marx so I am even less able to foresee these future patterns.

I do, however, think that changing the labor process and putting workers in charge is at the heart of socialism and that changing ownership of the means of productions from one class to another (or its representatives, most likely) hardly touches ground zero of our daily lives.

The gnawing dissatisfaction many feel derives from powerlessness. That's why we escape into our personal fantasy worlds of sports, games, entertainment, and philosophies touting certainty in an uncertain world. It's compensation for living under the dehumanizing conditions of capitalism. If people get a taste of real freedom and collective solidarity in how they spend much of their lives--at work--it yields tangible results worth fighting for.

As for M-L, it seems to me to be a brilliantly specific response to the conjuncture that Lenin and others confronted in early 20th century Russia. It is not necessarily the only organizational form needed, nor is it a universal antidote. There is room in the struggle for such political formations and I respect the people that want to build them. Perhaps the most nourishing five years of my life was spent within the 24/7 world of an M-L organization, but it does not necessarily inculcate the social practices of the new society due to its military hierarchicalism.

It has also been my experience that the dialectic of democratic-centralism is weighted pretty heavily on the side of centralism. But I am no fool and I don't think the class enemy is going to be dislodged easily or peacefully. I don’t see how any one organization or political formation could bring down the system that is eating us alive. It will have to be a plethora of attacks, subversions, and liberations on many levels and ordinary people will have to do it, with or without the help of leaders. With is better, given that the enemy will be well led.

I expect to see an attempted fascist takeover in the US of some sort occurring in the next five years. I think that's what we need to prepare for. We'll need both mass organizations that require little more than showing up that can mobilize ordinary people who are aghast at what their nation has become, as well as vanguard organizations that respond in a monolithic manner.