What I learned in London

I talked at great length in my last post about what I found so impressive about Marxism, and I had occasion a few `times to mention that I thought it helped to clarify what I had been thinking about the situation in the United States. I want to try to clarify that a bit now.

I came into politics starting with the sense that it was necessary to fundamentally transform the existing social order, and so I looked for a group that embodied some kind of overarching worldview and political project, and I found the ISO. I only got involved in "movement" activity afterwards. A lot of the people who make up the organized left in the US have a similar story, perhaps with a detour or two along the way.

There are only ever going to be so many people like that (and we tend to be a peculiar sort in some ways). One of the most exciting developments of the last few years is that there is a wave of people (most visible in the antiwar movement but also popping up elsewhere) who seem to be headed towards the same place from the opposite direction. If my own experiences and those of the people I know are anything to go by, there are thousands of people out there who have seen some of the crying injustices in the world around them and are trying to do something about them; who then see that what they are fighting against is one of a multitude of problems and that there are many unexpected pitfalls in overcoming it; and who are trying to come up with a way of understanding all this and a strategy to overcome it.

The role that radical (anarchist, socialist, communist, or what have you) political organizations generally aspire to is to give these people what they want, to give them a political home. Unfortunately none seem to be able to. Why is that?

As someone said, all happy families are alike in their happiness, but all unhappy families are unique in their misery. The american left has a myriad of shortcomings: some strands (most anarchists, or Democratic Party fringe groups like DSA, PDA, and Democracy for America) simply have little to offer in the way of ideas; others (most Maoists, Workers' World, PSL, the Communist Party, the SWP, and at least a dozen Trotskyist grouplets) have only ideas which are so detached from reality as to be worse than useless. Solidarity and the Socialist, Labor, and Green parties (together with their various factions) are so ideologically scattered and organizationally weak that in spite of the determination and acumen of many of the people who owe allegiance to one or another their organizational existence is almost irrelevant. The ISO, for me the most complicated case, is at the end of the day so organizationally and intellectually rigid that in spite of itself it is frequently reduced to the status of an alien body which has thrust itself into the various movements in which it projects itself. This has been the state of the American left for longer than I've been alive, and there are many who see it as an inevitable, natural part of the post-modern, post-industrial, post-whatever condition.

I don't think so, and this last week has given me a whole lot more confidence about that. The first point that was really driven home to me is that although things may be particularly bad in this respect in the US, the socialist movements in much if not most of the world (almost the entire developed world and a sizable portion of the rest) have been facing similar problems, but over the last 10 years or so have started to overcome them. This is actually the first key to overcoming the deadlock we face in the US -- if it can be done elsewhere, than that should give people a lot more hope that it can be done here.

The second thing we can get is an understanding of what it actually means to get beyond the current state of affairs. That means building structures that share a broad common understanding of the problems we face (war, neoliberalism, etc, to use the common shorthand) and a set of tactics to begin to fight against them. The latter vary from place to place; in Western Europe, the organizations in question are mostly new political parties of the radical left, which is to say that although their most important role is in social movements, trade unions, community organizations, and so on they often cohere around electoral activities of a kind which might be impractical in the US for some time to come.

This brings me to a rough point: even in, say, England there is a political culture so dramatically different from the US that it would be silly to try and directly copy the experience of RESPECT or some other group even if their success did come from some sort of written recipe and not a series of developments in reaction to a succession of complicated situations. I do think, however, that when a group of people comes together and makes a commitment to applying this project to the reality we find ourselves in we can draw any number of lessons from the details as well as the big picture of what our comrades in other countries are doing.