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* See also, "The role of division tactics"
The fall of Berlusconi's regime in Italy on April 20 is a textbook example of something the proletarian forces of the majority-exploiter countries need to understand and utilize. At the moment, we expect Berlusconi to come back with a new government and rule again, but no one is questioning that one half the reason that Berlusconi had to junk his government is the Iraq war. The fall of Berlusconi's government is very significant, because Italy is right after England in importance to the coalition oppressing Iraq.
As MIM Notes explained in a previous article, the Amerikan killing of an Italian secret service agent in Iraq set the exploiters of Italy thinking. The petty-bourgeoisie reasons that if the Amerikans can kill their elite secret service persynnel, the Amerikans can kill an ordinary Italian petty-bourgeois without making the evening news. An Italian fantasizing about driving a truck for six digits of Amerikan dollars in Iraq then has an unpleasant thought, and such short-sightedness has a life of its own even when the truth might be greater exploiter unity than the fantasy.
The reason that Italy is now distancing itself from Bu$h is the same reason that Stalin's strategy writing off the Amerikan, British and French proletariat in World War II was correct. The most direct but incorrect strategy would have been to wait for the Amerikan, British and French workers to overthrow Amerikan, British and French capitalism respectively to aid the Soviet Union in its war against Germany. Thankfully Stalin did not do that. Quite the contrary, he rightly opposed strikes by Allied munitions workers.
A labor aristocracy will only ally with the proletariat of a country threatening not the labor aristocracy's imperialist partners but the imperialist competitors of those imperialist partners. The Italian labor aristocracy perceives a threat from Amerikan imperialists for the same reason bandits cannot divide loot equally. This situation creates a provisional opportunity for a weak alliance of the Italian labor aristocracy with the Iraqi proletariat or even the international proletariat more broadly because of the Amerikan dominance of the globe. While it is true that there are absolute pro-Amerikkkan lackeys in Europe, and they are largely in control in Eastern Europe, the labor aristocracy of Europe on the whole tries to assert interests independent of the u.$. imperialists.
The tendency will be for the emergence of a European Union competing as the Soviet social-imperialists once did. Once the EU fully emerges from the u.$. shadow, it will mimic u.$. imperialism in more recognizable ways more consistently. No one of the imperialists probably knows exactly how future contention will play out. It is in the situation as we have now where there is an apparent unity in occupying Iraq that the vacillation of the Italian, French and Germany labor aristocracies plays its most positive role: they can back an end to a joint occupation without seizing control of other u.$. territories. In most situations we should think of imperialist contention as a matter of concentrating resources: they pull out one place only to occupy another. In this case, the united $tates thinks it owns the world, so the EU cannot necessarily pull out from one place and occupy another except by a wink-and-nod agreement with the u.$. imperialists, which would not be contention but cooperation.
MIM mourns for imperialist Italian armed forces killed in Iraq. We suspect that whatever danger of nationalism might exist, the Italian proletariat should also mourn the loss of any Italian life in Iraq while retaining clarity that the imperialist system can in no way end wars.
Today with lightning fast communications and instant television news reporting of wars, the imperialists can create a very quick and impressive effect. At any moment it can become subjectively overwhelming to those of us trying to maintain proletarian bearings. In such moments it is important to stay calm and not make a bad situation worse, by say, allying with a class that is not going to drive the global situation forward. That is especially true in the majority-exploiter countries where we are talking about hitching the minority proletariat to the majority petty-bourgeois wagon.
In Amerika, the political pressure in any crisis may seem to point to the proletariat's surrender to the petty-bourgeoisie to relieve subjective pressure. In most countries in the world it would be bad enough, but in the majority-exploiter countries such an alliance is fatal for the proletarian movement. If we must surrender to an imperialist country petty-bourgeoisie, we should surrender to the petty-bourgeoisie of a competitor, especially the competitor of the top dog. The material basis for the Iraqi proletariat to squeeze in some quality time with the Italian petty-bourgeoisie is real.
Note:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/20/italy.b
erlusconi/index.html
Putting forth a sharp proletarian line has two effects. Counter-intuitively but in line with dialectics in material conditions where potentially dominant revolutionary forces are not in place, the lesser effect is to rally proletarian consciousness. In Amerika, the greater effect is that a razor-sharp proletarian line like that of Sakai, Churchill or MIM causes an across- the-board re-evaluation of group self-interest.
The re-evaluation is like the waves going off at a 90 degree angle from a passing speedboat. Those waves do not follow the speedboat, but nor did they exist without its passing. The whole rise of pseudo-feminism in the 1960s for example is very much connected to the wimmin who dated male SDS leaders and other radicals. These pseudo- feminists may think of themselves as something third and new, neither status quo nor radical; yet they are in fact a notable side-effect of 1960s radicalism.
If we picture a railroad spike (oversized nail) or ice pick going into a huge block of ice, we can see the effect of Marxism on the ice block that is Amerika. It's not that the ice coheres to the ice pick to make it larger, so we cannot say that the sharp tool necessarily draws a large Marxist movement in Amerika. What the pick does is bring out the potential for fracture that was already in the ice. It's not that the pick forms a new unity with the ice. In other words, everywhere Amerikans are using the confrontation with Marxism for a wide variety of projects in self-clarity. Today, since most people are bourgeois in Amerika these re-evaluations and gropings for internal clarity rarely go the proletariat's way. One might even question the use of bringing Marxism to Amerika, because perhaps it trains the enemy in something. There is a lasting impression that the arrest of comrade Gonzalo in Peru had something to do with Amerikan agents trained in Maoist rhetoric.
We can even connect some of the fracture between Republicans and Democrats to the broad re-evaluation caused by the 1960s speedboat. The competent, well-educated Clintons of Yale Law School are typical of this self- evaluating, somewhat open-minded elite. Those who did confront the 1960s, even when they took the reactionary side of it like the Clintons did, tend to believe that they have the competence in excess over others who relied on formal, mechanical or hereditary unity in Amerika.
In actual fact, the more a bourgeois leader has confronted Marxism, the more danger that leader is to Marxism. It is not Quayle but Clinton who is the real concern of the international communist movement. However, before that question even plays out, the bourgeoisie has its own infighting. In that infighting, the hereditary and mechanically reactionary side has claimed that even the reaction to Marxism is wrong, because the bourgeoisie should exist as if Marxism never existed, as if that speedboat never passed by.
Listening to Patrick Buchanan, one would think Amerika is already a house of cards ready to fall from within because of the side-effects of the frontal assault of Marxism in the 1960s. Buchanan acknowledges that the Black Panthers and the like did not win in the 1960s, but the sharp proletarian attack unleashed a whole range of what we call bourgeois re- evaluations that Buchanan believes are going to bring the death of the West. Catharine MacKinnon is a case in point from approximately that generation. There is no saying that a Catharine MacKinnon would have found herself interested in gender issues in another political era or context. So it's not the case that Amerikans jumped on- board with the the labor theory of value, Lenin's theory of imperialism and the evils of capitalism generally, just because Ho Chi Minh was calling himself Marxist. It was more as Lenin said: the well- posed challenge from Marxism shook things up in Amerika. If class issues could come out so sharply, if so- called race relations were really wrong as many came to realize--then the question became what else is wrong. People questioned sexual relations from both sides of the Liberal dichotomy--"too tight" or "too loose." The other interests of wimmin started to face questioning. Another form of questioning unfortunately concerned recreational drugs and so on down the line.
Among a largely bourgeois people, the effect of Marxism is to bring out all the various self- interests more clearly. The division among the exploiters is principal and their unity temporary. Thus, any clearly posed intellectual challenge has the danger of ending the false consciousness of the bourgeoisie--so that each exploiter wonders how to pursue his/her interests more perfectly. In such a context, the influence of a single Church such as the Catholic Church falls. Any easy past cultural unity falls apart.
So this is how we should picture the work of a pick on a chunk of ice. Some small bits come off and whole chunks may cleave off: a perfect shot with the ice pick may split it in half.
As far as the the majority-exploiter countries are concerned, it is true that all movements that have arisen are essentially bourgeois in nature. The greatest stunt that demonstrates the extent of bourgeois influence is how the Amerikans have managed to turn the environmentalist movement into a corporate project at the larger bureaucratic level and a racist movement against immigration at the grass-roots level. In that sense the proletariat is only in charge in the anti-war movements, and even there, only when relatively high numbers of casualties or a draft occur: the other movements are all dominated by the bourgeoisie. We have argued that is not false consciousness but in fact a kind of greater bourgeois class consciousness in reaction to proletarian consciousness seen in the 1960s. The alliance with imperialism is principal with the petty-bourgeoisie, because of the weakness of our proletarian forces, so the principal trace of the proletarian struggle at this time comes in the form of petty-bourgeois re-evaluations ranging from liberal anti-racism, to pseudo-feminism, to environmentalism, to gay rights movements and to tastes in bourgeois music and recreational drugs.
Bill Clinton actually lost an election in Arkansas for governor in the midst of red-baiting according to Hillary Clinton's book. If we listen to the howling of Patrick Buchanan but also millions of Republican Party and other reactionary activists, the tiny number of real Marxists in Amerika have had a traumatic impact. I have to laugh when I try to picture someone arriving in the united $tates to try to investigate the political situation. In most countries there are anti-communists of the sort who lump everyone who does not follow the Pope as some kind of communist. But this pathetic approach is most funny in the united $tates. There are literally tens of millions of people and millions of places that an international comrade could visit in Amerika and receive the impression that communism is on the verge of triumph--in the Democratic Party. That's how the hard-core Catholics and especially the born-again Christians talk. When these same anti- communist activists attack the "cultural elite," they intend no class war either. They refer as Hitler did to a Marx-influenced cultural elite.
So though we communists are supposedly "dead," that's not how the reactionary activists on the street talk at all. There is no one more bitter than the type of activists attacking Ward Churchill who believe that cultural elites like Churchill have deserted them and left them to fend for themselves politically.
So the proletarian aspect of Amerikan society is the subordinated aspect. The class contradiction since the 1960s is bourgeois-dominated, but the acute perception exists that still Marxism or something from the 1960s changed Amerika in a cultural sense. There is an image of Marxism discussed by millions that bears no relationship to anything a Marxist would say. It's all highly derivative--the perception of a perception of Marxism animates millions in Amerika who act as though otherwise they might not have anything clear to discuss politically.