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March 24 2007
The U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is due to be fired. His recent difficulties started with the revelations by an audit of the FBI that President Bush noticed.(1) The audit showed that FBI was conducting Patroit Act investigations where no investigation was authorized and some "investigations" more accurately termed "persecutions" went undocumented.(2) Of course, the audit and media presentation is a very watered down version of the actions and motivations of the FBI. It's not untrue that the FBI takes Internet, bank and phone records, but it is an understatement.
As FBI head Mueller and Gonzales became due for criticism in Congress, Democrats in Congress upped the ante by criticizing the general politicization of the Department of Justice, not just how the Patriot Act singles out unpopular activists. The most liberal of the main TV news channels started referring to the "Department of Injustice" in the headline section of the TV screen.
Now eating the most time is the replacement of eight moderate Republican U.S. attorneys by Gonzales. At issue is whether the president should replace people with federal prosecutor responsibilities with political appointees. The law gives the president that right, but the political situation is still explosive. The idiot Democrats passed the "Patriot Act" and other laws that give the president the right to change the attorneys and now they complain.
MIM would like to use the Gonzales furor as an exercise in learning Maoist terminology. During the Cultural Revolution in China, there were multiple campaigns against high-ranking government officials like Gonzales. The only difference is that at that time, the assumption was that some officials wanted socialism while others wanted capitalism, and so the Chinese people had to decide which officials were the good ones they wanted to keep, even if they all proclaimed their love of Mao Zedong Thought. Today, of course, all the U.$. officials want capitalism. The theorist is able to work with this difference, even while "there is no Marxism that is not concrete" as the Chinese comrades said, which means that in the short-run, we will not be expecting the oppressed and exploited to be able to shift the use of Maoist theory from one concrete context to another.
Ironically, one of the main debates in the Maoist Cultural Revolution was exactly whether or not everything is political. Is there such a thing as apolitical art, music and law for example. The whole question of politicization of attorneys would be typical for the Cultural Revolution's agenda.
Maoists say law is not apolitical, because there is no getting around underlying conflicts about money, family and nationality. Politics can only disappear after a complete social harmony arises after power of people over people disappears. Lately we hear some dispute of that idea from those claiming to be "Maoist" who believe there should be a system of law under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but such a notion is not in the writings of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Hence, there would have to be a substantial argument as to how there can be socialist law and "humyn rights" as "neutral" concepts before advanced stages of communism eliminate politics. It would seem possible that though laws could be loaded in a socialist or communist direction, having laws could still obscure politics and disarm the proletariat which will need alertness and aggressive creativity and not just routine to achieve its historic revolutionary goals.
MIM does have specific demands against Mueller and Gonzales, because they have specifically attacked MIM in unprecedented ways. We should also say that MIM's interests and the international proletariat's interests coincide on this point, because the imperialists have let it be known that it is Gonzales and Cheney for Guantanamo Bay and Gates and Rice who want to close it.(3) Gates and Rice seek to protect imperialism by cutting its losses in the exposure of the international prison system.
The Democrats sense "blood in the water" and they have "broadened the attack" as we Maoists would say. Bush quietly offered to oust Gonzales and shopped for a new attorney general, but when it became clear that this would not appease the Democrats, Bush dug in his heels against a "partisan fishing expedition."(4) The general outlines of this political conflict are classic and generalizable. Democrats seek to go further and Bush threatens to give up nothing if some deal is not reached.(5) In the Democrats' favor is that the Bush regime is at a low level of general popularity. One more hard blow would sink the Bush ship in a way parallel to Nixon's.
Reality said the Democrats could settle for the head of Gonzales. Yet, there was a temptation to push further and get Karl Rove for his role in the attorney firings. The objective of Democrats is no good, because they want one capitalist to replace another in government, but we can still illustrate a general principle. If it turns out that Democrats cannot make good on a more general attack with the "blood in the water" and if Gonzales ends up getting off the hook because Democrats overreached, then we say they made an "ultraleft" mistake by analogy, if we allow the one false presumption that the Democrats wanted to replace a capitalist-roader with a socialist.
A difference between a theorist or leader on the one hand and an activist is that we can tell the theorist or symbolic reasoner that here we merely add the false assumption that Democrats want proletarian government leaders in order to illustrate a more general political concept. In fact, the theorist will be quick to work with that notion, while those who reason only in the concrete will be stuck on the idea that Democrats are Democrats and not socialists. Having a discussion with the concrete-minded requires that all parts of the discussion fit into a rigid place. This creates a gap between those who lead and can shift around concepts readily and those who follow and require concrete instructions.
Conversely, if Democrats attack Gonzales and get his head, but they could have gotten Karl Rove and discredited other high-level people in the Bush regime, then if they settled for getting Gonzales, they would be guilty of "right opportunism" in Maoist terminology. It is a question of the underlying political reality--of what the real possibilities were. MIM says science is necessary to know those possibilities, and we should not settle for our subjective preferences or wishes.
The House of Representatives just voted 218-212 for a measure that would have forced a U.$. troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2008.(6) Here again is a question with shades of the question of "ultra-leftism" and "right opportunism." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to some Democrats and told them to vote for the 2008 deadline instead of demanding a 2007 deadline. The essential argument was that there were not enough votes, no political reality for a 2007 withdrawal. With that approach, Pelosi prevailed. Some House members essentially agreed it would be "too far" to expect sooner than 2008. Each member of the House of Representatives had to look around, gauge political reality and see how far the question could be pushed. That is a very similar process as what MIM undertakes all the time.
On the House vote, there is another issue of what the central question is. If the central question is gaining votes in the House, then it is hard to oppose that it was "ultra-left" to want a deadline before 2008. If the central question is serving god or preparing public opinion, it is possible that voting against the 2008 deadline in order to get a "now" deadline is better. MIM's stance on this issue is that House votes actually do not matter, because the Congress is an imperialist institution. Our central task involves "independent institutions of the oppressed." In terms of obtaining proletarian goals, the Congress only reflects the political struggle that has already happened. So for example, the Iraqi oppressed and exploited have fought the u.$. invaders into a costly standstill. That is why the House is voting now 218-212 to try to withdraw in 2008. We are not interested in the House vote-counting question enough to center our strategic thinking at that level and that has to do with the nature of political reality again.
Now on the question of "deviation" and what that is. An "error" involves a misjudgment on one question. A regular pattern of errors is called a "deviation." So, if House Democrats kept voting for immediate withdrawal and it was not possible and those House members found themselves in the year 2012 with troops still in Iraq, then they would be guilty of a pattern of voting errors that would add up to a deviation from what they themselves claimed to intend. They intended to oust U.$. troops immediately, and instead they bungled the politics and did not even obtain a 2008 withdrawal. If bungled badly enough and regularly enough, we start to wonder if these House members really intended withdrawal of troops all along. Perhaps these House members were secretly working for the other side of the troops question, in order to keep them in Iraq.
MIM itself faces questions along these lines too. Political reality is that we still have a gap between leaders and led, but MIM acted as if we could by-pass or at least neutralize the question of symbolic, Aesopian or allegorical communication. Hence, MIM overestimated political reality, in an ultra-left deviation that led to regular dumbocratic errors. It was not MIM's intention to have regular dumbocratic errors that amount to a deviation, because our third cardinal principle says that we see the majority of the population in the imperialist countries as oppressors and exploiters. Hence, our intention at MIM was not to get mixed up with majority-oriented political prejudices, but in emphasizing accountability and accessibility, we went to the point where we did not deal with imperialist spies, not just in one situation but in a pattern.
Notes:
1. "'My question is: What are you going to do to solve the
problem and how fast can you get it solved?' he said."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/03/10/AR2007031000445.html
2. Mueller himself ordered a follow-up audit pointing to abuses of
five or six digit numbers of people. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aBd9Zzld22w0&refer=home
A former FBI agent noted the following about the numbers involved:
"Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) expressed surprise at how widespread the use of national security letters had become, asking: 'Do we have that many potential terrorists running around the country? If so, I'm really worried.'"
3.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OWFiN2E0N2Q1OGU1NTE4MmY2YjhhZ
WQ2ZmE3NzRkMjg= has an interesting intra-reactionary discussion of
Gitmo, where Andy McCarthy refers to his attack on Rice and Gates on
the issue.
4.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/22/us.attorneys.firings/
5.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070324/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/fired_prosecutor
s
6. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/24/MNGCROR6OM1.DTL