|
|
|
|
|
|
|
by mim3@mim.org
You know you're a petty-bourgeois Liberal if you condemned both the rebels and the government in El Salvador, Peru, Nepal, the Philippines etc. for humyn-rights violations, if you seek to count more things as humyn rights violations such as the death penalty, if you thought both the pro-peace accords and pro-People's War side in Peru were wrong, if you think Green lifestyle choices can fix the environment, if you think everyone can fix capitalism by investing in a socially responsible way, if you think you escape patriarchy by masturbation or gay/lesbian lifestyle, if you think non-governmental organizations and the UN are going to solve the problems of the Third World, if you believe in "art for its own sake" or if you think superior "artistic conscience" rises above politics.
Most Liberalism has no sweep evident on the street like the examples above, because Liberalism is more about distinguishing individuals. Liberalism as theory is mostly the property of academic, legal and political theorists because it is so prevalent and so much assumed as the basis of all discussion that few know what it is in general. Ants spend their whole lives on earth, but they may not know what it is from the vantage point of the moon. So it is with most people and Liberalism. The equivalent of ants on the earth receive justification for not knowing Liberalism in theory from the dominant secular philosophy of the Anglo-Saxon world, pragmatism.
When there is sweep in Liberalism evident in practice, as in the examples above, it comes from the petty-bourgeoisie, gender aristocracy or national bourgeoisie--the in- between groups attempting to rise above classes, genders and nations. Much of the inspiration for wanting to rise above comes materially from wanting to be above the conditions for the poor or genders or nations "treated poorly." Politically, the inspiration for petty-bourgeois Liberalism (as opposed to total apathy) may come as an orthogonal reaction to the sweep of the proletarian line.
The expression of petty-bourgeois Liberalism is vacillation or a fake neutrality, as when art is supposed to be politically neutral. Yet, even when the petty- bourgeoisie assigns the People's War 50% of the blame and the regime the other 50%, the result is to benefit the status quo, because change requires a change in the balance of forces. There is no such thing as neutral, because pacifism in an oppressed nation benefits the oppressor who has the upper hand in terms of force. So behind petty- bourgeois Liberalism is idealism, an imaginary place as opposed to a real terra firma humyn rights zone that the petty-bourgeoisie is defending. In contrast, the proletarian Marxists oppose all Liberalism and concretely uphold in a sweeping way the proletarian side.
Within petty-bourgeois Liberalism, there is a faction resigned to the dominance of the capitalist class, but still wants to get in a word edgewise from the bottom. This faction thinks of itself as not above the class struggle, but thinks of it as the capitalists getting 60% and the lower classes 40% through reform, so the result is much the same as thinking one is neither for one side or the other. You know you're a social-democrat if you focus on the lower and middle groups in your reforms of capitalism. You know you're a social- democrat if you want guaranteed employment or guaranteed welfare in the West, if you like social- security, Medicaid and Medicare, if you worked with MacKinnon and Dworkin for anti- pornography laws and you fought to have oppressed nationalities have the legal right to be officers in charge of the oppressors' military.
Social-democrats can contend that their reforms improve a flawed system by improving individual rights, thus their political appeal to Liberals. The work of social-democrats never succeeds, but when it is most effective it turns the oppressed into oppressor instead of abolishing both--the rise of Colin Powell being an example that was not possible before reform.
While the petty-bourgeois focus is on choices of everyone to rise above, capitalists have more of an interest in one-on-one fights than the petty- bourgeoisie, because capitalists can afford them. We call their dominant brand of Liberalism "bourgeois Liberalism" and not surprisingly, their brand of Liberalism centers on distinguishing among individuals. In contrast, the Marxist- Leninist-Maoists have no such luxury: they have to unite a huge group around a sharp political line. It's tough enough to unite behind a line without the various distractions that Liberals obsess about.
You know you're a bourgeois Liberal if you think bribery is a white collar crime concerning the handful, if you think that murder is something the poor and people on the street do, if you think pornography is something in a couple magazines and some videos, if you think weapons of mass destruction are something a few bad guys have, if you think weapons proliferation is like shop- lifting, if you think species-threatening war is something the smart people in government are taking care of, if you think communism spreads because of some foreign spies, if you think rape is something a few bad guys do, if you think capitalism is good because communism opposes shopping, if you think art is something to buy for prestige, if you think that family values choices matter or if contrariwise your main idea about feminism is "choice" or if you think political power for wimmin and minorities is a non-issue about finding candidates with more qualifications than the existing ones.
And you know you're a bourgeois Liberal if your response to the above was then, "you're for crime, pornography, nuclear war, communism (OK, they got that one right), living in poverty, living without "choice" and families and not picking candidates on their credentials." No, the point is that we believe we can only revolutionize ourselves, not solve all those problems right now within the capitalist system. We believe the Liberals have so stereotyped those issues as to make them worse than meaningless. So the bottom line is that one or the other is right: either the Liberals are correct or the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists are correct about what problems are and how problems get solved.
Bourgeois Liberalism distinguishing among individuals is the majority faction of Liberalism in the majority-exploiter countries. It can be hard to tell apart from petty-bourgeois Liberalism and there is often no point in trying. The difference is that the petty-bourgeoisie actually thinks it is rising above something while the bourgeoisie would only claim neutrality or use cloaks to cover up exploitation and oppression. The capitalist Liberals are closer to the truth of political economy than the petty-bourgeois Liberals.
Even we calling ourselves "Marxist" or Marxist- Leninist-Maoist are guilty of Liberalism when we get confused, which is most of the time in the West. In Lenin's Russia and Mao's China, Liberalism still had a progressive role to play, because there were still major holdovers of feudalism. To integrate some Liberalism into the theory behind struggle in those circumstances may be progressive. Even a question as simple as "who owns something" can turn into an anti-monarchist struggle in many historical circumstances. The legacy of comrade Gonzalo in Peru is being fought out as we speak just along those lines and it has to be done. In contrast, the death of all MIM individuals cannot doom the MIM line in the imperialist countries, because the task in the imperialist countries does not involve a fight for property. There is no new democratic stage. Even within the oppressed nations, the migrant proletarians may come from feudal holdovers, but their work inside u.$. borders is more closely connected to the MIM approach than one attacking semi-feudalism. The MIM line stems from reality and a class which has to fight feudal holdovers but only in countries MIM does not operate in.
In the imperialist countries, Liberalism is the ideology of the status quo. It can only play an arguably progressive role against fascists, papists and monarchists. Even then, if an oppressed nation proletarian movement can come to power by siding with fascist imperialists against Liberal ones, then siding with fascist imperialists has to be a consideration, because there's not much difference between Liberalism and fascism, both being products of imperialist decadence. Concretely at the moment, the united $tates is the biggest prop of fascism globally while simultaneously preaching some Liberalism for use internally and as an excuse for war. The Peoples' Wars are still arising from semi- feudal conditions and it's not surprising that they ask us to lean to the Liberal side in the fight against fascism, because Liberalism is somewhat useful to their struggles. What would be even more useful to the Peoples' Wars than our upholding Liberalism is more disunity among the imperialists.
If we copy the Peoples' Wars mechanically by reading formulas from a book, we are going to undermine the struggle against Liberalism. We do not have to go through another monarchist stage to have our revolution: working with that premise is idealism. Russia and China both had declining monarchies to deal with: we do not yet. So in handling the Third World comrades looking at the majority-exploiter countries, time is on our side, but in the short-run there will be a lot of problems talking with Third World comrades that amount to the role of Liberalism in one context versus another. Most Third World people know that the Mao suit (clothing of one color and style given free to all Chinese) is not Liberalism and the dress they see in the West is Liberalism, just as likewise they know that Maoist television programming was not Liberalism and Western television programming is Liberalism. On this, and in a sweeping way, the Third World proletariat has a correct perception that also scientifically guides the struggle in the imperialist countries. Likewise, the perception of the most discontented in the Third World is that the West is the road to the loosest sexual mores, so much so that it makes discussion of dating, harassment, monogamy, family, pedophilia, rape and the general substance of Western feminism pointless. One has only to turn on the TV to see what the West is talking about and then say, "what is the point after that?" What is correct about these attitudes is not the nod to Islam but the sweep--the sense that so many things are connected that the existing dialogue cannot properly appreciate them.
Because the fascists benefit most from the disunity of the proletarian forces, our emphasis should be on the sweep of the proletarian line, including and especially against naturally divisive Liberalism. To take the one issue that most gets the goat of the bourgeois Liberals, to take the Michael Jackson case right now, it is not just gays who are pedophiles. The problem is more sweeping than that; even though the court system and pornography machine demand that we take sides in cases as an entertainment distraction with the side effect of dividing the oppressed. Michael Jackson would be newsworthy by himself, but when we spread the notion that pedophilia is a one in ten million kind of thing, we get to the scope of the pornography distraction we have now. This problem is in fact so sweeping that there is no way to assess whether some Freudian psychiatrists are correct that large portions such as a quarter have had sexual contact (before age 9 for example). Already by the 9, 10, 11, 12 ages we are seeing a lot of sex by children with children too. That much we can and do know with hard fact. So often these spectacular cases like Michael Jackson act as a cover for the fact that a large portion of the adult population does not want to deal with questions, cannot even frame the questions while still demanding "action," or more likely, pornography followed by an injustice. It has to do with people's getting stuck in distinguishing individuals and not knowing the prevailing practices statistically or not wading into hot waters and doing the investigation of thousands or millions to see what people are actually talking about instead of handling the question in a stereotyped way. A lot of this has to do with whether we are going to allow Liberalism guised as post-modernism achieve the upper hand in race and gender struggles, because if we do the concrete investigation, that is what is happening in those places where revolt is most likely to break out. So against Liberalism, it is the job of the proletarian vanguard party especially to emphasize the sweep of problems.
Currently and concretely, none of the liberation movements in the Third World are benefitting from a fascist imperialist conflict with Liberal imperialists. The closest example would be Italy, where Berlusconi has fascist roots himself. However, Berlusconi was part of the coalition with the Anglo-Saxon imperialists in Iraq. Mao believed that a Deng-led China would be social-imperialist and social-fascist. So another consideration today is social-fascist China. China has been an unattractive partner from the vantage point of the Peoples' Wars, because they cannot afford the confusion of Chinese revisionism destroying the Peoples' Wars from within. It's easier to fight and ally with an open opponent.
In the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution both, the vanguard party at a specific historical moment had to teach people the meaning of Liberalism and its progressive thrust against monarchism and fascism. In the West there is no progressive historical task for Liberalism or the petty-bourgeoisie: the best way to organize against fascism will be to prepare minds for the next step-- the demands of the joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations (JDPON). This will mean separating from Liberals, taking corrosive abuse from Liberals and struggling against both Liberalism and fascism.
Liberalism has proved many times in history unable to defeat fascism: indeed, Liberal Weimar Germany gave rise to it. There are many deluded within the West calling themselves communist who believe some white proletariat is stopping the rise of fascism. Yet these same people know what the attendance to rallies to protest repression are and how they compare with the full-time political work of the Minuteman Project. Since only whites in their majority voted for Bu$h, there is a mechanical sociology that says the Democratic Party contains the proletariat and that we should tail after it on everything.
Key to understanding how not to capitulate to Liberals out of fear of fascism is understanding what prevents fascism in the united $tates. The only real factor in preventing u.$. fascism internally is international considerations. As it stands, internal cultural differences are already sharply setting the European petty-bourgeoisie in the hundreds of millions apart from the united $tates. A fascist united $tates sticking out like a sore thumb would be an inviting target around the world that even many opportunist imperialist politicians would not be able to resist.
So the next consideration for the imperialists is to go the international fascist route. It remains to be seen whether "third way" fascism does more spade work for international fascism or social-democracy does. The "third way" fascists are planting the seeds for international fascist unity. Yet, this invites trouble not only from the Patrick Buchanans. No one could be better disposed to internationalized fascism than Berlusconi, but even he has to back out of Iraq because of the reality of the national question in the eyes of the European labor aristocracy. It's important to understand that the "third way" Hitler spoke of (and Clinton and Blair also speak of) is different than proletarian internationalism which favors open borders and takes advantage of imperialist division for change instead of seeking to unite imperialists with a single ideology. In contrast, proletarian internationalists want a single ideology of the world's majority that needs to cross the borders from Syria into Iraq for example, instead of the fascist line of each Arab country to itself. The justification for that comes from proletarian internationalism, not fascism and its "third way."
Briefly put, what is preventing fascism is the nature of international division of the exploiters today. If the united $tates goes fascist, it risks repercussions from the EU and Russia. If any European country goes that way alone, there is an even bigger problem. So internal fascism could happen if there were a plan for inter-imperialist war that fascism would tend to justify or if the EU and united $tates jointly slid into fascism. Resistance from Liberals or labor bureaucracies would not be a factor in imperialist considerations and never has been. The idea that a united $tates of Kanada would form in the event of fascism would be a consideration--again a question of exploiter division. Another factor would be the strength of the communists and their ability to capitalize on a political crisis, not much of an issue concretely at the moment.
Even Liberals should be able to understand that not all people like Liberalism, but that does not mean they have to be fascists. They can be communists. As the Liberal and fascist roads prove their bankruptcy, we must plant the seeds now, including taking lots of abuse while doing so. If we do not generate some heated opposition in the imperialist countries, as we are planting these seeds for sweeping change, the reason is that we slid into Liberalism or fascism. So among the communists we say beware those big on individualist resentments, big on distinguishing individuals and small in getting opposition from Liberals and fascists. The communists themselves must constantly keep in mind the question, "how do I know if I am a Liberal?"