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February 2006
In today's conditions, parasitism is the key to our stance on individual national questions. In the imperialist countries there are roughly two poles--one which sees revolution as one united global process and one that breaks it down into two or more groups. The first position we refer to as Trotskyist, because Trotsky was the first to differentiate with others in a consistent way on this question. It does not mean everyone who adheres to the view of a global proletariat with one single global struggle literally considers himself a Trotskyist. The second position on the national question has followed from Stalin and Mao and proceeds on a country-by-country basis with a detailed analysis of each country's internal class structure.
The question of parasitism was the real driving force in necessitating a proletarian scientific break with Eurocentrism. It was Lenin who developed the thesis on imperialist parasitism, but it was Trotsky and Stalin who fought out the implications. In a word, even if we do not accept a country-by-country approach, there were those who agreed with Lenin that the distinction between oppressor and oppressed nation was fundamental. This did not necessitate an analysis of 200 countries individually, but a division into two camps at the very least--oppressor vs. oppressed.
Those like Trotsky who continued to believe the revolution centered in Europe believed the freedom of the colonies was to be found in the revolution in Europe. Hence, the practical use of distinguishing between oppressor and oppressed nations slipped in Trotsky's hands.
Even in 2006, most U.$. Trotskyist groups believe that Trotsky followed Lenin. This is despite the fact that Lenin(1) and Stalin believed Blacks are a nation arising in North Amerika while Trotsky believed Blacks are a race.(2)
Here in North Amerika, even though Lenin and Trotsky spelled out exactly opposite positions on Blacks, it would be a small miracle to find any organizations that would demonstrate awareness of even that much "theory." The pathos in the Amerikan communist movement finds expression in Carl Davidson. He correctly notes that
This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that "all nationalism is reactionary," while the SWP falls into the "all nationalism is revolutionary" swamp. What unites the two is tailism.(3)
Davidson is no doubt referring to the observable practice of the SWP to cheerlead for every nationalist armed struggle in its newspaper. Being devoid of a connection between theory and practice, SWP does not refrain from simultaneously quoting Trotsky in its paper on the national question.
Floating above the class structure, Carl Davidson purports an ability where he can condemn either revolutionary nationalism or Trotskyism. What is missing is a developed analysis of where the main danger lies--tailing after nationalist armed struggles or tailing after no nationalist struggles. It's fine to adopt a plague on both houses approach to the imperialists, not the oppressed nations. Only the petty-bourgeoisie is apt to believe that steering is a question of 50% avoiding the proletariat and 50% avoiding the capitalists. Most real world problems do not occur in those proportions.
Davidson is a member of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) that has made an ideological principle of political degeneration. But in the West, if we can have dadaism in art, why not CoC in politics.
Another persyn claiming to be able to condemn both sides is Bob Amerikan, who typically tries to have every question both ways:
All nationalism is bourgeois--it's a reflection of the bourgeois world outlook--but that's true in the final analysis. It doesn't mean that in every particular instance, or even in a struggle overall, such nationalism can only play a reactionary role because in the final analysis the bourgeoisie is a reactionary class.(4)We would say the bourgeoisie could be progressive in an anti-feudal struggle. Mao said that the nationalism of the oppressed nations is "applied internationalism."
Bob Amerikan and Carl Davidson belong to different organizations now, but worked together in the RYM II that emerged from the SDS. Whether in the same organization or different ones, their line in 30 plus years has not changed in its unity centrally revolving around defense of the white petty-bourgeoisie. That is the real reason they seek to have it both ways on the national question.
Now I know what some are saying right now: "OK, but you are defending the Third World petty-bourgeoisie." It does not occur to these people that conditions differ in different countries and that the petty-bourgeoisie might still have some progressive thrust in some countries, just not the imperialist ones.
Our critics echo Trotsky, who said:
That the slogan 'self- determination' will win over the petty bourgeois more than the workers. That argument holds good also for the slogan of equality.
Key to this view was that toilers have enough in common in all countries that a Europe-centered strategy would work. Rather than see European workers as the most parasitic, Trotsky tended to see them as the most technically advanced and correspondingly fluent with advanced political concepts. In the year of his death he continued to believe that the European worker would come to power and free the colonies peacefully.(5) More than 60 years later, we can create a Stupid Parasitism Index (SPI) for each year by multiplying the number of years since 1940 times the number of Trotskyists that year still saying the same thing.
It's not that Trotsky never spoke about parasitism, the labor aristocracy and the labor bureaucracy. It is a question of his differences of emphasis with Stalin. A certain percentage of the time we can even say Trotsky sounded like Stalin and Mao, but the first to bring out a controversy are not always entirely aware of what the real differences are. When we look back, we can see that Trotsky retained faith in one Europe-centered Comintern to bring global proletarian revolution and he derided as social-patriots the communists who "broke" discipline by overemphasizing the distinction between oppressor and oppressed or among the various countries.
In the 1960s developed a break-away from Maoism along Trotskyist lines called the Progressive Labor Party. PLP returned to the idea of one world Comintern necessary. It also flaunted the line "all nationalism is reactionary"(6) against its competitors supporting the Black Panthers and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. That PLP did all that without admitting its debt to Trotsky and while claiming to uphold Stalin is further proof of the petty-bourgeois haze overlaying North Amerikan politics. Even in the organization with the political economy most similar to MIM's, the Revolutionary Youth Movement I flipped and flopped on whether whites were bought-off or mostly exploited. The politics in the most revolutionary-minded section of North Amerika is like a flickering lightbulb, one that bounces between proletarian on and capitalist off, the same way the petty-bourgeoisie bounces between the two great classes.
Much less surprising to see than a supposedly pro-Stalin group (PLP) abandon Stalin's contributions on the national question is some anarchist circles taking up the Trotskyist side. Those anarchists who believe the world is ready for a simultaneous insurrection or lifestyle movement toward statelessness and classlessness naturally oppose the line of Stalin and Mao.
An anarcho-syndicalist group informs us:
All nationalism is reactionary in its nature, for it strives to enforce on the separate parts of the great human family a definite character according to a preconceived idea.(7)
Neo-colonialism
The growth of super-profits and the proportion of the population that is bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries did not drive all the people calling themselves scientific communists into the pro-Stalin and pro-Mao camp. One might have thought that the growing gap between rich and poor internationally would have had that effect, since no Eurocentric revolution through a Comintern-like organization happened, but instead what happened was the opposite. Rather than conclude that Europeans and North Amerikans were bought-off, most calling themselves scientific communist chose to represent the small exploiters. They were abetted by the Liberal wing of white nationalism which encouraged scientific communists to give up the group-oriented approach in favor of an individual rights approach.
There is no better illustration of this point than the Communist Party U$A. Rather than adjust to new realities concerning parasitism, the CPU$A now has a sister party serving in the U.$. occupation government in Iraq. It became complicit in national oppression in Iraq.
At home, the CPU$A organized civil rights with a conscious emphasis on gaining what it called "minority" groups equal access to super- profits. While MIM is in favor of having liberals fight for civil rights, and holding them to that, the CPU$A consciously dropped Stalin's theory of the national question to do it:
That new position, a more winning approach, moved away from the "nation within a nation" concept, a somewhat mechanical application of Russian experience to the U. S. developed in the 20s and early 30s.(7)
In the same article explaining Gus Hall's decision to drop Stalin on the national question, the CPU$A says it is only interested in Black and Brown civil rights, without mentioning Red or Yellow. Black and Brown populations are the two largest inside u.$. borders, so the current CPU$A line stinks of electoral opportunism put forward in some social-democratic circles where working on Black to Brown relations is seen as the key to Democratic Party success. The story goes that Blacks are 90% Democratic Party voters, but Browns are on the bubble and need to get along with Blacks in order not to be Republican Party fodder.
The favored-minority-of-the-month approach is absolutely built in to redistributing super-profits. We cannot expect the Euro-Amerikan nation to surrender voluntarily its property through international redivision. So the CPU$A is typical in leading the way to turn the screws on Iraqis tighter while offering Black and Brown people inside u.$. borders civil rights. There are various white fads on exactly which exotic people are the most oppressed and worthy of white man's pure heart. There is absolutely no other way to divide the oppressed nations. If the CPU$A or any other oppressor organization always spoke just for the Euro-Amerikans, it would become too obvious for even the least advanced among the oppressed. Divide-and-conquer for the oppressor means that neo-colonial deals of the week need to be brought forward, taken away and tweaked continuously in order to set the oppressed nationalities against each other. Just ask Haitians why Cubans have an easier time visiting the united $tates.
Many organizations are relatively undeveloped on the national question. On the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) website, there are documents on Black Liberation only. That is another popular neo-colonial fad that missed the importance of even Brown people. There is an RWL web page titled "defend affirmative action," but it is only pictures. So the RWL neo-colonialism is the same as the CPU$A's, minus Brown people. It's just an illustration that the left-wing of the white nationalist movement has perfected the game of intellectual variety in order to divide the oppressed nations and lead them to Liberalism.
Negri and Hardt are now the leading spokespeople for the Trotskyist view of simultaneous revolution led by advanced white so-called workers, whether they think of themselves as Trotsky's descendants or not. They bring the struggle up-to-date with labor-theory-of-value-toting MIM as their antithesis.
In their book Empire, Hardt and Negri say:
The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power. It is thus necessary to develop a new political theory of value that can pose the problem of this new capitalist accumulation of value at the center of the mechanism of exploitation (and thus, the center of potential revolt).
This is the same thing Trotsky said about the most advanced workers being in the West. While the labor theory of value tends to point toward those Western so-called workers as parasites, Trotsky, Hardt and Negri stressed other characteristics of those same people. Instead of writing off the economic demands of 10% of the world's people, Hardt and Negri said they don't want to play by the Marxist rules anymore. Their overriding purpose is to kill off the national question by saying there is only one global system, with the nation-state being meaningless in the face of empire. The solution proposed is the same as in Trotsky's day: the "advanced" workers lead the way.
Conclusion
Among MIM's opponents on the national question, it's difficult to choose which are the worst.
In Progressive Labor Party's case, at least they can claim to be opposed to all racism. They fight for so-called equality within nations. Since people who put up a stout anti-racist struggle will no doubt tap into major problems, those with a consistent PLP approach may be the lesser evil among MIM's opponents though they are the farthest from MIM's position on the national question. We do not know, but if PLP really runs a Comintern-style organization without regard to nationality or borders PLP can at least have an anti-racist unity while pursuing false goals. This will tend to exert a pull on liberals to carry through on their civil rights rhetoric.
The worst have to be the in-betweeners. When Trotsky urged independence for the Ukraine as Hitler was about to invade, he showed us the damage of mixing together ultra-global approaches with nation-by-nation approaches. The one time he wanted national independence would have helped Hitler. For some teaching purposes, it is in fact better to count that as Trotsky's error than to deny the fundamental coherence of most of his positions.
Carl Davidson and Bob Amerikan are worse options with positions obviously leading to eclecticism and neo-colonialism. They are unable to take up either Trotskyism or Maoism consistently, though Amerikan in particular is more consistently Trotskyist than some Trotskyist groups. While PLP may be running one giant anti-racist Comintern, Bob Amerikan is saying Kanada is a nation but Aztlán is not. He wants an eclectic mushing of oppressed nationalities into a "multinational proletariat" inside U.$. borders. Into that mix he throws in the popular white fad that only Blacks might seek nationhood. Thus Avakian does not back off into an internationalist agnosticism for self-determination for all nations, and instead concretely favors Kanada over Aztlán, with Blacks in-between.
Ultra-global positions modified for faddish exceptions become neo-colonialism. That was Trotsky's Ukraine error. Davidson and Amerikan want many more Ukraine errors built in as a matter of neo-colonial principle. The fundamental reason is their stance on behalf of the white petty-bourgeoisie that causes their vacillation between two poles--the ultra-global pole and the Maoist pole.
The other terrible in-betweeners are the liberals masquerading as scientific communists. The CPU$A wants civil rights but cannot take up the PLP's anti-electoral politics line. At the moment CPU$A's neo-colonial deal-of-the-week is Black/Brown unity. They are obviously in a half-way house of most use to dividing the oppressed nations.
MIM's approach is based in the concrete reality that super-profits are underlying the difference between oppressor and oppressed nations. The ultra-MIM position stressing super-profits the most would be that the concrete clashes of material interest between the oppressed nations and imperialism are greater than all those among oppressed nations combined, so that we can be confident that overall oppressed nations nationalism is progressive even as it comes with some intra-oppressed-nationalist-noise. The relaxed-MIM position would be that we have to work on oppressed nations unity through class struggle in order to achieve a progressive effect for oppressed nations nationalism.
So it comes down to how much of the intra-oppressed nation fighting is caused by imperialism and how much is some real intra-bourgeois fighting among oppressed nations. In the event that imperialism is also the overwhelming material source of conflicts among oppressed nations, we should take the ultra-MIM position. In the event that the oppressed nations have situations where one non-imperialist bourgeoisie can really gain something over another non-imperialist bourgeoisie, we need to bring to the fore proletarian class consciousness in the oppressed nations. For example, in the event of a Pakistan versus India conflict, local class struggle may have to be principal. We may have to emphasize that nationalism of oppressed nations against each other is not progressive. Nonetheless, the Maoist line is that the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed nations is principal overall. How we handle Pakistan versus India may fit into that most of the time if the U.$. puppet-master is creating the particular divisions in question or it may not fit into that and may need to be handled as a secondary question of bringing to the fore proletarian class consciousness. Those are the kind of two-line struggles we need to have--how much is imperialism's fault and how much is the local bourgeoisie's fault. It's not that we are going to vacillate over nationalism. We are always going to say it is progressive against imperialism-- "applied internationalism" as Mao said. And when in doubt, we are going to blame problems on imperialism. Otherwise, we make the principal contradiction a dead letter.
Notes:
1. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/blacks.txt
2. "The Negroes are a race and not a nation."
http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6846/684649.html Trotsky goes on
to say that a Negro language may develop in the South. He is
obviously trying to encourage a crude interpretation of the
Lenin-Stalin thesis on the national question on that point.
3. http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/guardian/pt09.htm
4. http://rwor.org/a/v24/1171-1180/1180/grasp3.htm
5. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/wetoldyouso/trotskycolonies.txt
6. http://www.plp.org/pamphlets/politecon.html, still held as a position
30 years later.
7. Anarchosyndicalism 101
http://www.anarchosyndicalism.net/rocker/nc-13.htm
8. http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/512/1/8/