Answering An Argument From The Left

The current issue of the People's Weekly World carries an article from Emil Shaw entitled "On Marginalization." Please read that article here.

Several political turns or trends seem to be happening at once. Sometimes the pace and depth of change takes our breath away.

Emil Shaw is speaking for a number of prominent and respected Communists when he says

But to be able to be in a position where people will listen to you, one has to be in the coalition, participating in their day to day work. To be on the sidelines doesn’t work. To yell “socialism” doesn’t work, in particular when the party and our international comrades, do not have a clear idea of what we are talking about, since the days of the demise of the Soviet Union. New paths towards an egalitarian and just social order are being written with the efforts of the people in Latin America and Asia. But this story is not yet completely told, depending on the degree of U.S. interference and also the degree of solidarity we can generate within the U.S. labor and people’s movement.

It's a point well worth considering and taking to heart. Shaw goes on to say

There are comrades who still feel that all we have to do is to follow the example of Charles Chaplin in his film “Modern Times” where he walks down the street, picks up a red construction flag, waves it around and all the workers from different work sites put down their tools and follow him in a procession. Times are different now.

The print edition and the on-line edition of the PWW each carry slightly different versions of the Shaw article but the gist is the same.

I don't know anyone in our political circles who opposes coalition work, who supports sitting on the sidelines or waving the banner and yelling "Socialism!" or following Chaplin's humorous lead in "Modern Times." Quite the opposite is true: people on the left tend to give up their identities as leftists to work in coalitions, hide our politics, set theory aside and appeal to the political center. And for the center and parts of the right this is still not good enough. They continue to accuse us of being unthinking, devious, covert and extremist. Many on the right believe that a shadow government now exists and that it is headed by the Communist Party: right wing hate radio has been saying this daily for the past two weeks. What is at stake is the existence of the left.

It is bad argument when leading Communists accuse unnamed people of being ultra-left, rejectionist or isolationist and then neglect to name names and continue their critique. We have been hearing this for at least several months now. If such people do exist, then there should be an open discussion and a resolution of the issues. If they do not exist, we have a right to ask why the criticism emerged in the first place.

My concern is that leading Communists may be making these criticisms in deliberately broad terms in order to appeal to the center and lead at least part of our movement away from traditional Marxism and towards social democracy. I'm not convinced that this builds the left even in the long term. And I think that it gives the right a victory by disarming the left. If your opponent can determine your moves you lose the game in sports and in politics. What does the left have to apologize for and how does criticism of an unnamed "ultra-left" help?

I certainly believe in coalition work and I back this up on my job and in my political work. But coalition work succeeds and works at its best today and under current conditions when everyone in the room and at the table is being honest with one another. If I'm at the table representing my union or another organization, I'm bound to stay within those frameworks. If I'm there as a member of Willamette Reds or the Communist Party I have a broader field to work in. In either case, I need to be honest about my politics and affiliations and have the hard conversations with people who have a problem with it. Few people do have a problem with it, however. How and when I have that conversation is something to be decided in the moment and with a collective body giving me support and criticism, but it needs to happen.

What we are losing on the left is the collective body and consciousness needed to enable conversations about politics and left organizing. If the left continues to adopt the social democratic models of decentralizing and orients towards heading gradualist movements, always appealing to the center, working from the top down, not adopting modern critical thinking and organizing models, not internalizing participatory democracy and not grounding our work in Marxism left identity will disappear.

The article and so much of what we hear from leading Communists these days does not deal with what else the left does besides work in coalitions. Do we read and understand Marx and Lenin? Do we publish newspapers and newsletters in our communities and in our workplaces? Do we run candidates for union or public offices? Do we act as part of a world movement and in solidarity with specific movements and parties elsewhere? Do we teach? Do we have community centers? Are we family-friendly and attuned to the cultures around us? Do we have affirmative action mechanisms in place so that everyone gets a chance to lead? Each of these questions has a "why?" and a "why not?" attached to it that goes to the very heart of why we have and are a part of the left in the first place.

People who ducked the questions of their left affiliations and thinking during the McCarthy years suffered as much as people who took the questions on head-on. My parents were among the victims. People who kept an open left identity through those years and argued the point had something to be proud of at the end of the day. Ben Gold, president of the furriers union, refused to back down and the furrier's union--I was a member once--won some strong victories under his leadership even while the union took some losses. We need more Ben Golds today in order to honestly stand up to the right. Wins and losses can both be expected, but if you give up your collective and your identity it's more difficult to recover from the losses and find something to rebuild with.

On the other hand--and I am sensitive to these points--hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people believe Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh when they say that the Communist Party is running a shadow government in the US and that Obama is either a tool or a leader of this conspiracy. To a large number of people in the US Obama is indeed a revolutionary and even the public option for healthcare is a radical step. Change will come incrementally for a time while such a large bloc of people thinks this way, but it may also be that change can be driven forward with a more stubborn and self-respecting left in place--one made more in the image of Ben Gold and William Z. Foster and less in the image of the postwar Earl Browder if we must measure our present and future by the past.

Let's look ahead, I say, and try to discover among ourselves where the "new paths towards an egalitarian and just social order are being written" here and now. We have yet to adapt or adopt as a left the participatory forms taken up in Latin America. Surely there are new Marxs and new Lenins in the movements around us. If the left does not offer them the chance to grow with theory and in collectives we choke the spirit that gives the left its distinct and necessary identity. And we do this as well when we backtrack on questions like the wars, healthcare and EFCA.

Part of the truth that needs to be told is that we have historically depended upon African-Americans to be the best Americans, to have and to hold every great republican and democratic virtue, and to save this country from its worst excesses and destruction. The civil rights movement had, and still has, the mission of redeeming the US. When Black people lead social movements, from Reconstruction and Populism forward to the civil rights and labor movements, the very best in the US comes to the fore. If the left were to move to the margins and exist as sideline critics of the Obama administration it would become an alien creature to African-Americans and lose their support, and deservedly so.

Another hard truth is that the modern left is becoming a left without labor at its center. For the first time in the history of the American left we are working in a movement not led by or comprised of union members. This gives the left a particular class orientation and leaves what remains of the unions up for grabs by other forces. Several factors help account for this: job losses in unionized sectors, people retiring who were active in the '60s and '70s, the recent splits in labor, too many leftists taking staff jobs and burying themselves in that work, the naturally slow pace and hard tasks of being a committed communist or socialist and an active union member, the absence of groups like Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy. It is definitely not the case that labor and the left are going separate ways because leftists accept marginalization or insist on waving the socialist banner and refuse to work in coalition.

Finally, it has to be said that among those sections of the left that are disengaging--the social democrats and greens who abstain from meaningful political action, the old-school lefties who stopped thinking in the '30s or '40s, the people who bury themselves in coalition work and deny being on the left--there is a real lack of organizing and organizing experience. They can't point to any recent successes, or even project building, despite all of the new opportunities that exist for the left. Their credibility suffers because they can't bring real and lived experience to the table.

On the other hand, some of us have had the odd experience of going to Portland Jobs with Justice as union members and leftists and hearing the gasp in the room from other labor-left people when we announced our political affiliations. Jobs with Justice has not met its goals locally in Salem not because of the presence of so many openly left people involved in it, but because so many of those people are buried in other work, because there are self-imposed barriers to union activism here and because the local left has not grasped the essentials of democratic centralism. "Organizingism" is as problematic as doing nothing. Forget the supposed problem of leftists accepting marginalization and waving banners from the sidelines in this case and help us get back to historically proven methods of leftwing work.

Somewhere on the left there must exist a space which rejects as false and harmful the misguided accusations of accepting marginalization and ultra-leftism, on the one hand, and fully appreciates the need for a Black-led and labor-led left moving ahead at almost any speed. In that space there is a rejection of ultra-leftism, disengagement and the watering down of who and what we are as three sides of one triangle. There needs to be a recognition that progress is made through critical thinking, the juxtaposition of opposing ideas and organizing. Put me in that space.