Click on title to link to my blog entry, dated September 3, 2009, that includes commentary on the "united front" and the Joseph Seymour article mentioned below. Forward in opposition to the warmonger-in-chief Barack Obama.
Recently I have been asked by a couple of young concerned people, by not means yet radicals, about the nature of the tasks for revolutionaries, radicals, and the occasional good-hearted left liberal in the fight against the Obama Afghan war policy in particular, and the struggle against capitalism and imperialism in general. Needless to say, today, September 22, 2009 the forces mentioned above are minuscule, as Obama and his operation still have plenty of political capital to expend with elements, like the youth, minorities and working people, that we need to reach in this country. That is not to my liking but it is reality, and should be recognized as such.
That said, I have staked out a position on the Obama Afghan war policy that is the only fairly clear cut pole of attraction that can be offered by leftists today to the emerging, if naïve, left opposition to the Obama administration. We, today, have no leverage on health care, the immigration question, the regulation of financial markets, the fight to save the working class from further immiseration, or a number of other issues that cry out for solution. I have bet, and that bet, unfortunately for the working class youth in the military that will be the cannon fodder for actions ahead, seems to be a winning one, that Obama has decided, as least in the foreign policy arena, to stake his place in history on a successful outcome in Afghanistan.
In the not distant past I posted an entry from the “Young Spartacus” pages of the Trotskyist newspaper, “Workers Vanguard” concerning the application of the “united front”.(See link) In that issue one of the leaders of the Spartacist League in the United States, Joseph Seymour, had an article, based on a talk he had given at an educational, about the history of the “united front” in the international Leninist movement, especially targeting the various controversies in the early Congresses of the Communist International (Comintern). The key point for today’s commentary is that the Comintern spent some time on just the kind of situation we are confronted with today, a lack of an independent working class party and the need to set out current tasks accordingly.
Seymour, in his talk, noted that the early Comintern directives indicated three separate and mainly distinct stages, for lack of a better word, of communist political work. They are: propaganda, which he encapsulated as presenting many complex ideas to a few people, basically cadre formation; agitation, where a few ideas are used to animate some mass action, basically struggling to win on a few demands; and, party formation, where the struggle for power is realistically placed on the agenda.
We are, and here I agree with Seymour, at that propaganda stage, for most of our day to day tasks. But here I want to make an exception for the Obama Afghan war policy because, frankly, it is our only serious leverage today to break people, particularly the young, from capitalist politics. Thus we need to fight to get back to the streets, where believe it or not, the issues of war and peace are ultimately decided. And emblazoned in bright red on those banners that we should fill the streets with- Obama- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan (And Iraq Too)! That is the easy part. On the others, we shall see.
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