*To The Armed Struggle League- Propaganda or Agitation?

Click on the title to link to an "Under The Hood" (Fort Hood G.I. Coffeehouse)Web site online article about the "Oleo Strut" Coffeehouse, an important development in the anti-Vietnam War struggle. Hats off to those bygone anti-war fighters.


Commentary

On Slogans- Propaganda or Agitation?

Every once in a while I get a political communication that baffles me. Today is one of those days. I am looking for help and comments from readers as much as I want to comment on this one myself. I monitor a number of amorphous left wing political sites to get a sense of what is happening in our little corner of the political universe and to get a better slant on events than one generally gets from the bourgeois media (although one should not dismiss that source out of hand, if for no other reason than to know what the buggers are up to). I have commented on other occasions that some of these left wing sites have gone off on more than one conspiracy theory tangent to explain away the impotent of the left but the subject of today’s entry is of different magnitude.

Here is what I am up against upon receipt of a communiqué (in English, although today that means less than it used to) from a group called the Armed Struggle League. Personally, I have never heard of this group, at least not under that name although I do not necessarily keep up with the doings of every grouplet as I have enough to do creating my own propaganda along with my own little grouplet. The substance of the Armed Struggle League’s message is that NOW is the time, due to a myriad of political, social and economic circumstances (the usual laundry list- the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the housing crisis, the commodities crisis, the poor American education and health systems) to form workers councils, use those organizations to struggle for power and defend them by arming the workers. That is where we part company-for the moment.

After giving the communiqué some thought my initial satirical reaction was that here was a group that had been underground for a long time and had only surfaced now that United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his majority had given its imprimatur for the individual right to bear arms. But that was too facile an analysis even for this writer. My next reaction was that the group had been underground for a long time and had only recently gotten the word that the 1917 February Revolution had occurred in Russia and that they were playing catch-up somewhere in the summer of that year. Again, that is too easy an answer. I am going to assume for my own political purposes that this is a rational group and that they are just frustrated (like the rest of us on the extra-parliamentary left) that the masses have not yet risen to slay the monster who is certainly taking a big chunk out of their lives.

Elsewhere I have tried to explain the difference between our general propaganda tasks in defense of socialism in this period and our occasional ability to take the offensive and agitate for certain demands either because the objective situation cries to high heaven for that solution or because the demand has some capacity to get a hearing from some segment of today’s political audience. The clearest example that I can give of this in recent times, and that concerned me personally, was the question of creating soldiers and sailors solidarity committees to link up with the soldiers in Iraq to end the war a couple of years ago when there were openly civil war conditions in Iraq and American military forces, especially the rank and file, were in turmoil. Without going into all the details of how my group decided to agitate around that issue it certainly met, for a time, the two criteria I mentioned above- objective necessity and possibilities of a hearing from political elements. Sometime in mid-2007 that slogan lost its agitational edge as things calmed down in Iraq with the ‘victory’ of the Bush/Petraeus ‘troop surge’ strategy. We still use the slogan as propaganda on selected occasions but we do not highlight it much less agitate around the slogan today.

And that, my friends, is exactly what is wrong with the political prospectus of the Armed Struggle League today. Workers Councils- great idea. Center a workers government around this organizational form- even better. Defend those organizations by arming the workers against internal counter-revolution and external imperialist intervention- ABC’s. But what does all that have to do with today’s “simple” little tasks like getting working people in America to break from their political allegiance to the Democratic Party (and, apparently, in the cases of at least some white workers the Republican Party) and struggling to create a workers party that can fight for a workers government. Not as sexy as invoking the glory days of the Russian Revolution but those are our general propaganda tasks today.

Note: The thought had passed my mind that this message was an act of provocation by some nefarious forces, governmental or otherwise. For what purposes, however, I do not know. The e-mail address I tried to reply to was one of those no reply things. However, since the thrush of the communiqué had some sense of historical knowledge I think this is really the work of some antsy “ultra left” kids. In that case I urge them to think things through- our day will come, it is just not today. If any reader knows anything about this group, has received this communiqué or is a member of the group I definitely want to hear from you.