April 12, 2004
Dear Peter and the AL Collective,
Thank you for your response. To keep this discussion prompt and focused, this e-mail will address two particular points raised.
1. Propaganda and agitation
2. Conscription and its relationship to revolutionary defeatism
(We are leaving aside the class character of the anti-war movement, the Marxist attitude toward animal liberation, tactics related to ANSWER and the WWP and other issues for now.)
1. Propaganda and agitation
Our pamphlet, "Propaganda and Agitation in the Building of the Revolutionary Party," reviews the Bolshevik understanding of these concepts. We are sending a copy of it to the snail-mail address you provided.
We are not clear on whether or not your collective was founded on -- or has since produced -- documents expressing your overall view of the world and perspectives, and in particular your view on party-building. (One such general programmatic document in our case would be the COFI Political Resolution to be found at http://www.lrp-cofi.org/PR/polres.html.) We would normally expect a general public statement that explains the political basis for the group's existence and so forth. Perhaps that is the upcoming document you referred to, or we missed something. In any case understanding your overall perspective in regards to the party question would be helpful for understanding your group.
We are open advocates of building the revolutionary party and re-creating the Fourth International. This determines our view that propaganda is key to winning advanced workers and that agitation is subordinate at this point in time. We are founded on a definite revolutionary program and principles based on the overall experiences of the world communist movement and class struggle historically. Our first task is to get others to join us based on this program. Our prime purpose is convincing those who can be most readily convinced today of the need for socialist revolution and the party to make it possible. We believe this concentration on propaganda is correct today -- and also consistent with the lessons of building a cohesive vanguard championed by such Marxists as Lenin and Trotsky.
And we frankly think you have a misunderstanding of what agitation is. Propaganda in the Leninist tradition is understood as the explanation of a wide range of ideas to a relatively small number of people; agitation is the emphasis of a limited set of ideas to a large number of people with the aim of initiating or sparking a particular mass action or at least convincing great numbers of a particular idea in an immediate sense. We think your material which we have seen is basically propaganda.
You characterize the leaflets which you have put out as "agitation." You say that the chief action which you would like to see undertaken would be protests and rebellions by soldiers. No doubt such actions would be desirable. Yet if your leaflets were to aim to accomplish this, then the people whose hands they would need to reach would be the soldiers ready to receive this message, or other people who were likely to immediately be convinced to focus their energies on encouraging soldiers to protest and rebel. In point of fact, though, this is not what you are doing. (Nor would we say, at this stage, that that is what you should be doing.)
The leaflets are being distributed at general anti-war events, where soldiers or those with likely access to them are probably a minority, and the leaflets explain general political points at some length --within the limits of their total size. They lay out a particular, fairly detailed perspective in fact today no matter how widely distributed they are, only a minority of readers are receptive enough to the full political message to read them through and accept their arguments. As well, the majority of participants at the anti-war demos today do not see organizing a mass soldier' protest as actionable. Not only will the majority of readers of the leaflet not act on your general points, but they will not act upon the immediate action advocated in the leaflet in reference to soldiers. Their main effect will be on other already socialist-minded participants, such as the LRP and others who will want to pursue discussions with you based on the ideas in the leaflet.
Again, for the multitude of demonstrators, for example on March 20, the ideas in your leaflet are neither actionable or popular. The bulk of demonstrators were for Anybody But Bush, which is why they are hardly convinced that voting for Kerry is not the most effective action. That is the reality of today's movement, such as it is. Thus, in effect though not intention, your leaflets at the anti-war demos are propaganda leaflets even though you do advocate some actions within them, because they can only impact a narrow audience.
This is not to say that agitation has no place in a propaganda group. Without the test of practice, the cadres of a revolutionary organization, and the advanced workers they seek to reach, have no means of testing the validity of the program and methods of struggle they advocate. But historically, small groupings which have sought to emphasize mass work over propaganda and program, by prioritizing agitation over propaganda, have fallen into opportunism in their attempts to reach the masses. If one makes agitation the priority from the beginning of a small formation, the more foundational work of establishing a full Marxist scientific program and theory and clear principles, which in fact is a primary task until the mass party is built, never gets done. (Propaganda remains an ongoing task even where agitation becomes more dominant but that is a different point.)
In our union work we put out propaganda and agitation. Examples of propaganda and agitation are found in Revolutionary Transit Worker at http://www.lrp-cofi.org/TWU100/RTW/ -- let us know what you think of it.
2. Conscription
On conscription, you do raise an interesting objection. (I hope you will provide a more detailed response to Dave's letter. We also have more recent material on the subject at
http://www.lrp-cofi.org/PR/conscriptionPR69.html)
Anyway your question was a good one and I quote it below:
"A draft provides military strength for the imperialists immediately, while a draft army is potentially a liability to imperialism in the future. In war, tempo is a critical factor. Suppose the US is losing a war with its mercenary army. A draft in that case might be critical to an imperialist military victory. Wouldn't it be appropriate to oppose the draft as part of a general defeatism?"
The most important aspect to any movement or any fight for immediate aims, even including the aim of stopping a particular war, is how far it goes in developing revolutionary working class consciousness of the necessity of socialist revolution, and therefore the party to do it. If the movement does not end up building a party which represents communist consciousness, then it is assured that sooner or later the masses will end up being misled, and capitalism and imperialism will continue along with the system's miserable wars. There is no question that a pacifist anti-draft movement can put a crimp in imperialist plans, but it does not represent the serious danger to imperialism that the working class, armed with a militarist class war perspective, will. And it does not build consciousness toward that goal.
Our discussion of the anti-draft movement was based in the concrete reality of its dominant pacifism which is antithetical to communists. It is the opposite of what we stand for, because we know that revolution means class war. And in fact anti-draft movements are generally pacifistic and middle class -- and not by accident. And this is key. What anti-draft movement do you have in mind which has not been dominated by pacifism and the middle class? The working class is inherently not pacifist, given that its consciousness has been shaped by class struggle and class reality.
Right now the U.S. will not dare to re-introduce the draft, even though it is already needed if the U.S. is to accomplish its will in Iraq and have forces to put down unstable situations elsewhere at the same time. They will not do so until they feel they have enough popular support to get it going without fostering a mass rebellion. Your question itself recognizes that reality because you note that the draft will be a potential hazard to the imperialists over time.
We discuss our tactics toward the draft question in the concrete circumstances as it has existed and will exist. In such a situation, the masses of workers will go, as they went to World War II, for example. Even when, for example, the Vietnam War was becoming less popular, the working-class youth who were drafted went in--even though the whole anti-war movement and the fairly large left of the time were all for draft resistance. The workers were not the draft resisters, who were overwhelmingly the white middle-class college kids who could, for example, go to Canada. The workers by and large did not go on hunger strikes or go to jail as individuals, even as they became more questioning or miserable about the fate of being drafted. Instead, as the war became less popular, it was those working class draftees who became the source of rebellion from within. For that reason, accepting that as long as capitalism exists there will be one sort of capitalist army or another, we prefer a draft to a mercenary army. Because there is a greater chance of exactly the kind of rebellious agitation that you claim to favor in a drafted army, fighting from inside -- rather than agitation not to go in.
We are not sure what you mean by general defeatism. For us defeatism is a military policy, not a pacifist policy. If a generally defeatist movement existed, in actively siding with the military defeat of imperialism it would have to advocate that soldiers turn their guns around to bring it about. If masses of workers were being drafted, rather than having individuals burn their draft cards, a defeatist movement would have to advocate that defeatist-minded workers go in in order to convince their fellow workers who were being drafted to foster military rebellion. As long as a drafted army exists, the strategy must be to go in alongside our fellow workers and fight from the inside. If you can paint a scenario where workers as a class are refusing to go in and are generally defeatist, in the Leninist sense, then you are talking about an already revolutionary situation.
The working class has to do everything in its power to obstruct the imperialist bourgeoisie's drive to turn us into cannon fodder. But imperialist militarism can only be stopped through proletarian militarism. The proletarian military policy, as implemented by the Bolsheviks during the Russian upheavals of 1917 and described by Trotsky in the build-up to the Second World War, provides an indication of how that can be done. (If you have not read our pamphlet on the draft question, we would be happy to send it to you.)
One last point. The opportunities for revolutionaries to encourage the rebellion in the ranks will be far greater in the drafted army of tomorrow than in the "volunteer," mercenary army of today. It is true that many if not most of today's soldiers are subject to an "economic draft." Nonetheless, a choice has been made that is at least partially analogous to the choice made when someone born to the working class, in search of a good paying, stable "job", becomes a cop or prison guard.
Because of the nature of the choice, it is rather likely that young workers with relatively advanced consciousness -- those who most immediately must be reached with our anti-imperialist propaganda -- are not likely to be as common in the armed forces as outside. That could change. But overall, the mercenary character of the forces has a retarding, conservatizing influence on the consciousness in the ranks.
Thus, while encouraging rebellion among active soldiers will be an important strategic task, we assign less central import to it at present.
With communist regards,
Joseph for the LRP
P.S. We are glad to share information but we do not have any concrete information as to what motions WWP has put forward.