United fronts and united fronts:
by International Minister, March 12 2006
Recently a crypto-Trotskyist organization coordinated its plans for International Wimmin's Day with the Bush administration. Together, they prepared the war climate against Iran. Neither is openly saying to go to war right now, neither the Bush administration nor the crypto-Trotskyist demonstrators of International Wimmin's Day. They had a united front on singling out Iran for hatred this International Wimmin's Day. Part of the reason for that is that the crypto-Trotskyist group in question consciously rejects the line that "all sex is rape." It also has no understanding of the social forces moving first, second and third generation Iranian wimmin inside imperialist country borders, because it rejects the concept of "gender aristocracy." Worst of all, the crypto-Trotskyists act like there is some kind of internationalist proletariat about to rise up inside u.$. borders and put down the imperialists, instead of an oppressor majority rallied to hatred by their words. (No, sorry crypto-Trotskyists, no matter how much your leader WANTS state power in all caps, no matter how much "flexibility" means attacking out of both sides of his mouth and taking both sides of every question in practice in order to put the "solid core"--i.e. him--in power, your tactical cleverness is not going to work. Revolution doesn't happen that way. You do have to know the social forces at work--accurately. Training successors means that people can recognize the desire and trajectories of social groups of people, not counting on somehow being tactical wizards, when in fact you do not have the ABCs down.) Without even close to the right concepts in hand, the crypto-Trotskyists who are serious as opposed to in the pay of the Bush regime have no real-time ability to discern allying with imperialism from wimmin's liberation. However, there is going to be an organization representing the labor aristocracy, so the real problem is that the international communist movement needs to understand that MIM has said for years that Trotskyism leads to neo-conservatism, because of Trotskyism's line that imperialism is progressive, not as decadent and parasitic as MIM says.
Nonetheless, it is also true that MIM agrees with some statements from the Bush administration. It could be that MIM's line is too fancy, because maybe we should always disagree with the U.S. Government, no matter what or somehow evade comparisons.
I'm referring to MIM's line on internationalism, that we want to hold the bourgeois internationalists to their bourgeois internationalism. Recently, MIM entered the fray against the chauvinism connected to the ports deal for the United Arab Emirates. Before that, the most relevant struggle in the same vein was the vote in France regarding accepting the European's Union's latest unity paperwork.
There is a beauty behind the idea of somehow managing to avoid siding with the U.S. Government on anything. For those who find their prime directive "to never side with the U.S. Government on anything," we have some unity and we see the beauty of their position. If Uncle $am calls socialism bad, then it is good and so on. That will get us pretty far in politics, just that simple idea.
For International Wimmin's Day though, because we are talking about international issues, unfortunately there are going to be problems. This is no where clearer than on the sexual slavery issue. We do have to support the imperialist law against sexual slavery. It is more advanced than the logic of the exploiters taking advantage of super-exploited conditions. There is a sense in which wimmin from semi-feudalism would be better off IF we could only get them under a law implemented by imperialism. The trouble is that the U.S. Government also imprisons migrants and that causes an opening for the sex traffickers. So we need to support the law against sex slavery while attacking the law on migration offenses. Is that reformist though? Not really. The labor aristocracy would have to be overthrown to allow in migrants without imprisonment. The imperialists could care less, but they need numerical support politically, and they need divide-and-conquer, so if they make the mistake of living without the labor arisocracy, they are going down.
So did MIM make some fancy pants error? Let's look at these last two united fronts with the bourgeois internationalists MIM made. We jumped on the chauvinists opposing the UAE ports deal. From my perspective--and the Central Committee can remove my words saying this--the UAE coverage that MIM did was the most impressive proof yet that MIM is right on the line on bourgeois internationalism.
Mere days ago, MIM came out for the UAE ports deal and so did Bush. We opposed the chauvinism connected to it. Meanwhile, Bush did not get what he wanted, because the Congress knows its labor aristocracy well and crushed Bush, absolutely crushed him. It was such a crushing blow, that Arab governments are now saying within earshot that they realize power has shifted hands in Washington. So let's look at this united front. In a matter of days, MIM got what it wanted and Bush did not get what he wanted. Dare we a small party out of power say it? Who was the dog and who was the tail in that situation? If MIM did that every week, how long would imperialism survive? People would start to realize that MIM knows up from down in the imperialists' inner-most politics even better than the power-holders themselves.
Then there was the European Union paperwork that the labor aristocracy allied from Le Pen to the phony communists crushed in France. Every single imperialist of Europe came out for it. They did not get what they wanted, but MIM opposed chauvinism. We had a rather watery and distant united front with the European imperialists, (not as immediate and not as well-timed as our UAE united front), but we got what we wanted and they did not.
The bottom line for this is that the imperialists also have false consciousness and MIM knows what that is. We have put it in condensed language that we are able to act on in a timely way. If we are wrong, it is mainly that it is a bad example to set. It's not often that imperialists will make the kind of mistakes that we can take advantage of the way MIM does.
Now let's look at the united front of the crypto-Trotskyists. First of all, they did not even control their own publicity. They invited the imperialists to their rally. MIM supported Bush on the UAE in our newspaper. We controlled what we said 100% and distributed that. We didn't pull a vague pseudo-feminist "do something" about the Taliban, which imperialists turned into "bomb Afghanistan."
Now let's look at who got what they wanted. Bush got what he wanted from the crypto-Trotskyists, support for a war climate against Iran. Of course Bush did and not only that, but imperialists coming after Bush got what they wanted from the crypto-Trotskyist organization. In contrast, the UAE ports deal is a done and finished event.
So I can see from self-introspection that some people might say MIM entered a united front with Bush on the UAE ports deal. We did not organize a demonstration for it. We probably would have had higher demonstration priorities on something else. On the whole though, MIM's approach does the correct thing. We won't get stunning victories like we had this week every week, but on the whole MIM's strategy and tactics connected to these questions are going to win much more than not. MIM has looked into this question for decades at a time and we know what imperialists are going to do before they do.