Mark Phillips: The American Question

Marx wrote, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living." Well -- I buy that one. I vote we dig our asses out from under.

Much of the tradition which American socialists received from abroad arrived garbled in translation. Much of it is inappropriate for American historical and cultural contexts. How to distinguish healthy traditions from unhealthy?

Marx proposed a ruthless critique of everything existing. Let's start by applying that ruthlessness to ourselves.

Many of the Third International's strategic precepts are brilliant and applicable. United front, self-emancipation, democracy from below, transitional logic, uneven development, national liberation. Many others are obfuscated. Leninist norms, the dictatorship of the proletariat, conflation of party with vanguard, professional revolutionaries. To tell them apart we need protocols. Otherwise our critique is subjective and arbitrary.

Communism in 1919 was a rupture from the Socialist and radical movements preceding it. Well -- not merely a rupture. Communism buried the old American socialist and radical currents of Debs, the Abolitionists, the Minute Men, the Patriots. What is there in those traditions which could be helpful today to the American movements for peace, social justice, democracy, equality? I dunno. Here's a shovel. Our protocols: those are our shovels.

To many of us who were formed in the American far left, America itself is a mystery. Our focus on 1917 has been like a vibrant but narrow lens. Maybe it would be better to say, like a laser beam. One moment in world history illuminated in brilliant focus; much of the rest left opaque, including our own history. As activists convinced of the need for strategy, shouldn't we begin by recapturing that lost history?

To use the old language: The American Question.

For an analysis of the specificity of the American social formation, in its history. Beginning with a ruthless critique of our own Alp, the tradition which has in practice served to retard this analysis.