Marx Now - Panel: Marx and Political Identity---And we add some comments, questions, and a mention of Margaret Stevens' new book

This is not the best forum or panel discussion on Marxism and political identity ever held. And at some crucial point in the video there are technical difficulties which intervene. No surprise, but Kali Akuno is again the brilliant thinker and speaker. Some long-lasting (and incorrect) prejudices against Marxism and Marxism-Leninism reemerge here, and some of the criticisms made show a trend to the right and towards pragmatism. On the other hand, the excellent points are made that the book Black Reconstruction in America by W. E. B. Du Bois is absolutely necessary reading and that politics needs to go beyond electoral action---not counterposing electoral action to other forms of action, but seeing their dialectical unity and contradictions---and that the left does not look carefully enough at program and the masses of people who do not vote and that we do not organize on the basis of coming to grips with the changing structures and content of world capitalism. The section on how we move between the universal and the particular and understand the terrain of our struggles is important and deserves greater discussion. Are we content with being subject to changes, or do we work for making changes? Are we building a movement, or are we structuring and restructuring criticism of one another and mistaking that for politics and organizing?

One of the speakers expresses her opposition to building a third party, or even talking about it, in very subjective terms and puts forward an impossible and too-pragmatic measuring stick for approaching the question of whether or not we can build a third party. Whether we support building a new third-party now or not, we do not have think about building a third-party in 50 states simultaneously and spontaneously. Approaching the question of building a third-party in this way is at least unhelpful. We do have to think of timelines, political organizing, relations with movements and with labor, leadership, and what breaking with the Democrats really means. We have to ask why existing left parties in the U.S. don't appeal to more people. What are the limits and possibilities of electoral action now? How do we shift from a context in which the attention is on ballot lines and on politicians to a context in which program matters? How we answer these questions takes how whether we come to the matter of building a party as opportunists or as radicals and revolutionaries. Part of our history in the U.S. has involved fusion politics and alliances. Our left today is terrible at alliances, but forming alliances has been part of our DNA. The questions should be formed in part around how we recapture that part of our past.

One of the weaknesses of this panel is that we get nearly all of the way through the discussion before anyone mentions the teacher's strikes. The panel discussion on the teacher's strikes is insufficient and misdirected. There is no mention of events in Puerto Rico and Mexico, both of which have more bearing on our situation in the U.S. then do issues in Germany, India, or Greece. Kali Akuno correctly references events in Jackson, Mississippi when he speaks, but much of the conversation takes place without any recognition of the moment we're in here in the U.S. We're seeing increases in the quantity and quality of class conflict and the continuation of struggles by nationally oppressed peoples and some recent electoral victories for some forces on the left as we come to midterm elections. Trump's presidency is in crisis, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the people in its orbit do not seem focused on winning, at least not by building capacity among workers, people of color, and women. We are coming to the midterms without enough discussion of coalition politics and a united front. 

The point that we need to hold on to is that we need to understand and describe politics here as they are, not as we want politics and the U.S. to be. Until we get to that point we're coming up with answers that don't answer and conclusions which don't conclude. Kali Akuno hits this point hard at the end of the panel. Even if we disagree over how he got to that point, we need to take up his challenge and take him and his work seriously.

The panel would have benefited greatly from engaging with the ideas presented by Margaret Stevens in her new book Red International and Black Caribbean.