The Dialectics of Political Practice

These are opening remarks by Richard Levins in a seminar on "The Politics of Solidarity Work" organized by the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee and the New York Marxist School on May 12, 1984.

In a way this is a unique event with people from political groups in different countries coming together to think about our own activities. In the past, solidarity has taken a very different form. Usually a political group with its own program intact will approach people in other countries to ask people to support that program. One thing that makes this possible is colonialism; the transplanting of people from one country to another has allowed contacts between us, so that a number of people here have already had the opportunity of participating in political struggles in more than one country. And colonialism has also given us a common language. I was at a meeting in Boston recently where the Haitian poet Jean-Claude Martineau was pointing out that the forced migration of Haitians to the United States, where they're forced to learn English, and of Puerto Ricans to the United States where they are forced to learn English, made it possible for Haitians and Puerto Ricans to get together in the Boston area. So in some ways the very creations of imperialism are making it possible for us to get together and to think through common problems and exchange experiences. The problems that we're all facing are problems of two kinds I think:

• How to build unity among people who are, in one way or another, already committed to political struggle; and

• How to reach new constituencies

We have in common—in Puerto Rico and in the United States, at least—the fact that changes in our society at present (the economic crisis, militarism, and so on) make political action increasingly necessary; they create an awareness in the general public that things are going very badly for us. But we have not been able to find the appropriate ways of political response to this yet. So that's another area of a common problem. We've shared the problem that our movements have been divided into many groups which normally don't speak to each other, yet face a common task. So here we can share those issues. And then, finally, we have an opportunity to talk about the problems of directly coordinating our own efforts in the two countries and in other areas of Central America and the Caribbean.

These are theoretical problems as well as practical ones. Now, theory has a bad name on the American Left. We've had the disease of pragmatism, of activists thinking that theory is mostly an excuse not to engage in practice. That has resulted very often in theory's not being related to practical questions. So when I talk about theoretical issues in the context of this discussion, what I'm referring to is not long-term theory about the nature of contradiction and the nature of thought, but in rather practical theoretical questions, or theories of political practice. How do we change consciousness in various constituencies? How do we maintain a movement of dedicated people surrounded by an environment which makes that increasingly difficult—not only because of the overt repression but also because of the cultural bombardment that isolates people from each other and erodes people's energies and enthusiasm. The problems of changing consciousness: of pulling together and yet maintaining differences.

There are a number of contradictions that we face in our political work. There is the contradiction between single-issue programs and broad programs. The single-issue argument says that people come into political action through their own perception of a particular way in which capitalism is no good for them; and there is the fear that if we asked them to oppose capitalism in every way, they would be frightened off. Against that, we recognize that if you oppose capitalism only in terms of particular abuses, any progress in meeting those particular abuses can give rise to the feeling, "Well, maybe things aren't that bad after all; we'll give it a chance." But there is another reason that multiple issues have to be raised and that is that it's not possible to fight effectively on a single issue without dealing with multiple issues. As soon as people come together, the problem arises of the form of participation in the group. So, in the United States, no coalition around any single issue, no matter what the issue is, can afford not to deal with sexism and racism. That would undermine the group and make it impossible for it to function.

Then we face the contradiction between militant action that shakes the consciousness of a country and challenges the way things are run and the kind of minimum appeal to people to do something not very different from what they've always been doing but in a slightly different direction. And here again we recognize that there are strong arguments on both sides. We do need to reach people in the kinds of activities that are already congenial to them, and yet if that is all we do then once that campaign is over people go back to their normal lives without having changed their thinking about the world and we're not really that much farther forward. On the other hand, if we raise forms of struggle that frighten and shock people, we are often left in isolation—with a good program that challenges capitalism to the core, but there's nobody there to listen. We have to deal with that contradiction.

We have to face the contradictions between the need for autonomous movements and the need for unitary movements. Particularly in the United States, and also at present in Puerto Rico, there's a great debate about the autonomy of the women's movement. There has traditionally been argument on whether the Puerto Ricans in the United States should be functioning a part of a broader North American revolutionary movement or should they maintain a separate organizational existence. Among Black revolutionaries the problem has also come up—of working withing the Black community and of working in the multinational group. Once again we can see strong reasons for both sets of alternatives.

Furthermore, it turns out it's possible for the same individuals to be participating in more than one form of struggle. One example of this is the Combahee River Collective, a Black lesbian organization functioning in the Boston area in the 1970s, which was criticized for its separatism. But the critics didn't realize that but also working in many kinds of coalitions every member of that collective was also working in many different kinds of coalitions. The collective was functioning as a support group that made it possible for each of its members to venture forth into an environment that was often hostile and difficult. So for many of us, we see that autonomous activities for those groups that have traditionally been oppressed and have not had the opportunity to develop leadership and self-confidence must co-exist with broad organizations that bring together the struggles from many different perspectives.

We face contradictions in discussing unity. Shall unity be built on the basis of acknowledging differences or ignoring differences? On traditional way of dealing with unity in the U.S. Left has been to say, "We forget about our differences We talk only about those things that unite us. And we hope that in some way working together will cause those differences to dissipate." It doesn't work that way. Important advances have been made—especially, I think in the Third World women's movement within the United States—in recognizing the creative role of difference in the process of building unity. We see this in the various conferences of Black and Jewish women looking for a radical program and so forth. So we'll have to discuss the question of the relationship between difference and unity, of making difference a source of strength rather than an embarrassment.

We're all concerned with changing people's consciousness and moving them into political action. We have to recognize that people join a revolutionary movement for two opposed reasons; we might say for conservative as well as for revolutionary reasons. The conservative reason for joining a revolutionary movement is that you become aware that the changes in your own society are taking away what you already have, even if it's very little; or that the society is denying you those things that it agrees everybody should have. So, for instance, in the parliamentary democracy of the United States, people who have been excluded from the electoral process are struggling for the opportunity to participate effectively in that process, precisely for an active role within parliamentary democracy. Or a labor movement might be struggling to have steady work for men so that they are not separated from their families. (We think of it in terms of strengthening the family at a time when women are challenging the way in which a family is a structure for their own oppression.) People whose goals have been simply to have a steady job look forward to the creation of businesses that might give them jobs. There are many ways, therefore, in which the early demands of a revolutionary movement are really the demands of the society in which people are living, for the opportunities which they've been denied. This is also true of the small businessmen who are prevented from making a profit by imperialism, and so look forward to an independence in which they can be the prime exploiters, or at least work out a better deal.

What this means, then, is that for some people the movement into revolutionary activity is very tentative; it's the realization that they cannot achieve their bourgeois goals within capitalism. For others, moving into a revolutionary perspective means increasingly challenging every aspect of their life—finding that their job or career is alienating, that personal relationships under capitalism keep people isolated from each other, that their minds are cut off by bourgeois education, that they are not able to use those skills they've been able to develop, that wherever they look the world is a hostile one. And we—recognizing that most of the suffering in the contemporary world is either created by capitalism or is adopted and reinforced and transformed and maintained by capitalism--see that some of us are becoming revolutionaries in order to challenge our whole way of life while others become revolutionaries in order to preserve a way of life that is increasingly tenuous. Both kinds of people are absolutely necessary in the revolutionary process.

If we start out by saying "Well, the masses are afraid of change, let's not frighten anybody, let them think a revolution if really keeping things the way they are only a little better," we build a kind of movement which may get a lot of popular strength but will not lead very far. Or if we develop a movement that says "Our revolutionary movement is turning everything upside down," we can have very solid cadre committed to the long haul but who will be unable to reach others who don't want their whole lives turned upside down. So it's a practical problem, then, for all of us to face the contradiction between the needs of the revolutionary challenge that causes people to examine critically everything about their lives, and those of the revolutionary challenge that says that the present society is no longer capable of satisfying our old needs.

Now, in the face of all of these contradictions what we'll find that in most cases the solution will lie in some kind of mixed strategy. In recognizing that, if we counterpose these different strategies we end up, on the one hand with movements that can be described as drifting to the right, and on the other hand with movements that become increasingly sectarian. Yet a combination of these two poles doesn't mean a placid kind of grey mixture the way it does in liberal philosophy. It means they all play a very important role. Sometimes because of of organizational history it's not possible for these different roles to be played within the same organizations. And in that case we have to recognize that different organizations having different perspectives on the struggle are equally important to the struggle, and that it's not our goal to convince the other organizations to work the way we do. In the absence of an overarching combined party-like movement, which is able to engage and strategize simultaneously on all these fronts, the next best thing is to have this kind of diversity, even though some of the participants see their own particular form of struggle as the most important.

This raises, then, a lot of theoretical issues about how to deal with those contradictions, and particularly how to deal with the consciousness of people who are engaging in revolution. What Gramsci has contributed to the developing revolutionary movement is the notion of hegemony—that is, that capitalism relies on maintaining its rule not only by the stick, but also by intellectual domination. Sometimes we misunderstand this and imagine that hegemony comes about because the capitalists own the newspapers, the media, and bombard us with advertising and bad ideas. This is only partly true. To accept that belief is to believe that people are infinitely gullible and can be conned by anybody who puts on a strong publicity campaign. That isn't true. We're increasingly aware that the reactionary ideas that we're trying to change are also rational ideas which make a certain amount of provisional and relative sense within the experience of people's lives. Andrea Dworkin's recent book, Right Wing Women, deals with that question. From the point of view of the women's movement, the unequal divorce laws, for example, in providing alimony for women, represent a solidification, a codification in law of the inequality of women in society, and therefore must be overthrown. From the point of view of the right-wing women who do not have independent means of economic activity, the threat of being abandoned by their husbands opens up the threat of downward mobility. Therefore, the undermining of the sexist law is very threatening to them. And their fear of the E.R.A. does not mean simply that they're incorrigible, medieval reactionaries; it's that, under the condition of oppression, changing the oppression in one place might in fact accelerate it someplace else.

I have had the experience of a woman in my class, a Turkish woman, saying that her grandmother regards the veil not as a form of oppression but as protection against the surrounding sexism. In Puerto Rico, it is the direct experience of the unemployed that their food comes through food stamps, through payments by the United States; it is an indirect analysis that would lead them to see the source of their poverty in the United States domination. Therefore, when people support the New Progressive Party it's not out of stupidity, but rather out of a rational perception of their own experience—though a very limited experience. And so very often our task is not to argue and educate and say "You don't understand where it's at," but to show that their own perceptions are, in fact, rational but incomplete and in the long run lead to a dead end. This means starting out with an attitude of respect toward the people whose consciousness we're attempting to change.

Some of the people whose consciousness we're attempting to change are ourselves. It's very important, then, that we consider those of us who are participating in a revolutionary movement as also living in a political environment that's affecting our own thinking: we are also subject to many different kinds of pressures within our movement and on the outside. And the only thing that can sustain us in this political activity is the knowledge that within that political activity we are both contributing to the ongoing structure—struggle—and are ourselves growing as revolutionaries. If we are not able to grow as revolutionaries within our organizations, if participation is simply gritting our teeth out of a sense of duty, it cannot persist. We'll have burn-out, fluctuations, spasms of activity followed by periods of withdrawal. In the broad coalitions and solidarity movements that we're considering here today, there are several different ways in which this problem is dealt with. Some people have a base of political support outside the solidarity movement, in party organizations where they do most of their study and intellectual growth; and therefore it's possible for them to take on an assignment within a solidarity organization without doing very deep political analysis and without worrying too much about the process within the group or about their own growth. For large numbers of people, however, solidarity work is a major form of political activity, a place where they have the right to expect to grow as revolutionaries. That means to be able to analyze increasingly deeply the problems that they are dealing with at the level of direct political action.

Now this brings us again face to face with a contradiction: in order to be a very broad movement it is necessary to appeal to people's sentiments against military intervention in Central America on the basis of respect for national autonomy, on the basis of anti-militarism, on the basis of pacifism, on the basis of commitment to peace. It does not require that people have a complete analysis of the contradictions in the class structure of Nicaragua or El Salvador. Yet for us to be able to grow as revolutionaries working in collaboration with comrades in other countries, we increasingly demand to have that knowledge. To go without that knowledge would mean turning off part of our own brains in the belief that this will attract people. Now, I believe that liberal organizations engaging in solidarity activity are very important: they can reach larger groups of people on the basis of less threatening ideas. Revolutionary groups engaged in solidarity work are also important. They have the capacity to stick through the long haul, whereas groups that engage in solidarity on a more superficial basis tend to be more sporadic. If the goal is support for a country that's being oppressed, if humanitarian considerations alone are the motivation, then it follows logically that we devote our efforts to those places where the abuses of people are the most extreme.

And so we have the phenomenon of people starting political life in the support groups for Chile, then moving on to Nicaragua, jumping in to support the Salvadorans, briefly having a fling at Grenada support. What happens then is that the solidarity groups enter into a kind of competition of "Where is the pressure worse?" "Where is it more horrible?" and the fact is that we engaged in Puerto Rico solidarity work are going to lose in such a competition.

Puerto Rico is a country in which there is widespread political oppression but not police terror. Puerto Rico is a place where there is poverty but not mass starvation. Puerto Rico is a place where there is colonial oppression along with prosperity in the subordinate middle class. So from the pure gut feeling that if you go to a colony you expect to see people starving in the streets, somebody going there would come back shocked: Puerto Rico is not what we were told colonialism is, it's more complex. In order to sustain solidarity with Puerto Rico, then, it's essential for people to understand colonialism at a deeper level than the poverty, the police oppression, the arrests, the assassinations.

I think this is a strength in the Puerto Rico solidarity movement. It means that our own work absolutely requires having a perspective on a Caribbean-wide basis and an in-depth analysis of the dynamics of colonialism.

Now, I raised the question of building unity on the basis of diversity. At the present time, this is being developed most, I think, by the women's movement-- in the initiatives being taken by people like Bernice Reagan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Rosario Morales, Ellie Bolkin. What they've been doing, first of all, is saying that racism and sexism and the other ideologies of capitalism penetrate into everybody's consciousness. To combat racism in our movements it is not sufficient to denounce it. It's not sufficient to demonstrate that racism is engendered by imperialist oppression and is an off-spring of slavery; it's not sufficient to condemn somebody who expresses himself or herself in a racist or sexist way within our movement. It is also necessary to explore very deeply how racism and sexism operate in our own consciousness and practice. The experiments being carried out by Ricky Sherover-Marcuse organizing workshops for people to confront their own racism and anti-Semitism, the conferences of Black and Jewish women, the writings of people around this are all revealing a great deal of complexity and importance--first of all recognizing that, even though everybody is not the direct target of the oppression, everybody in the U.S. receives exploitative ideologies and absorbs parts of them. Some of the racism is internalized within peoples' consciousness and allies in the groups who are not the target of that repression are very important in the struggle for overcoming it. So it's not a question of all of us joining hands together against racism, but rather of each of us having a unique set of experiences to contribute to the struggle agains racism--a question, therefore of our making use of our own experiences rather than feeling embarrassed if we are not the target population.

So I would think that white people do have an important role in the struggle against racism, both in white and in Black consciousness. And, similarly, that non-Jews have an important part to play in helping Jews to take on the struggle against anti-Semitism in their own lives; that non-Jews also have perhaps a special role in helping the Jewish community meet with our Palestinian comrades, and overcome the mutual chauvinisms that have been engendered by colonialism.

The recognition of diversity within unity has some other facets as well. When we meet from different countries, we come from very different kinds of experiences. In the United States and in some of the West European countries the Left has not been able to make a bid for power. In a certain sense, therefore, our own development has stagnated. We are not in the position to carry into practice a lot of the theoretical questions that we've been examining. But, for the same reason, we've also been in a position to elaborate certain theoretical concerns that tend to be placed on a back burner in the course of a revolutionary upheaval. This, I think, is the reason that during the 1930s the most vital and creative Marxist work within the Communist movement was being done in Britain, a country where the Communist movement was far too weak to make a bid for power, or take on the responsibilities of leadership. They were strong enough, however, that they were allowed to function publicly, without the repression that we had in the United States.

In some of my own work in the science international movement we recognize that when scientists from the United States and Nicaragua meet around solidarity in science, we can avoid two kinds of errors. One kind of error would be for us in the United States to say,"We have an advanced science. We can come down and tell you how science ought to function." The opposite error is to say,"Well, it's your revolution; tell us what to do." The integration of this is to recognize that both parts of the collaboration have our sources of strength and weakness built into our historical experience. As North American scientists, we have the benefits of the wealth ripped off from the whole world which makes it possible to develop our own science. We therefore have the freedom to examine the long term, to examine indirect effects, to be critical of that science seen as an oppressive force in all our lives. Our comrades in Nicaragua, seeing Western science from a distance, recognizing its technical achievements as something they've been deprived of, would tend, I think, to be less critical of that science. While those who are affluent tend to be impatient with what they would regard as mere material goals, our comrades from Nicaragua are overwhelmed by the sense of urgency for meeting peoples' needs in the present, for producing. They are, therefore, perhaps more apt to transfer technologies which might be applicable and to postpone long-range issues.

Similarly, the women's movement in a revolutionary society starts out with the emergency question of mobilizing women to support the revolution and blocking the attempts of the counterrevolution to organize them the way it has tried to do in Chile. In the United States, the women's movement has been able to raise issues that would be thought of as a luxury in some other countries. Questions of family relations and of sexuality, which are in fact very important for the development of a women's movement on a world scale, simply have not been the focus of attention in countries that are engaged in desperate life and death struggles, where there's been a fear of divisiveness once the issues of the women's movement are raised. So, again, the North American movement is able to contribute ideas and theoretical achievements from its own experience and have them checked and countered and criticized by the experiences of the movements in Puerto Rico, in Central America.

Our argument, then, is that the basis of solidarity is not simply that we have a common enemy and a common goal, but also that we have very different perceptions; that these different perceptions are all rational; and that the confrontation of our differences in experience and understanding creates the possibility of a Marxism that's much more creative than one which binds us within the particularities of our own lives. We should build on those differences while maintaining an awareness of where they come from—both where our strengths are and where our typical kinds of blindnesses will lie.

When we look around for allies, I think it's important to recognize that alliances are formed not between classes but between political organizations. And when we try to define the work of the solidarity movement, for example, as alliance with the Puerto Rican working class, or when a radical group of students says that they are allying with the workers of the United States, that's not really true. When it comes down to it, we're not allying with all the workers; we're not allying with all the unions, even though these are class organizations.

The truth, I think, is that we seek our alliances in the working class because of our analysis of society; we seek our alliances among people from countries oppressed by colonialism, but that's where we seek political allies. It's really a fiction which says that the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee is allied with all of the Puerto Rican people in all their political demands. That's not true. We've made political judgements already. We are allied with the struggle for emancipation; and we seek allies with the struggle for emancipation; and we seek allies on the basis of common understanding and, in varying degrees, common programs even as we are also allied—in a different way--with some whom we disagree with on questions of tactics but recognize as part of a common struggle.

So there are many different kinds of alliances. But alliance is based on the recognition that it is and alliance among revolutionaries engaged, in the long run, in a common world battle and, in the short run, mostly in battles within our own countries which at various times can become highly coordinated. The forms of alliance will be very different, and we should not bind ourselves to the notion that working together means having a single organization, or a common program, or anything else.

During the very creative period of the upsurge of the Puerto Rico independence movement it was recognized that one of the most powerful things we were able to accomplish was the setting of a political agenda for other groups who would normally be horrified at the idea of following our leadership. It was the independence movement that placed on the agenda the demand for a Puerto Rican bishop; it was then the Catholic rank and file, independentistas or not, who carried that struggle through to completion. There have been many examples of this kind.

So when we talk about moving people are raising questions, we don't necessarily mean getting people to follow us. This sheds some light on the problem I raised previously: What about frightening off the moderates? Part of the terror of a Left movement is in being isolated. Therefore we create images of the moderates, or the middle, or the uncommitted whom we are trying to attract. The real experience has been twofold: on the one hand, the appearance of a radical movement demands that seem extreme does frighten moderate elements. In response to that fright they can move in opposite directions. One thing that the freedom rides did—the early days of the civil rights movement in the South--was to frighten the Southern moderates into recognizing that it was no longer possible to maintain segregated schools. This does not mean that they were driven into alliances with the Ku Klux Klan--what it meant was that they even organized committees for the saving of our schools. They said, "Segregation is better than integration, but integration is better than no schools." What happened then was that a strong civil-rights movement pushed the moderate elements, who would certainly not have joined SNCC or CORE, into movements in the direction of an agenda that we set.

Similarly, during the anti-war movement when we were told, "Don't rock the boat or you'll frighten away the moderate elements"--when the Viet Cong flags began appearing on the streets of the United States—the liberals began freaking out and saying, "This must be the wrong war. It's tearing our country apart." So we did not go out and organize the liberals with our slogans, but we set them in motion.

What I'm arguing here, therefore, is a more dialectical view of political practice, in which the commonsense rule of thumb--that every time you raise a question, you lose a vote--is more appropriate to the ward captain than to the revolutionary. We have to have a diversity of forms which allows, on the one hand, for people to take the most minimal steps of thinking that maybe the President isn't right, and also for those people who suddenly see "I don't have to live this way." Both are absolutely necessary for a movement. We have to respect these different paths and create space for them.

It is also possible within the Left to create forms of unity without agreeing on everything by recognizing a division of labor. If we called together all of the political groups in New York City, gathered them in a room and said, "Let's organize a school for Marxist education," the meeting would end at 4 o'clock in the morning with exhaustion, and there would be no school. Instead, a group established the Marxist School in New York without being subject to any kind of coalition program, and created an environment in which people from different groups can meet; this forced the level of discussion to rise by the ground rules that evolved within the school. It created a system, then, in which most other Left groups would not feel the obligation of setting up their own school. Likewise, if a group like Pensamiento Critico is publishing a journal, it can be recognized by the whole Puerto Rican Left as representing not only the political views of the collective, but also representing enough of the concerns of the broader Left so that every little organization does not have to establish a theoretical journal but rather can have access to this one.

This means that if one group decides that it's going to organize a march on Washington to raise demands against military intervention but hasn't raised all the points in our own program, at the very least we don't set up our own march on Washington for the same day. At most, we rally our own forces to support them, without taking on the responsibility of having a whole coalition for a march. Unity has to be developed at a lot of different levels, recognizing that we're coming from different places, that we have very different positive functions to perform. A place where we can meet to discuss theory without fear of having to reach a common program—without the fear, therefore that we're going to be tricked into adopting something we don't want--is a prerequisite for developing the kind of unity we need.

In the case, finally, of the revival of a strong Puerto Rico solidarity movement, we recognize that its greatest strength was during the period when the Puerto Rican struggle was most visible in Puerto Rico, when there was close coordination between solidarity work and the organized Puerto Rican community within New York and the rest of the United States. The revival of the solidarity movement, I think, will depend first of all on an understanding of where Puerto Rico fits into the Caribbean-wide solidarity struggle; on a recognition that, in a way, the unique features of Puerto Rican capitalist colonialism caricatures the future that capitalism has in store for all of us. It's not simply a question of colonialism in Puerto Rico--the kind of overdeveloped underdevelopment that gives you both the diseases of development and the diseases of backwardness. The Puerto Rican experience is vital for our understanding of capitalism as a whole, as well as of colonialism. Puerto Rico represents one of the crucial fronts for United States penetration in Latin America. The exposé of U.S. colonialism is important in the consciousness-raising of the whole world about the nature of the United States. It's something, therefore, that is part of our political commitment in the long run and not simply a reaction to the assassinations at Cerro Maravilla or the military maneuvers at Vieques.

On that basis—not competing with other solidarity movements but integration with them—I think the Puerto Rico solidarity movement has possibilities of going through a cycle of expanded activity, along with greatly deepening its understanding and finding new ways of international solidarity. This is the consequence of a large population who have already experienced both the United States and Puerto Rico, and therefore have the perspective of carrying on on many political fronts.

I would like to se some these issues touched upon when we start discussing particular areas of the world, and particular phases of struggle. And my fundamental plea—and also my thanks to the New York Marxist School for their part in organizing this conference--is that a theory of political practice is absolutely essential: that without it we are guided simply by the folklore of machine politics of our country and by traditional gut reactions. When theory is related to political practice, we can break down the isolation of theoretical and practical work, which has been one of the major diseases of the North American Left.

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The following are remarks from the floor by Richard Levins during the closing session of the seminar which address the issues raised during the day.

I'd like to touch on, first of all, the question of the links among the various solidarity struggles. We've heard discussion on the Middle East, Puerto Rico, Central America and the Caribbean, and they're connected in various ways. Some of it has already been pointed out: that Puerto Rico has been used as a springboard for intervention in Central America. Furthermore, if there are Puerto Rican troops, National Guard, stationed in Central America, we can expect that if an attempt is made to use them, we will see what happened when the Puerto Rican National Guard was sent to Panama in the past that the Puerto Rican soldiers refused to fire on the Panamanians. So the sending of troops to Honduras, which is a militarist-imperialist act, is also creating the potential of a radicalizing experience withing Puerto Rico. And the struggle against intervention in Central America is important for the Puerto Rican movement.

The Middle East comes through in several ways. First of all, the Israeli government has been acting increasingly as an intermediary for the United States, not only in Africa but also now in Central America—Israeli military advisors, Israeli arms. And Israeli corporations have moved into Puerto Rican agriculture. Now, in order for us to be able to develop a very strong movement against imperialist activities in Central America, one important tactical goal is to remobilize the Jewish masses for anti-imperialist struggle. That has been undercut; in general, there's been a drift to the right under the influence of Zionism. A prerequisite for the remobilization of the Jewish people is a principled stand on Palestinian rights that includes a struggle against anti-semitism. That will then feed into our struggles for liberation in Central America--as well as the struggles in this country, where my people have always played a very active part until the domination of the reactionaries under the dual impact of racism and Zionism.

There's this whole pattern of connections that leads us to see the struggles as really part of the same thing, not simply as our having a common enemy, but feeding back and forth in all kinds of criss-crossing ways.

Also, I'd like to touch on what Arnoldo was saying. After Arnoldo spoke there was an uneasy silence. My interpretation of that was that what he was projecting was something scary. Because, with all of the prestige of the movement from El Salvador, he seemed to be saying, "Go back, go out into a frightening and unknown territory to do your work." Or, perhaps even more frightening, "Return to that terrible community that you've struggled hard to escape from to do the organizing." It is scary. And it carries with it some principled political judgements as well that cater to the biases of people we should work with. Does it mean that we're writing off the Left as insignificant because we number only in the thousands or tens of thousands and not millions? Does it mean that we abandon the working class in order to chase after some vague middle elements? Does it mean that we discard our historical materialism in order to appeal to people on a superficial basis? Is it dishonest to approach people with half of our analysis? Is it drowning our own philosophy in a sea of liberal pap?

I believe that it could be done that way. That it could be done in an opportunist way. This is a danger in the American Left because we've not learned how to deal with the contradiction between the need for breadth and the need for depth. And therefore we've often tended to divide between those insisting on retaining the deep analysis and those insisting on reaching what is called the "real world." And the real world in the United States id defined as any place other than where you happen to be. We tell students, "Go out into the real world," even though there are 12 million students and education is one of the biggest industries. We tell New Yorkers, "Go out into the real world," even though it's a city of 10 million people who are struggling and so on. The "real world" is a devise for dismissing our own efforts.

I think, however, we can avoid this being done in an opportunist way if we guarantee both sides of the contradiction. I have some propositions about that. First of all, we must recognize that the core of any solidarity movement is a committed revolutionary Left in this country, no matter how small, entering into alliance with revolutionaries elsewhere. That's a precious core and its concerns are real concerns. There is no way we can justify dismissing that Left, calling it ultra-Leftist to be worried about the concerns of the Left when there is a bigger world out there. They're absolutely essential and absolutely not enough.

Second, we must recognize that the working class is part of the masses. They're not the vague middle element; there's still a working class to be won over to this anti-imperialist struggle. So it's not such an alien political project as it might sound like. Third, it is not cheating on them intellectually when we link up their own oppressions to struggles in the rest of the world. That's a Marxist education even if it isn't labeled as such and underlined. What we are showing is that their own suffering is not unique to them. And also that there's a common ground with others and that people can be moved to action out of a combination of understanding their own needs and understanding the needs of others. It's that combination of motivation which is critical for sending people into movements.

If our analysis of capitalism is correct--as a world system responsible, in one way or another, for pretty much all the suffering in the world today--then it means that everybody in this country, pretty much, has a good reason for opposing American intervention in Central America. Some of them also have good reason for supporting that intervention. Our task, therefore, becomes to find the relationship between the interests that support and the interests that oppose, and to strengthen those aspects that would be opposed to the intervention. Here we have the theoretical challenge arising from the notions of hegemony: How does capitalism dominate the thinking of this particular sector or that particular sector? In what ways do they have interests in opposing the intervention and how can we strengthen that? And this will be different for every group. I can cite only a few brief examples in relation to my own work among scientists. Scientists who are not especially concerned about Central America or about imperialism will often be concerned about the environment, concerned about the devastation that militarism is causing in Puerto Rico, in Vietnam, in Central America. Health workers going to Central America discover, "Here I've been breaking my ass trying to get a community clinic established in Roxbury, and to have them all over the place, even in a country that' being besieged, even in the liberated areas of the bombardment--how come we can't do it?" So we get people volunteering to serve in medical capacities, in scientific capacities. There are people who want to send aid to Nicaragua, scientific aid, not because the support the revolution but because they're pissed that Reagan doesn't want us to. And they feel science is international; we ought to share the knowledge. After all, it was built from the rip-offs of people all over the world. Lawyers might realize that militarization and imperialism results in illegal practices, in bypassing the constitution, in secrecy and oppression at home. So for every single group, whether it corresponds to their class interests or not, there are reasons why they should oppose the war, including those who have more opportunist reasons, who feel the system is working for them and they don't want it polarized, don't want it torn apart by demonstrations. So that our task is to guarantee that is is polarized with the threat of intervention.

Getting those people to move, then, doesn't necessarily mean convincing them to join us, but rather, creating a new spectrum of self-interest and of understanding that will get them to move in one way or another. Even if they think that by moving they can save their position in Congress or simply don't want to lose the electorate—there are thousands of reasons why. So our theoretical task is to understand the structure of ideas of all these people and see how we could intervene, with those forces we do have, to move them further. Placed in this way, I think the challenge that Arnoldo raised does not mean the abandonment, reformism, or opportunism that I think some people feared, but is instead the creative development of our movement as a whole.