5 Key Takeaways from The Purity Fetish. By: Thomas Riggins

This is a transcript from Tom's presentation at the book launch of Carlos Garrido's The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, which you may purchase HERE.
Transcription by Emily Doringer 

​Noah Khrachvik: Awesome, our first speaker is Thomas Riggins. Thomas is a retired philosophy teacher from NYU, the New School for Social Research and others. He received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1983 and he’s the Consulting Editor for the Midwestern Marx Institute. He’s been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960’s, when he was Chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League at Florida State University. And he also worked for CORE in voter registration in North Florida. He’s written for many online publications like People’s World and Political Affairs, where he was an Associate Editor. He also served on the Board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was President of the Corliss Lamont Chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. He’s the author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism and Eurocommunism: A Critical Reading of Santiago Carrillo and Eurocommunist Revisionism. Here’s Thomas…
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Thomas Riggins: Well, I’m going to introduce this book in the spirit of our comrades from the Middle Flowery Kingdom. I have the 5 Takeaways that we need to have from this book. I should reformulate that as the Middle Flowery People’s Republic. The 5 Takeaways from The Purity Fetish. These are the five most important things I think that you’ll have to remember:

1. One is, we have to take away the idea that those Marxists who refuse to accept the reality of states and peoples who are struggling to institute socialism, to build Marxism in their countries, that have faced failures and have made mistakes; that this does not mean that they are supposed to be rejected and denounced as traitors to Marxism because they’re not living completely according to some ideal idea of what Marxism and socialism is supposed to look like. The real world is very different from the ideal world, as we learned from reading Hegel. It’s one thing to say, “all men are created equal”---it takes a Civil War to make it begin to happen.
2. The second takeaway is those people who dismiss certain elements of the working class in this country--especially in this country, but in other countries too--because they are backwards in their thinking, reactionary in their thinking, they have racist ideas, whatever the problems are that make these people hostile to us or hostile to progressivism. Instead of blaming them we should remember it’s the system that’s creating these people and our job is to educate them and to try to free them from the shackles that have been put on them by the capitalist system, instead of denouncing them as deplorables and useless and trying to ignore them. That’s the second thing that Carlos—one of the five things that Carlos puts forth in that book. That’s the second takeaway I think we have to make.
3. The third takeaway we have to do is fight back against dumping on China from the West. This seems to be something that is incorrigible in the press now because of the cold war starting with China again. Academic leftists and the petty bourgeoisie leftist that claim to be Marxists want to attack China, call China capitalist because it goes through the usual forms to try to improve the living standards of their people. We all know the struggles are going on in China, and so we have to fight back against—it’s our job to explain to people the reality of what the Chinese struggle is. We must at least be able to explain what’s going on there and why we should support the Chinese and support the Chinese government in its efforts to increase the living standards not only of the Chinese, but to bring about a more peaceful world to live in. And to bring about real foreign aid to the peoples of Africa and South America, instead of the phony type of foreign aid the United States insists on giving, that requires them to vote the way we tell them to in the United Nations.
4. The fourth takeaway is the people who ignore the progressive history of the United States. The people who want to dump--Lincoln statues are being tossed away now, in some ultra left groups. It’s true that our country has a checkered past with the Indian removals and with racism and with slavery. Nevertheless there were people back in those days that fought against that even though they didn’t have the advanced positions of the 21st century, they knew slavery was wrong, they tried to do something to eliminate slavery. They may have been caught up in the system themselves because they were economically in the plantation system. So, but we have to remember that--just to try to dump on all American progressive history because of the weaknesses of the past is alienating from people, regular Americans today who have some feeling of patriotic pride in their country. It’s true the Communist Manifesto says the working people “have no country.” We can’t forget that. We are actually internationalists. But we can tell them we do have a country. You know, it’s not as great as Trump cracks it up to be. But it’s not as bad as people who think we’re all colonial settlers or something and we have to give everything back to the original inhabitants. Okay that’s the fourth thing.
5. And the last thing is the left is soft on the anti-imperialism front. There’s too many people on the left who are also flying Ukrainian flags in their backyard or porches. We have to remember that any struggle against the major enemy of the worlds people—which is U.S. imperialism, by far the most bloodthirsty killing machine since World War II, must be supported. Just the number of Vietnamese they killed and the number of Koreans that were bombed out, far exceed anything any left group or any left country has done as a communist country or a socialist country, or even as a bourgeois country. I’m talking about Russia, which is lost its communism but nevertheless plays a progressive role against U.S. imperialism. And that’s the common enemy of humanity right now. And they should be getting—at least we should be supporting them, if not outright cheering—we should at least be supporting their right to defend themselves from NATO and the use of other countries like Ukraine as puppets and proxy wars against them. If we read Carlos’s book we can see the “purity fetish” of those Marxist, or people that claim to be Marxist, who in the name of trying to be true Marxists, don’t accept any of those five takeaways that I’ve put out. We can understand what these people, whatever their good intentions, are. We on the left and in the communist party at least have a distinction between objective and subjective enemies. And they may be subjectively communists and friends, but they are objectively helping U.S. imperialism.  And I think reading Carlos’s book will make anybody who is not aware of that, aware of that. This book is a big advance in the struggle here in the United States. 

FULL BOOK LAUNCH: