====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
On 2011-03-04, at 2:04 PM, Paddy Apling wrote: > > No doubt there are tribalists, monarchists, Islamic fundamentalists, and all > sorts of other "...ists" that we have never heard about, and cannot > understand, among the crowds opposing tyranny. But they are in ACTION > against tyranny !! > > NO revolution has ever - or WILL EVER HAPPEN - that only includes people who > have a rational understanding of the vast issues involved. These are simple > people - just like the people you pass in the street or in the shops when > you go to by your food. They are not political theorists like so many of us > on this list - they are just coming on to the streets because things have > just gone beyond what they can put up with any longer. They just know that > things have become INTOLERABLE and they want CHANGE !!! Most of them have > not the slightest idea what they mean by change - but they know they want > it. Had the once powerful international socialist movement not disappeared from the historical stage, can there be any doubt that its Libyan cadres would not now be at the forefront of the democratic struggle against a repressive regime which can no longer lay claim to any anti-imperialist credentials? Would the presence of bourgeois liberal democrats and Islamists in the Libyan and related Middle Eastern movements - or the declared support of imperialist nations for their liberal bourgeois leaders - have caused them to turn on these movements and join the autocratic regimes in bloodily repressing them? Would they be challenging the bourgeois democrats and Islamists for leadership of the more radically democratic Libyan masses - whose political objectives have an underlying social and incipiently revolutionary character - or would they be standing apart from their uprising as mainly inspired and directed by foreign imperialist and even "monarchist" (!) agents? Would the calls by its bourgeois liberal faction for foreign military assistance be enough in itself to justify its suppression? Obviously rhetorical questions on my part, but I'd be interested in the response to them by Nestor, Fred, Eli and others who have distanced themselves from the Libyan movement. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
