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On Apr 8, 2011, at 6:40 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote: > > > On 4/8/11 6:33 PM, Lou Paulsen wrote: >> Okay, I must have missed the party document where it says "we don't >> care about political freedom in the Arab world." > > Sorry, I must have missed all those articles in Workers World newspaper going > back two decades all about what was happening in Libya > > 1. Torture > 2. Mass killing of prisoners > 3. (etc) > > Unless of course you do care about such abuses but refrain from writing about > them for fear that you would be confused with Joanne Landy and Michael Berube. > > ______________________________ Well, Libya is not the whole Arab world. We have made our views clear about opposing abuses particularly in those parts of the Arab world where the oppressors have been the proxies of US imperialism. That may not strike you as an adequate argument, so let me go farther. The founders of our party came out of a setting where it was commonplace to set aside big chunks of the newspaper to condemn abuses in the "Stalinist" countries in such language that would never give anyone the impression that there was any content there to defend. We have been distinguishing ourselves from that tradition for sixty years now. The purpose of our newspaper and website is primarily to educate and arouse the workers and oppressed in the US about the crimes of the US ruling class. It is not to publish everything we care about in the world and call upon the workers in every particular country to rise up and deal with their situation according to our expertise. I don't think this is outside the Leninist tradition. I would bet that you could find a whole host of abuses by governments, capitalists, rulers and tyrants around the world in the period, say, of 1903-1917, which never got any mention in the Bolshevik press, not because they didn't care about them, but because they were writing mainly about Russia and its empire. Now, if you care about some bad thing, you want to do something about its cause. I won't attempt to prove to you without evidence that we care about the abuses that have taken place in Libya. But what about the causal chain? Who is responsible? Just Gadhafi and his personal impulses? In my view, the buck stops with us here in the US. We have not only not overthrown our imperialists, we have let our working class get weak, uneducated, and backward. This has contributed to the historical period we are in, in which every anti-imperialist force, not to say socialist force, in the Arab world has been deprived of support, directly targeted and in many cases physically destroyed. The incentive structure is all in the direction of collaboration and authoritarian rule. Until we turn our own situation around here, innumerable deaths and unmeasurable crimes are going to take place. So how are we actually going to most effectively use our resources to bring more freedom to the Arab world? By doing our revolutionary, anti-imperialist job? Or by using some of our resources to make sure that our readers are aware of abuses in Libya, which they can't do anything about except, arguably, support humanitarian imperialist war? Lou Paulsen ________________________________________________ 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
