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Lou Paulsen wrote:
Again, what is the point? What diseases or delusions in the working class
and the progressive movement are we supposed to be opposing here? Gadhafi
and Kim have not set up internationals. We do not run into their followers
everywhere. But on the contrary, there are millions of workers who support
imperialist war against them, while believing that the US armed forces are a
"global force for good"* against their evil, and many in the progressive
movement who are truly equivocal about it. Those people are our
responsibility to engage with our press.
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Kind of misses the point comrade, because in reality WWP and similar
organizations do much more that simply oppose imperialist war, and the
belief that the armed forces of capitalist countries can be a "global force
for good."
There is, I believe, an actual record of endorsement, of uncritical support
[and by criticism I mean class-based, material critique of the functioning
of the "nationalist" regime, so that uncritical support involves obscuring
the class lines within the "national" domain] for Qaddafi-type regimes.
And this creates the illusion that somehow such regimes represent a viable
option, a viable opposition to capitalism, exploitation-- that
"anti-imperialism" actually represents a vector for class struggle.
It also creates the illusion that oppositions to Qaddafi-type regimes can
somehow be identified as, and separated into, from the getgo, "good"
opposition [i.e. not containing "liberal," pro-capitalist,
foreign-intervention friendly], or "bad" opposition, containing all those,
and more elements.
That's not how social struggle develops. That isn't how it develops in
Iran, Libya, Syria, etc. just as it wasn't the way it developed in Poland,
the former DDR, Romania etc.
What's missing above all in this "anti-imperialist" cover is economic
analysis; analysis of the social relations of production in these economies;
the relations that compel a Qaddafi, or a Jaruzelski, to act as they do.
If I might be so rude to refer back to an earlier exchange, in discussing
the situation in Poland, you pointed out how WWP "appealed" to the Polish
government to renounce the debt when in fact that government had committed
itself to servicing that debt at the expense of the workers in general, and
the Polish miners in particular.
The Polish miners did more than appeal. They struck and seized those mines.
Did WWP support those strikes? Does a workers' press have an obligation to
support workers' actions taken against a "anti-imperialist" or "national"
state/economy that is in fact embedded in imperialism and servicing the
demands of capital?
Simple question: did you support the strikes and seizures of the mines by
the Polish workers?
The illusion being sown is that the workers in say a Poland or even a Libya
or Syria cannot dare risk opposition to the terms of exploitation because
they might lose something more than their chains.... which of course
abandons the field of opposition exactly to those regressive forces that are
generated, reproduced by "national" regimes.
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