******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
On 5/6/15 4:48 PM, Manuel Barrera via Marxism wrote:
So, because Tsipiras and Syriza are working mightily against
austerity, it is ok for them to issue a joint statement with Egyptian
dictator and join the "war on terrorism" in the Mediterranean?
http://secure-web.cisco.com/1looxgbWb-GPBklqaAbqOFPxe-w1QKTWnzhC_6UCLn8owm_2-nyQOt6kpzkRXw-LlPxLfxnDWQ_1kIOjg34QTepKEL9tZCQQEK4wZFXFivuSZPf3SbDPZsezlFjkfHJGUDFCsx_jI8e1jnnL1ijoFio7tXT09acdZhnB9U25SQbApPSXwryFcoxjUoc8fwKKZtxQXmJ11sD0f4wEz6_iWeIiTm1-hpszj6a19vS8B6UO_-3fomhrjoDdUyqT7ekr9epU8TRX10XQTkjo0kRt1hi_QW5JiX9z1FcIq2Y_iqVRpuafr0jRjgqEHjZvBCDMz/http%3A%2F%2Flouisproyect.org%2F2015%2F01%2F30%2Fagainst-manichaeism%2F
For the past few years, and largely as a result of the wars in the
Middle East and the Ukraine, there has been a tendency to view everybody
fighting as proxies of Washington or Moscow. For most of the left, this
means taking a position on those fighting based on where they stand in
relationship to the rival powers. Like a chess game in which the black
pieces are pure evil and the white pure good, geopolitics matters much
more than the individual pieces. If a pawn is forced to align itself
with the West, it matters little whether its cause is just.
Ironically, Manichaeism was born in Persia, a country seen by most of
the left as certainly pale in hue and pure as the driven snow. After
all, how could a country be bad if it is hated so much by the USA? This,
of course, is the same logic that drove so many new leftists into Maoist
sects in the 60s and 70s. If Mao was such a universally despised figure,
didn’t it make sense to follow Bob Avakian or Mike Klonsky? For some,
Nixon’s trip to China complicated things to the point that these sects
began to disintegrate in the 1980s.
Manicheanism got its name from its founder—Mani. Mani is not a name like
Louis but an honorific like “Sri” or “Bey”. Scholars view the religion
as an offshoot of Gnosticism, a religion that fascinated me when I was a
religion major at Bard. For the Gnostics, the world was divided between
good and evil. You tended to dwell in the evil until you learned the
truth about the world’s dualism. You can easily understand how
Gnosticism was traceable back to Neo-Platonism, a philosophical cult and
semi-religion that was inspired by Plato’s notion that philosophical
reflections by philosopher-kings was a precondition for understanding
the world. If you trace back geopolitical/chess game thinking to its
Platonic roots, you can see how little has changed. Instead of reading
Plato’s Republic, the key to enlightenment is Robert Parry’s
ConsortiumNews or WSWS.org
All this came to mind nearly hours after it was announced that Syriza
had formed a government in a bloc with ANEL, a small ultraright party
that disagreed on all issues with Syriza except the need to fight
against austerity. Facebook lit up with revelations on its head guy who
came across as a typical Alex Jones interviewee. Kevin Ovenden, a
staunch supporter of Syriza and someone prone to geopolitical ways of
thinking, was candid about ANEL’s leader:
Kammenos is a kooky conspiracy theorist (with added anti-semitism to
boot). For example, he maintained that the vapour trails left by
passenger jets were in fact chemtrails the kind left by low-lying
crop-spraying and comprised a soporific drug which had made the Greek
people go along with a new German occupation of their country.
The immediate reaction of those upset with such an alliance was to say,
“ah-ha, this is what you could have expected all along—Syriza is moving
to the right”. Only a day later, things quieted down about the ANEL bloc
when Tsipras and his top cabinet appointees showed a flinty
determination to tell Germany to take its austerity and shove it up its ass.
It was obvious to me at this point that some people were anxious to
indict Syriza on the same basis as the Maidan activists or the FSA were
condemned but from the opposite side of the coin. If Tsipras can unite
with such a slug, that’s all you need to know. It was the same kind of
logic that allows so many on the left to take Putin’s side because
Victoria Nuland’s phone call to the American ambassador to Ukraine
revealed Washington’s support for Maidan. What Maidan protesters were
for hardly mattered. In fact, the whole mission of the Manichean left
became one of dredging up every piece of evidence that would condemn
Maidan after the fashion of a district attorney.
In the latest development, the same people ready to throw Maidan under
the bus are now all the more ready to back Syriza because it appears to
coincide with their own support for the Kremlin. Tsipras has declared
that he opposes sanctions against Russia over its intervention in the
Ukraine and his foreign minister Nikos Kotzias is apparently a colleague
of Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist philosopher of Novorossia, the
Kremlin’s bid to reconstitute Katherine the Great’s Empire.
I have a totally different take on ANEL, Dugin and any other litmus test
applied to Syriza outside of its stance on the all-important question of
austerity. If Greece moves forward and successfully beats back the
austerity regime imposed by Western European elites, it will encourage
mass movements everywhere, including Russia. Russia, like Greece, is run
by oligarchs who enjoy obscene incomes while ordinary people’s income
stagnate. Furthermore, as oil revenues decline Russia’s social divide
will become more acute. Putin was able to draw a “silent majority” to
his side because incomes were rising. People put up with corruption
because it did not necessarily affect them directly.
If you step back and look at all the protests and civil wars taking
place around the world, they are driven by the same causes whether they
line up on Washington or Moscow’s side of the ledger book. Crony
capitalism is the target even if people marching in the streets don’t
have an analysis of capitalism. Every successful hammer blow against a
Bashar al-Assad or a Greek billionaire hiding his money in a Swiss bank
will flow like streams into an ocean of resistance that will make the
radical movement of the 1930s or 60s look pale by comparison. Our role
as socialists is to encourage rebellion against the malefactors of great
wealth, whether they are on the black or white side of the chessboard.
If any confirmation was necessary of the inadvisability of applying a
litmus test to Syriza based on such considerations, I refer you to a
column by James Bloodworth that appears in today’s Independent.
Bloodworth, a long-time opponent of the Bolivarian revolution and Bashar
al-Assad, likes to speak in the name of the left but is basically a
liberal, not to speak of his shoddy journalism that plays fast and loose
with Venezuelan statistics.
Never one for understatement, Bloodworth titles his hatchet job:
“Syriza’s victory in Greece might not be the radical revolution you were
hoping for. The party has got its head nestled in the lap of the
Kremlin, but apparently that’s fine.”
He claims that Syriza and ANEL are “light years” apart based on
questions such as immigration as if sheer opportunism rather than
agreement on the need to resist austerity made their alliance possible.
It would seem that Syriza falls short of Bloodworth’s lofty standards
since its opposition to the EU bosses only looks leftist in a context of
politics shifting so far to the right.
Put another way, it would be a mistake to assume that the people of
Greece shifted decisively to the left in electing Syriza. In reality
economic orthodoxy has moved so far to the right that an unwillingness
to let a generation of young Greeks wither on the vine is now considered
utopian.
This is a distinction without a difference. The election was not a
referendum on the wisdom of the labor theory of value. It was not about
ideology but about survival. With a suicide epidemic based on despair,
people were voting for a party that offered an alternative to austerity.
For our young pundit, this is not good enough apparently.
Applying a litmus test of Ukraine on Syriza, Bloodworth has a hissy fit
over the fact that people on the left, including me, are not ready to
cast it down to hell:
Enough to quicken the pulse of any far-right ideologue, you would
think. Only this isn’t the far-right but the radical left, the living
embodiment of the “hope” that is supposed to inspire Europe’s genuinely
beleaguered poor.
He makes sure to get in a dig about Venezuela and the new pope:
This is why you will see left-wingers board charter flights to Caracas
and laud the Venezuelan regime while journalists are locked up and
student protesters watercannoned. It’s why the reactionary Vatican is
praised as a vessel of progressive thought for mouthing platitudes about
“the poor”.
What a cheap smear. The fact that the pope is going around the world
blasting economic inequality leaves him cold. What else is the pope
supposed to do except give speeches? Throw Molotov cocktails like the
lilywhite Venezuelan student protesters?
The article concludes with a Hitchensesque anti-Communist rant that
makes you wonder how the people running Jacobin would have ever given
him a bully pulpit:
And it’s why the spectre of 20th century Communism still casts a long
shadow over Syriza and their admirers in Britain. So long as you
nationalise a few things and spout some anti-colonialist rhetoric,
you’re a made man on the left. If you’re in the omelette making business
there is after all no time to coddle the eggs.
Actually it is the specter of 21st century socialism that casts a shadow
over Syriza. What it is doing in Greece is far more important than how
it lines up on the Ukraine. Venezuela and Cuba are also on the right
side of history despite their mistakes on Syria. They are to be judged
on the stand they took on the class struggle within their borders.
States often make foreign policy choices based on exigency, going back
to the USSR’s decision to make deals with Mustafa Kemal at the very time
he had the leaders of the Turkish CP assassinated. Politics is a messy
business. For those who prefer Manichean simplicities, I recommend the
legions of the simpleminded led by James Bloodworth on one hand and
Robert Parry on the other. For the rest of us, it is useful to recall
what Lenin said about the Easter Rebellion of 1916:
On May 9, 1916, there appeared, in Berner Tagwacht, the organ of the
Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the
Irish rebellion entitled “Their Song is Over” and signed with the
initials K.R. [Karl Radek]. It described the Irish rebellion as being
nothing more nor less than a “putsch”, for, as the author argued, “the
Irish question was an agrarian one”, the peasants had been pacified by
reforms, and the nationalist movement remained only a “purely urban,
petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it
caused, had not much social backing…”
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by
small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary
outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie without all its
prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious
proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the
landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression,
etc.–to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army
lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another,
somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a
social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view
would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
