Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Getting back to the original impetus of the thread. First, please note, the title 'begs the question': that the US government has ever contemplated a withdrawal of any sort from Iraq. Not being privy to the goings-on of NSC meetings and the president's war cabinet, the best we can do is make analytic guesses. I would guess that the US sent troops into Iraq for permanent occupation because (1) short to mid term -- 5-10 years--it would help justify doubling and even tripling the federal defense spending and (2) the national security state is convinced it needs large permanent bases in the ME (the doctrine of 'rapid deployment' going to the wayside because everytime the US attempts to deploy rapidly it takes the forces about a year, and the military still has not got--and perhaps never will--airlift capacity to move its artillery and armor). I should think they would be happy to have three really large bases in Iraq like the ones they have in Japan, Okinawa, Germany and the UK. So a federal plan that breaks up Iraq is the most likely choice and perhaps always was if the US could not get a 'pacified' Iraq after removing Saddam's government. See Rumsfeld's ponderings below: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq Conduct an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases, noting they have already been reduced from 110 to 55. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007. Rumsfeld also listed a handful of below the line (less attractive) options that included continuing on the current path, moving a large fraction of all U.S. forces in Iraq into Baghdad, increasing U.S. forces substantially, setting a firm withdrawal date and pushing an aggressive federalism plan that would lead to three separate states — Sunni, Shia and Kurd. Sen. Biden of the pro-war Democratic Party has also pushed the 'aggressive federalism plan'. As I said in 2000 when I knew the Bushwa would take office: 5-10 years of hell for the Iraqi people, for sure. CJ
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
a bit off the topic: even though the US attemped conquest of Iraq is definitely a bad thing, maybe it's good for the left that the US is going to be mired there for a long time. On 12/3/06, CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Getting back to the original impetus of the thread. First, please note, the title 'begs the question': that the US government has ever contemplated a withdrawal of any sort from Iraq. Not being privy to the goings-on of NSC meetings and the president's war cabinet, the best we can do is make analytic guesses. I would guess that the US sent troops into Iraq for permanent occupation because (1) short to mid term -- 5-10 years--it would help justify doubling and even tripling the federal defense spending and (2) the national security state is convinced it needs large permanent bases in the ME (the doctrine of 'rapid deployment' going to the wayside because everytime the US attempts to deploy rapidly it takes the forces about a year, and the military still has not got--and perhaps never will--airlift capacity to move its artillery and armor). I should think they would be happy to have three really large bases in Iraq like the ones they have in Japan, Okinawa, Germany and the UK. So a federal plan that breaks up Iraq is the most likely choice and perhaps always was if the US could not get a 'pacified' Iraq after removing Saddam's government. See Rumsfeld's ponderings below: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061203/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq Conduct an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases, noting they have already been reduced from 110 to 55. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007. Rumsfeld also listed a handful of below the line (less attractive) options that included continuing on the current path, moving a large fraction of all U.S. forces in Iraq into Baghdad, increasing U.S. forces substantially, setting a firm withdrawal date and pushing an aggressive federalism plan that would lead to three separate states — Sunni, Shia and Kurd. Sen. Biden of the pro-war Democratic Party has also pushed the 'aggressive federalism plan'. As I said in 2000 when I knew the Bushwa would take office: 5-10 years of hell for the Iraqi people, for sure. CJ -- Jim Devine / Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -- Bertolt Brecht
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Jim Devine wrote: a bit off the topic: even though the US attemped conquest of Iraq is definitely a bad thing, maybe it's good for the left that the US is going to be mired there for a long time. We can only know the truth or falsity of this after the fact, looking back on the world from the perspective of 2050 or so (if there is still a 'world' then). But if we generalize it a bit probably we can see the possible truth of the specific and the certain truth of the generic here. U.S. imperialism is not going to go away on its own or peacefully; and it is going to be a (I think THE) main threat to humanity until it is destroyed. But that destruction will necessarily involve a whole sequence of mirings in this or that battle at home or abroad, AND every one of those mirings will involve immense destruction of human life. So we are going to have to continue both to hate and to exult in occasions of immense destruction of human life. Does anyone really believe we can get to heaven in a rocking chair? That question is a folk-version of what Engels had to say about force in history. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Mark Lause [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Got it. This not unsurprising fact actually echoes what happened in the origins of the civil rights movement. It wasn't the traditional Left but religions and some labor figures that mobilized the numbers that morally confronted and defeated segregation. However, my point was that no movement seems to have come out of last spring's mobilizations. I say seems because the mobilizations amounted to very little in Cincinnati. From my perspective on it, this reflected the dominance of religious leaders eager to make a moral point but not to mobilize and empower the wider community. I've honestly not heard about it, if the mobilizations last spring sparked something elsewhere comparable to say the sit-ins that spread like wildfires across the South in the 1950s. The spring mobilization practically accomplished its most important goal: scuttling the attempt to make undocumented immigration a federal crime. After the accomplishment of the most urgent goal, the rank and file are back to local organizing, and organic intellectuals of the Latino communities held a series of conferences to create a national network. Local work will continue, the new national network may or may not survive. What is important, however, is that the question of undocumented immigrants, unlike that of civil rights, i.e., de jure equality, for Blacks, women, homosexuals, the disabled, and so on, cannot be solved within the existing legal framework of a capitalist state, for a national state has the right to select and reject newcomers. So, this will be an enduring issue, which will not go away, as long as a large economic inequality between the USA and Mexico (and other countries in the global South) remains. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
--- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is important, however, is that the question of undocumented immigrants, unlike that of civil rights, i.e., de jure equality, for Blacks, women, homosexuals, the disabled, and so on, cannot be solved within the existing legal framework of a capitalist state, for a national state has the right to select and reject newcomers. So, this will be an enduring issue, which will not go away, as long as a large economic inequality between the USA and Mexico (and other countries in the global South) remains. There are also economic inequalities between the Western European nation-states and Poland, but Poland will become part of the Schengen zone in 2007. Over and against the wishes of racist mobs in Eastern Germany, Polish workers will have the ability to reside in Western Europe without special visas or residence permits, and work there as well. Oskar Lafontaine's nightmare, but a real victory for human emancipation. Is such a state of affairs inconceivable in the NAFTA countries? The Republican right has to appease their racist core constituency, but I could easily imagine the enlightened Warren Buffett/George Soros wing of capital recognizing that if NAFTA is to be anything substantial, some sort of Schengen-like agreement will be necessary. Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: So, this will be an enduring issue, which will not go away, as long as a large economic inequality between the USA and Mexico (and other countries in the global South) remains. . This turned up on watchingamerica.com the other day: La Jornada, Mexico Skyrocketing Migration to U.S. is a Failure for Mexico “This incredibly weak economic policy, which makes Mexico completely dependent on the United States, can and should be reversed - as has happened in South Korea, India and China.” By Ana María Aragonés Translated By Barbara Howe November 28, 2006 More: http://www.watchingamerica.com/lajornada58.shtml ...and a while back, this from the Knight Ridder via the San Jose Mercury-News, about the ruination of Mexican communities due to migration North. Emigration From Mexico Devastating Mexican Communities - Migration to U.S. emptying much of Mexican countryside - KR via San Jose Mercury-News No corner of Mexico has been left untouched by emigration. In 31 percent of Mexico's municipalities, population is shrinking steadily because of migration to the United States, Sun, Mar. 26, 2006 Migration to U.S. emptying much of Mexican countryside LABOR EXPORT DEVASTATING By Jay Root Knight Ridder JOAQUÍN AMARO, Mexico — Decades ago, before massive waves of young men fled north, Pedro Avila Salamanca helped his father harvest corn and fatten pigs. He learned to write his name in a one-room schoolhouse. Sometimes he rode to town on a donkey. It's all a distant memory now. Everywhere abandoned houses are crumbling. The towns are shrinking. And Avila, 89, who wears donated clothes and lives on the meager checks his daughters send from the United States, can't remember the last time he ate meat. “What would I buy it with?'' he asked. Avila is a part of the immigration debate that neither Mexican political leaders nor cheap-labor advocates in the United States like to talk about: Heavy migration has all but emptied much of the Mexican countryside. More: http://leighm.net/blog/?p=140
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wrote: ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff, but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some tendency to converge to some sort of unity. I don't see how Yoshie's comment below responds to what I said above in any wa. I didn't understand what you meant by theme. A theme, to me, suggests an instrumental approach, like coming up with a campaign theme. That's necessary, but it has to come after the world view and institutions, without which a campaign can't be waged. Nonetheless, she wrote: The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and in part from liberalism. It no longer does, though it remains useful as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools. NB: this wasn't Marx's view as much as it was the Marxism of the 2nd and 3rd internationals. Yes. The Second and Third Internationals, however, are also the time when Marxists and socialist movements made a practical difference in the world, whose remaining achievements -- e.g., the defeat of fascism, eradication of many feudal practices in a number of developing nations, establishment of industrial unions and social welfare programs in developed nations, legal equality between races, genders, and so on -- we continue to enjoy. So the paradox is this: Marxists accomplished a lot more when they had a scientifically incorrect world view; the loss of the scientifically incorrect world view made Marxist theory better, but at the same time as (though certainly not due only to) the loss of the incorrect world view and the failure to come up with a new and better world view, Marxist practice began to decline, now it has dwindled to the point of nothingness in the USA. A school of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools, but a social movement cannot be. why is that? Is it because cross-class movements are required? A world view gives emotional cohesion to a social movement and sustains the morale of activists. A social movement, especially one with an ambition to present an alternative to capitalist modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity. doesn't Marxism have the potential to do that, especially if it sheds a lot of the old crap (Stalinism, Trotskyism, social democracy, third-worldism, etc.)? I believe so. Hints are scattered among the writings of unorthodox Marxitsts, like Gramsci, Benjamin, Brecht, Bloch, Mariategui, and so on, as well as the best thoughts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, etc. Those can provide the backbone of a new world view, which should be open to non-Marxist influences from religion, feminism, queer theory, environmentalism, etc. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: If the home front will stay as quiet as it is now, this will last years and years. -- Yoshie Yes. And the home front _will_ stay as quiet as it is now. There is nothing in the world today the equivalent of the black liberatin movement of the '50s and '60s, and it was that movement which made possible an anti-war movement of the strength and militancy of the anti-Vietnam war movement. No one as _ever_ successfully predicted the next upsurge in the series of upsurges that have marked the history of capitalism for four hundred years. No one saw either the '30s or the '60s in advance. Even in 1966 no one had any idea whatever of the magnitude of what was coming in those climactic years of that era. But of course the work people were doing then (and had been doing, for example, 15 years earlier in the anti-war movement of the Korean War) made possible the upsurges that followed. We have to keep organizing against this war while knowing that our efforts will fail to effect it, barring events of which we have no knowledge now. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: If the home front will stay as quiet as it is now, this will last years and years. -- Yoshie Yes. And the home front _will_ stay as quiet as it is now. There is nothing in the world today the equivalent of the black liberatin movement of the '50s and '60s, and it was that movement which made possible an anti-war movement of the strength and militancy of the anti-Vietnam war movement. No one as _ever_ successfully predicted the next upsurge in the series of upsurges that have marked the history of capitalism for four hundred years. No one saw either the '30s or the '60s in advance. Even in 1966 no one had any idea whatever of the magnitude of what was coming in those climactic years of that era. But of course the work people were doing then (and had been doing, for example, 15 years earlier in the anti-war movement of the Korean War) made possible the upsurges that followed. We have to keep organizing against this war while knowing that our efforts will fail to effect it, barring events of which we have no knowledge now. Many activists, Marxists above all, thought that they could replicate the anti-Vietnam War movement if they could get everyone single-mindedly focus on the Iraq War, excluding other issues which might prevent broad unity. Since the Iraq War is not like the Vietnam War, and our social conditions are not like those of the long sixties, that single-issue approach did not work. Not that any other approach would have worked to create and sustain the anti-Iraq War movement, but a different approach could have helped to keep up activists' morale. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Many activists, Marxists above all, thought that they could replicate the anti-Vietnam War movement if they could get everyone single-mindedly focus on the Iraq War, excluding other issues which might prevent broad unity. Since the Iraq War is not like the Vietnam War, and our social conditions are not like those of the long sixties, that single-issue approach did not work. Not that any other approach would have worked to create and sustain the anti-Iraq War movement, but a different approach could have helped to keep up activists' morale. do you really think that the strategies applied to build up an anti-(Iraq War) movement represent the application of some sort of Marxism? It seems to me that the sectarians who organized some of the demos (the Workers' World Party and its later incarnations) were applying the worst kind of Marxism. _And it didn't involve single-issue politics_. I remember that at one march, they delayed the march clearly in order to induce us to listen to a bunch of speeches on all sorts of issues (including South Korea) that reflected the WWP party line and had no direct connection with the Iraq War. (In one of the very few times my personal actions actually affected the world, by the way, I and another guy (who I don't know) got the labor contingent to start chanting no more speeches! let us march! or something like that.) -- Jim Devine / Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -- Bertolt Brecht
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Many activists, Marxists above all, thought that they could replicate the anti-Vietnam War movement if they could get everyone single-mindedly focus on the Iraq War, excluding other issues which might prevent broad unity. Since the Iraq War is not like the Vietnam War, and our social conditions are not like those of the long sixties, that single-issue approach did not work. Not that any other approach would have worked to create and sustain the anti-Iraq War movement, but a different approach could have helped to keep up activists' morale. do you really think that the strategies applied to build up an anti-(Iraq War) movement represent the application of some sort of Marxism? It seems to me that the sectarians who organized some of the demos (the Workers' World Party and its later incarnations) were applying the worst kind of Marxism. _And it didn't involve single-issue politics_. I remember that at one march, they delayed the march clearly in order to induce us to listen to a bunch of speeches on all sorts of issues (including South Korea) that reflected the WWP party line and had no direct connection with the Iraq War. (In one of the very few times my personal actions actually affected the world, by the way, I and another guy (who I don't know) got the labor contingent to start chanting no more speeches! let us march! or something like that.) Even WWP has only added mentions of various larger problems -- like Palestine, Afghanistan, and South Korea -- of US imperialism here and there to the main focus on the Iraq War. Neither a single-issue approach to the Iraq War nor a laundry-list approach to various hot spots of US imperialism can work. Neither approach begins with people -- citizens and immigrants, documented and undocumented -- who live in the United States of America, an increasing number of whom have concrete connections with the rest of the world. Secular leftists need to learn the ABC of organizing and institution-building from the religious, who don't begin with this or that issue but start with an enduring but ever-changing worldview that encompasses whole lives of whole individuals. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Jim Devine wrote: do you really think that the strategies applied to build up an anti-(Iraq War) movement represent the application of some sort of Marxism? The emphasis should be on Some sort, and with that qualification I would say Yes to your question. I _think_ that sort of marxism is pretty screwed up, but also to avoid platonizing Marxism we have acknowledge that the marxist tradition branches out pretty luxruiantly (or chaotically), and that _most_ of the branches have _some_ sort of grounding in some of the core elements of that tradition. I would also suggest that maybe we should speak of the socialist rather than the marxist tradition. That would allow a bit more room for varieties of marxism and other socialist tendencies to talk and work with each other. It seems to me that the sectarians who organized some of the demos (the Workers' World Party and its later incarnations) were applying the worst kind of Marxism. _And it didn't involve single-issue politics_. I think Yoshie's response to this is roughly accurate. But _also_, where the single-issue dogma binds is not so much at the large central demos (regional or national) but in the localities where the organizing for those demos is done. There a single-issue focus (whether it incorporates, e.g., Palestine or not) frustrates political organizing for the long haul. The single-issue slogan, it is well to remember, was not just an anti-war tactic, it had from the git-go in the '60s a sectarian purpose of confining real politics within the closed circle of the SWP. Mass mobilizations around a series of single-issues were supposed to incorporate more and more of the population in an essentially passive way, who would then take their political perspective from the 'true socialists' at the center. And as Yoshie also notices, the Laundry-List politics which are/were presented as the alternative were equally sectarian. Here the traditional definitions (but not the labels themselves) of opportunism (left and right) can be useful. Left-opportunism consists in an over-estimation of the power of capital; right opportunism consists in an under-estimation of the power of capital. The single-issue approach so _over-estimates_ the power of capital that it judges politics too complicated for ordinary people, who must be kept content with simple immediate goals, like Out Now. (I'm not objecting to that slogan, I think it the only appropriate one; I'm objecting to confining the thought of the masses to that level.) The Laundry-List approach (which can and in the u.s. for 70 years has gone along with tailing the DP) so _under-estimates_ the power of capital that it believes no particular politics at all are needed but merely a collection of people demanding that nice things happen. I'm not wholly convinced by Yoshie's formulation of the alternative (beginning with whole lives of whole individuals, but that might not be a bad rhetorical heading to begin conversation. ? I remember that at one march, they delayed the march clearly in order to induce us to listen to a bunch of speeches on all sorts of issues (including South Korea) that reflected the WWP party line and had no direct connection with the Iraq War. I think this can still be correctly labelled a single-issue strategy: roughly, it aims at making anti-imperialism the single mass issue about which the movement could coalesce. The implicit premise here (though I doubt WWP would accept this description) is that capital is so overwhelmingly powerful that it can be opposed only by those who unify around a 100% anti-capitalist theory. Hence the tightly controlled coalitions the WWP forms, as opposed to the looser coalitions aimed at in the '60s by both the CP the SWP. But we still need to keep working away at building opposition to the war, and the _general_ idea of building political consciousness inside that opposition is valid, though WWP's approach to that is obviously useless. (In one of the very few times my personal actions actually affected the world, by the way, I and another guy (who I don't know) got the labor contingent to start chanting no more speeches! let us march! or something like that.) That reminds me of what I guess was my single sweetest moment of the '60s, when Bruce Franklin and I came close to causing a riot in the lobby of the Americana Hotel in NYC, simply by chanting Drop the Charges until the lobby was full of people chanting drop the charges. It did get the MLA bigwigs to come flurrying around to shepherd us into a side room for discussion of the issues. :-) On the subject line: The troops are going to be there for a very long time indeed. And while u.s. imperialism may or may not be a paper tiger, that tiger has nuclear teeth. It will be less willing to withdraw from the middle east than it was to withdraw from Vietnam. The next decade is going to be perilous. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
CC writes: ... The single-issue approach so _over-estimates_ the power of capital that it judges politics too complicated for ordinary people, who must be kept content with simple immediate goals, like Out Now. (I'm not objecting to that slogan, I think it the only appropriate one; I'm objecting to confining the thought of the masses to that level.) The key problem is confining the thought of the 'masses.' A demo can be organized around the War, but the issues that people want to bring up should not be limited. What should be limited is certain actions, e.g., violent attacks on the police. Not only do those hurt the movement, but they are often the product of police agents (provocateurs) or total idiots. The Laundry-List approach (which can and in the u.s. for 70 years has gone along with tailing the DP) so _under-estimates_ the power of capital that it believes no particular politics at all are needed but merely a collection of people demanding that nice things happen. somehow, we have to figure out one single theme that unifies the laundry list, even if it alienates some of the components of a movement. Human liberation, democracy, and/or the whole lives of whole individuals sound good, but are pretty vacuous. -- Jim Devine / Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -- Bertolt Brecht
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: somehow, we have to figure out one single theme that unifies the laundry list, even if it alienates some of the components of a movement. Human liberation, democracy, and/or the whole lives of whole individuals sound good, but are pretty vacuous. We are not looking for a theme here. The question is the way people work with one another and elaborate an enduring but ever-changing world view, building institutions to go with it. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are not looking for a theme here. The question is the way people work with one another and elaborate an enduring but ever-changing world view, building institutions to go with it. ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff, but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some tendency to converge to some sort of unity. -- Jim Devine / Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -- Bertolt Brecht
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But we still need to keep working away at building opposition to the war, and the _general_ idea of building political consciousness inside that opposition is valid, though WWP's approach to that is obviously useless. I don't know about Stan, but I think Joaquin is questioning the idea that we still need to keep working away at building opposition to the war, and the _general_ idea of building political consciousness inside that opposition is valid, too. I have not read Joaquin's essay which Stan cites in his reflection, but I think I understand where he is coming from. For many outside Latino communities, this spring's powerful mobilization against the criminalization of undocumented immigrants came out of nowhere, a pleasant surprise. But, for many working in Latino communities, organizing for driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, working through workers' centers, and so on, the spring mobilization was the national culmination (which also had a transnational dimension, as demonstrations were held simultaneously south of the border, too) of the momentum that they had built locally. That's what Joaquin is talking about. What do you think of that general shift of focus, away from the war toward communities of color -- many of them new immigrants, many of them undocumented, in sync with political development at home, who speak Spanish, who are in touch with families and friends at home, who have their own culture aside from Anglo corporate American culture -- that are at the heart of living labor in American political economy today? -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
I'm not at all convinced that we aren't on the verge of something of a cascade in terms of popular responses. I teach in an extremely conservative area and a lot of my jokes make people nervous, but almost all of them laugh. Bush and the Iraq War as unpopular as Vietnam ever was. That there is no draft and no tradition of mass protest moderates the intensity of the reaction, but it's there. I don't think the focus has shifted to communities of color because there really isn't a focus for the movement yet. The mobilizations last spring were very impressive, but what's become of them? What has the Left tried to do to sustain such actions? To keep it in the streets, etc. ML
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Mark Lause [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't think the focus has shifted to communities of color because there really isn't a focus for the movement yet. The mobilizations last spring were very impressive, but what's become of them? What has the Left tried to do to sustain such actions? I think that Joaquin is saying that non-Latino leftists, perhaps with exceptions of certain sorts of labor and religious leftists, had _nothing_ to do with the momentum building over the last several years in the Latino communities or the spring mobilization or continuing local organizing after that, which proves the irrelevance (barring a shift in the near future) of the general run of leftists, in his view, to where it's at and, more importantly, _where the future will be, given demographic trends_. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
On 12/1/06, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/1/06, Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are not looking for a theme here. The question is the way people work with one another and elaborate an enduring but ever-changing world view, building institutions to go with it. ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff, but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some tendency to converge to some sort of unity. The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and in part from liberalism. It no longer does, though it remains useful as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools. A school of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools, but a social movement cannot be. A social movement, especially one with an ambition to present an alternative to capitalist modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ http://mrzine.org http://monthlyreview.org/
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
Got it. This not unsurprising fact actually echoes what happened in the origins of the civil rights movement. It wasn't the traditional Left but religions and some labor figures that mobilized the numbers that morally confronted and defeated segregation. However, my point was that no movement seems to have come out of last spring's mobilizations. I say seems because the mobilizations amounted to very little in Cincinnati. From my perspective on it, this reflected the dominance of religious leaders eager to make a moral point but not to mobilize and empower the wider community. I've honestly not heard about it, if the mobilizations last spring sparked something elsewhere comparable to say the sit-ins that spread like wildfires across the South in the 1950s. Solidarity! Mark L.
Re: [PEN-L] Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding
I wrote: ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff, but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some tendency to converge to some sort of unity. I don't see how Yoshie's comment below responds to what I said above in any wa. Nonetheless, she wrote: The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and in part from liberalism. It no longer does, though it remains useful as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools. NB: this wasn't Marx's view as much as it was the Marxism of the 2nd and 3rd internationals. There's also been a tradition within the broad Marxist trend of voluntarism and/or spontaneity. A school of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools, but a social movement cannot be. why is that? Is it because cross-class movements are required? In Marx's original view, of course, a mass social movement _could_ be built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools because there were no inherent conflicts within the working class and the superficial ones would be washed away by the acid of capitalism. If a cross-class social movement is needed, then the polarization tendencies of capitalism would tend to split the movement, encouraging the use of different theoretical frameworks. A social movement, especially one with an ambition to present an alternative to capitalist modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity. doesn't Marxism have the potential to do that, especially if it sheds a lot of the old crap (Stalinism, Trotskyism, social democracy, third-worldism, etc.)? -- Jim Devine / Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. -- Bertolt Brecht
