>An example in point, my favorite list (as Rob knows) is currently
>discussing whether Liberation Theology still exists! Many on this
>list seem to think that LT has almost totally evaporated off the face of
>the planet. If they were living in Texas as I do, they would quickly
>see that the only liberal/ Left activity in a town or city comes out of
>the Catholic Church.
Well, a former high-school student of mine spent a year in California, and
there the only alternatives she could see for young people were drugs and
Church. After a close shave with drugs she got her company at the church.
But there are workers and unions everywhere.
>So while others are enmeshed in Kosovo or East Timor, the practical
>question down this way, is how to build a movement where the largest
>component of activists are nuns?! What's even worse, these nuns and
>priests are the most active people working nationally for building an
>antiwar movement in the US, or ending the death penalty!
James Connolly, the Irish Marxist revolutionary, has lots of good stuff on
this problem of doing socialist work with Catholics.
>Thanks again, Rob, for inviting me to participate in Thaxis. But
>what an unfortunate name this is, to attract more plebian types to talk.
>It sounds like some sort of disease.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Anyway, given the appalling
state of other so-called Marxist so-called discussion lists I don't much
care what the name is as long as the discussion is free and hard, and you
don't have to suck up to people like the two Louis's or keep on the right
side (pun intended) of short-tempered blinkered sectarians like Cox or
Henwood. Thank Christ there's at least one even-tempered and tolerant
(German) American administering a number of Marxist lists (Hans Ehrbar) or
people could get the idea that the only Marxist discussion permitted in a
US Net framework was boneheaded Stalinism or blockheaded petty-bourgeois
academic (or in the case of Louis Proyecchhht, would-be academic)
Menshevism.
By the way, Rob seems to imply that the Nicaraguan revolution was defeated
by the imperialist guns. This is utterly wrong. It was defeated by
non-Marxist, non-socialist, non-revolutionary leadership, both locally and
internationally. The usual chorus of don'ts resounded from Moscow and
Havana, and were listened to in Managua, preventing the spread of the
revolution to the other countries of Central America. The formation of
independent revolutionary trade unions was outlawed, many of their
cofounders being deported to Panamanian jails for the crime of being
foreign and Trotskyist (members of the Simon Bolivar brigade). The Cuban
leaders in their day didn't have to listen to this shit from Moscow or
their later selves, so they went ahead and formed a workers state,
inadequate and nationally deformed though it was. The Nicaraguan leaders
didn't change the state, and the people of that country and its neighbours
paid the penalty for this treachery, which put the Central American
revolution back by decades.
As for Che in Bolivia, the whole strategy was wrong. The Cuban revolution
wasn't carried out by impoverished peasants but by a combined rural and
urban proletariat in direct defiance of both local and imperialist
exploiters. The Cuban CP fell with Batista. What was missing in Cuba was a
revolutionary Marxist party to organize the working class for its own
liberation and run a non-bureaucratic regime that would be able to carry
the revolution to other countries in Central and South America. Despite
its weaknesses, the Cuban revolution was a huge inspiration to many Latinos
-- as the failed Bolivian revolution had been a few years earlier in 1952.
Che's adventure in Bolivia was suicidal voluntarism -- the Bolivian
revolution is a creature of the mines and the cities (and nowadays the
coca-producing poor peasants). As a model for revolutionaries to follow it
meant nothing but disaster.
Perhaps talking to the nuns about the experiences of people fighting
injustice and exploitation in other places might open a path to more
rational activities for some of them? I mean, every Texan who starts giving
a shit about what the rest of the world thinks and does is a victory for
sanity over obscurantism and bigotry.
Cheers,
Hugh
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