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One can substantially agree with the thrust of the interview. And then we get to the nub of the problem I see again and again with respect to understanding Ukraine: Q: ..."So is this really a Ukrainian uprising? Or are these just superpowers playing with a pawn?" "Obviously you cannot deny that both the U.S. and Russia?and the EU?try to influence Ukrainian politics. They would be stupid if they didn?t. They are great powers, they have their imperialist interests, and that?s what we can expect from them. "But then you deny the grassroots nature of this protest. People are talking about real problems. People are self-organizing, both in Maidan in the Western Ukraine and in the Eastern Ukraine now. And you cannot just reduce it to this great power play." But this artificial juxtaposition of uprising vs. superpowers is quite a silly and completely unnecessary way of putting matters. It is an absurd way of framing a question that guarantees the absurd answer. It is this behavior that I find most puzzling. The real answer is that it is *both*. Louis has done valuable yeoman's work in drawing a clear line against especially our most rabid political opponents on what for the time being we must refer to as the "Left", on the questions of the Arab Spring and Maidan. However that is not enough. We need to be able to present our own analysis of the motives and actions of the outside powers. In particular we need to present an analysis of the actions of "our own" Great Power capitalist regimes, first of all because that is where we interact with ordinary people on a daily basis. And second of all because these Great Power interventions are an objective factor and condition for the uprising and for any self-organizing movement. Today Ukraine is clearly heading toward disintegration as a result, not of Maidan, but of the actions of the outside Powers. My own analysis indicates that this result is *primarily*, but obviously not solely due to the actions and attitude of the US government. It is hard to imagine that a conservative like Putin would not want a status quo settlement that would divide up the spoils. But the US gambled for it all. And lost, as its policy predictably heads towards "fubar". So far I've not seen this, perhaps out of a "scratch-gangrene" fear of "resembling our opponents", or perhaps because one agrees with Slavoj Žižek in his surprisingly good "Barbarism with a Human Face" article in LRB (I confess that Žižek has come off too much as the "philosophical clown" for my tastes in the past, but this is the acme of sobriety from him, relatively speaking), when he ends by stating "Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics". Here Žižek presents the above same artificial juxtaposition stood on its head as a conflation. Of course Great Power geopolitical games have nothing to do, are utterly alien, to authentic emancipatory politics. They are the *conscious enemy* of such a politics, that's why they exist! And that is why, as against Žižek, we MUST BE INTERESTED in the games they play against us, from ALL sides, and especially from the side of the Great Power closest to you. After all, a "new Cold War against Russia" is intended to whip up a militarist mentality in the US, generating not only the economic waste of yet another military buildup with directly negative consequences for our working class, but intended to create a political environment hostile to any "authentic emancipatory politics" in the US. Just as exactly 100 years ago, the machinations of the Great Powers provoked a World War with devastating consequences for the prospects of authentic emancipatory politics of the time, above all for the international working class Socialist movement. We clearly have a vital material interest in preventing that from happening, and that means going against all the idiotic "new Cold War" rhetoric coming out of Washington. With eyes wide open. I don't know why the concept of "know thy enemy" is so difficult to grasp. The failure to do so means defaulting to our opponents on the "Left". It is not enough to know that "we" are not "them". We have to defeat them. How else do we expect to win? Or are we content to simply be "oppositionists"? I don't know about you, but I fight to win. -Matt PS: Thank god it appears the Ukrainian officer corps has no stomach for shooting its own people. Who knows, with Ukraine facing disintegration, they might even move against the US-installed coup "government". And good news that a troop of torch-bearing Neo-Nazis just meet with real hostility from the present Maidan encampment yesterday. Unfortunately I had to glean this latter from RT.com: http.com//rt.com/news/155748-rally-kiev-massive-fight/ See what I mean? Why do I have to critically scour "the other side" for information? ________________________________________________ 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
