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A comparative approach can be very valuable for many things, but it can also be a distraction, aimed at changing the subject. For over a century, for example, reactionaries have attempted to muddy the waters of our Second American Revolution through an adulation of the proslavery "Lost Cause" of the seceding Southern states. They have done so, in part, through a comparative approach between the U.S. South and other slaveholding societies...and with the Northern states on such questions as race. In other words, slavery in the Southern US was awful, but much better than it was in some other places at other times. Or, Jefferson Davis may have had no use for black people, but Abraham Lincoln was a "racist," too. Both these comparative approaches are utterly dishonest and deceptive attempts to put what was (and, in some respects, still is) the dominant interest in the US ruling class in its best possible light. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
