I have no idea which middle class activists Jim is talking about. The Central American solidarity activists of the 1980s, including me, never spoke about the American people exploiting Nicaraguan or El Salvadoran people. They spoke about the US government. This is actually something that they learned from the Vietnam antiwar movement, which was led by Marxists. The guilt-baiting that Jim is referring to was typical of SDS petty-bourgeois radicalism, but it disappeared soon after the mass demonstrations became the most popular form of opposing the war. The SWP, which I was a member of, defended what at first was an unpopular point of view: the GI's were not murderers, they were victims of imperialism themselves. You could go through the literature of Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or consult their web page at www.cispes.org and you will find nothing that castigates the American people.
>Of course it should be said that the underdevelopment and dependency
>theses were a disaster for the third world, too. The import substitution
>policies promoted by the underdevelopment theorists were a feeble
>version of thrid world nationalism that stood little chance against
>international capital. Writing off the working class of the first world,
>the underdevelopment theorists saw no option but to support indigenous
>capital in third world nations.
It is true that Frank, Amin et al did not have an orientation to workers in the First World. Mostly they supported socialist development like Cuba's, or radical nationalist development such as took place in the former Portugese colonies. However, it is false to assume that they took a position against proletarian revolution in Great Britain. Monthly Review Press is strongly associated with this current and they published people like Amin, while at the same time publishing Mike Yates, who is on this mailing list. Mike has been writing MR books and contributing articles to their journal for years now on the need to develop a class-struggle trade union movement. It is more a division of labor rather than a debate over strategy. People like Samir Amin do not debate people like Mike Yates at Socialist Scholars Conference. They speak on different topics. It is to MR's credit that they bring authors such as these together.
> The financial squeeze put on Latin
>America and Africa in the eighties put paid to dreams of indigenous
>economic growth. In the nineties, political independence was trashed too
>as US 'human rights' activists overran Africa and Latin America telling
>the natives how to 'democratise'.
I am not sure which activists you are speaking of here. You are much too vague. Clearly not the radical activists in CISPES. Could you be referring to Greenpeace? I don't think they get involved with issues of "democratization". Mostly they seem interested in keeping bluefin tunas alive. Could it be Amnesty International? No, they get involved with freeing political prisoners. It is entirely possible, Jim, that you have constructed a political opponent in your mind that does not exist in the real world.
>All over the third world now, such ativists
>lecture people in destitution that they must not leave the countryside
>for the towns, that they should not aspire to Western standards of
>living, but Western values of ecological austerity.
Ah, just as I thought. You are imaginging things. There are no such activists. None whatsoever. I have scrutinized these issues and know the activists intimately. I have links to their websites on the Marxism home page. Trust me when I tell you that the groups like the Rainforest Action Alliance do not lecture people living in the rainforest not to move to the big city. Instead they petition, hold rallies, and lobby politicians to keep multinational corporations, such as the scumbag oil companies, out of indigenous peoples' homeland. This is a stance that all Marxists should support, but one that you don't. When I posted the article from the NY Times about how American oil companies extracted all the oil from Ecuador, while leaving behind a stinking, toxic dump for the farmers and fishers who lived in or near the forest and were now facing economic ruin, you got irritated with me. The Times article was "gonzo journalism", as you called it. No, Jim, it is not gonzo journalism. It is the truth and you have nothing to counter it with. NOTHING. The concrete facts of what is happening in Nigeria and Ecuador refutes your analysis, so instead of coming up with your own facts and a systematic analysis, you create fictional opponents. These fictional opponents are easy to knock down, but you are debating with me right now and not them.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)