Carrol and Yoshie are to be commended for attempting to defend openly on LBO-talk the sort of left opportunist position that Louis Proyect has been trying to build up on his marxism list, but which he will not also defend here owing to an unresolved and presumably unprincipled personal difference with the LBO moderator (which he has apparently not patched up after all).
It is a leftist position that tries to set up moral absolutes for marxists like "no compromises with imperialism", "no reforms of world institutions",
but actually on closer examination is quite muddled, once you get through the dogmatic arrogance with which the position is argued.
Yoshie's concise statement above ends by lamenting our inability to save peoples lives even in our own neighbourhoods. This very sad statement, sometimes true, is nonsense as a principled political position. We all know concretely, that we do speak up, act, and influence decisions so as to prevent at least some of the misery in our neighbourhood. Marx and Engels worked against the inhumanity of the early nineteenth century factory system.
Now when we go back to the main argument of Yoshie in the helpfully concise paragraph above, she is pointing out that all military intervention is in the interests of the interveners - quite a lot of truth in that - but goes on to support *economic* intervention: the wrath of IMF World Bank, US and European sanctions against Indonesia from 1975 for taking over East Timor, as if *economic* intervention isn't.
Indeed the left purists recently have circulated Chomsky's call on Bill Clinton to do just this now. And Bill Clinton has.
A more inflected position might be sustainable by a much larger swathe of left opinion that we are probably against military intervention in most cases and, I suggest, that economic intervention should not be purely destructive. But Yoshie and Carrol here cannot lecture us that economic intervention by imperialism is not intervention.
It most definitely is, and sometimes it is the thin end of the wedge. That wedge may lead to military intervention, and most assuredly it inevitably strengthens the economic pressure to succumb to a neo-liberal economic settlement as well as democratic settlement to redress the violation of human rights which provided the excuse for intervention.
It is because of a literary device that every analysis must show the evils of the class enemy that Yoshie is able to argue above that the West should have imposed massive economic sanctions against Indonesia in 1975. Clearly it is imperialism's fault, but is that her own position?
Is it her position over the economic sanctions against Iraq now?
In the case of Iraq there is no doubt of the evidence of numerous deaths from this economic warfare. There is no doubt too about the Iraqi regime's deplorable repressive attitude to Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Kuwaitis. But Iraq considered that Kuwait lacked legitimacy as an independent state and was a creation of colonialism. What was so wrong in the Indonesians seeing East Timor in 1975 as separated from themselves merely by the fact that the colonial power had been different and that the Portugese empire had collapsed a few decades later than the Dutch empire? Yoshie has duplicated a snide criticism of Mary Robinson that she supports the division of Ireland without any sustained argument. The same argument applies to East Timor: why should a colonial boundary prevail in a single island?
Yoshie's main point about military intervention is a good one. I caught most of an extended BBC Radio 4 discussion yesterday about intervention by concerned and informed liberals. They too were agreeing that in reality most military interventions are for the sake of the intervening power. They explored the materialist limits of the appeals to military intervention. They considered the argument that on one count there are over 20 further areas in the world that may break out into massacres and expulsion, clearly beyond the ability even of the USA and the US to contain.
I would add what a close run thing the recent interventions have been this year. The west almost lost the Kosovo war. In East Timor the west found the UN representatives of its policy being terrorised and killed off, the most dramatic challenge to its authority possible. As in Goradze and Srebrenica it could not even protect its own people.
Yoshie is ten years behind in the analysis of these questions when she cites Somalia. It is clear the US got severely burned in Somalia and cannot afford to repeat that.
What I am arguing against from Yoshie and Carrol, is the sort of dogmatic and mechanical policing of the boundaries of legitimate marxist analysis which they seek to impose.
When you look at their positions they are not in fact internally coherent.
There is no substitute for a marxist materialist analysis of the class forces involved in any given conflict. We need a concrete understand of which compromise in which conditions helps the development of the democatic movement of the working people of the world, and which does not. And then we have to get our hands dirty with these messy contradictions and try to influence the result. Wrapping oneself in a show of political purity is not marxism. It is sectarianism.
I will not be able to reply to any response for a few days, but I look forward to reading it.
Chris Burford
London