>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> 04/25/00 04:20PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> Communist China has 1.2 billion people, and they are wide awake. What is that 1/5 of the world's population ? I don't grant the claims of those who say the China is not still a Communist country. Cuba lives . Viet Nam lives.
>
> [snip]
> >>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 04/25/00 01:57PM >>>
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >My movement hasn't been defeated.
>
> Is it just sleeping? Gathering forces for the next forward assault?
> Will the USSR rise from the ashes? The outside world come around and
> realize that North Korea is an inspiring political model after all?
I disagree with Charles on China and (probably Vietnam) -- I think he is letting his trial lawyer instincts (Defend every inch of ground!) run away with him. And, Charles, you see here the reason I was disconcerted when you introduced the North Korea thread to the m-fem list.
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CB: Actually, this didn't come out of the North Korean thread. This WSWebsite was a thread that was indigenous to the M-Fem list.
On China, the "China is not communist" arguers have never denied that the vast majority of the Chinese economy is not capitalist, and they kind of arrogantly dismiss the claim of the Chinese themselves that they are still on the socialist road. So, my position is the result of lawyerly superior logic , not unprincipled "defending every inch of ground". Most inches in China are still socialist. I mean in the 1960's the bourgeois economists ( the most prominent like Samuelson) were saying that the U.S. was a "mixed economy", meaning half-socialist and half-capitalist... Those Marxists who have given up China are caving to the latest intellectual fashion. Carrol is handing himself a victory in this debate , but he hasn't won it on the facts or logic.
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But here it is -- so let's see if we can establish some rational point of departure.
If, on the lbo thread, one were to substitute "USSR" for "North Korea," then those posts which Doug claims are presenting NOrth Korea as a model form an exact echo of the posts on the USSR which Doug himself has been writing on maillists for years. He has consistently defended the USSR *in the same way* that on LBO Yoshie, Mike Yates, Sam Pawlett, I, Wojtek, various authors quoted by Yoshie, several MR writers over the years have defended North Korea. The sentence "The outside world come around and realize that North Korea is an inspiring political model after all?" would be more suitable on the editorial page of the WSJ than in the context of the North Korea thread on LBO. It is a lie. No one has come close to calling North Korea an "inspiring political model."
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CB: What is inspiring is their heroic resistance to imperialism in the face of holocaustic annihilation. Nobody would want to put someone else through that as a model , but it is inspiring to communists and national liberationists.
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In the 1950s Mossedagh (sp) tried to follow the "democratic route" which apparently Doug thinks should have been selected by North Korea under the bombs. In the 1960s Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic tried to follow the "inspiring political model" Doug favors. In the 1970s in Chile Allende tried to follow the "inspiring political model" Doug favors.. I wonder what would have happened in North Korea had the North Korean leadership chosen that particular inspiring model?
I at least have never been into "models" of any sort. I don't quite understand where Doug unearthed this particular slanderous terminology.
I may add that I never have been and am not now one of those who attack Doug for not being a Marxist. But his performance on this particular thread has been extremely disturbing. His contributions have been confined mostly to mind-reading assaults on the inner motivation of other subscribers. He has not offered a single comment on North Korea which has a source other than headlines in the capitalist media. I really do not understand where his performance comes from. He doesn't even have Charles's excuse of being a lawyer.
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CB: This is ad hominem error. My arguments stand on their content and are not distorted by my occupation.
CB