We go deeper and deeper into the surreal: this stuff makes you feel like you are on a bad acid trip listening to Jefferson Airplane sing about Alice in Wonderland's white rabbits. The small world of the UFT just happens to be the largest union local in the United States, well over 100,000 members. The small world of the UFT just happens to be the frontline of the struggle to save public education from privatization by venture capital and ultra-conservative ideologues. The great, big world of American Trotskyism is... Is there any one of these sects that has a membership that breaks into three, much less four, digits?
As much as I disagree with the politics of Solidarity and "Against the Current" in certain crucial respects, there is no doubt that it is, by a very wide margin, the most thoughtful and most serious of the remnants of American Trotskyism. But look what it is competing with: Workers World Party, which will go down in history for being the "Trotskyists" who defended Stalinism with more vigor and uncritical enthusiasm than the Stalinists; the ever shrinking SWP, with its fawning affection for Castro; the Sparts -- well, that doesn't even need a gloss... Add to that the likes of cyber-Trots like Proyect.
The "clearheaded" L-M is out of business because they were caught in a rather bold-faced lie about ethnic cleaning in Yugoslavia by some mainstream journalists who had no compunctions about using British libel law to make that point. But all of the Trots described above -- excepting Solidarity/Against the Current -- share with L-M precisely this willingness to excuse "ethnic cleansing" and to defend as 'socialist,' one of the leading practitioners of genocide at the century's end.
Yoshie again: << What is surreal?
1. Anyone who questions the mass media's framing of this issue risks being taken for mouthing "surreal" nonsense, or worse yet, an apologia for genocide. To me, what is truly genocidal is the continued reproduction & expansion of capitalism worldwide. I say this based upon works by such scholars as Amartya Sen (no socialist, much less "Stalinist"). Ever read "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing," _New York Review of Books_, December 20, 1990?
2. What's really surreal, in my view, is that those who reproduce the mass media's framing do not have to respond to criticisms of it; they simply need to repeat keywords: genocide, mass murder, Stalinism, etc. Ideology defines the terms of debate, and anyone who offers an alternative explanation (e.g., alternative to the idea that the dominant Hutus tried to exterminate the Tutsi minority in genocide motivated by ethnic hatred in 1994) as Heartfield has gets accused of "denial" of genocide. In ideology, it doesn't matter what happened before or after 1994 in Rwanda, what happened before or after 1989 in Yugoslavia. Ideology has already defined good and evil and provided ethnicized explanations. Historical materialist analysis of the political economy of the nations in question as well as of imperialism goes out of window. >>
This is farce to the sixteenth power. In the 1930s, Communists and CP sympathizers would dismiss accounts of the Moscow trials, of the mass starvation in the Ukraine, of the elimination of all of the central leadership of the Bolsheviks save Stalin, of mass murder, as these accounts appeared in the "mass media," in precisely the same manner you do here, because the "bourgeois press always lies." In the 1950s and 1960s, leftists celebrated Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, turning a blind eye to accounts in the "mass media" of massive repression and hundreds of thousands of deaths, because the "bourgeois press always lies." In the 1970s, leftists denied all of the reports of the incredible auto-Holocaust in Cambodia conducted by the Khymer Rouge, because the "bourgeois press always lies." The FIRST time was tragedy; seventy years and many repeat performance later, farce doesn't even begin to describe this willful blindness.
What we have here, for all its posing as a "critical" perspective, is a methodology which blindly follows the "mass media," in the form of an entirely mechanical, unthinking, blind REJECTION of whatever appears in that format. Heavens forbid, that one actually conduct something even remotely resembling an independent investigation.
And "genocide" is now just an ideological frame, a social construction of the "mass media": is Yoshie a pen name for Alan Skokal, and this line of argumentation the latest take-off on inanity in the name of post-modernism?
Yoshie again:
<< In this penetrating analysis of the economic and social causes behind the Rwandan holocaust, Michel Chossudovsky focuses attention on how the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and the World Bank contributed to the disaster. (First of a two-part article) >>
Why did I know that this shit was on its way, and that its main conduit would be none other than the personage that has made racist apologia for Slobbo into a full-time occupation? Are we supposed to be happy that this is a step up from Heartfield's explanation that the Tutsis brought it all on themselves by shooting down the plane of Habyarimana? Now it was imperialism that made the racist Hutus decide to wipe out one million Tutsis and non-racist Hutus. "The devil made me do it.": this is historical materialism? It brings to mind the old take-off on Stalin's "classic" text: "Diabolical and Hysterical Mysterialism."
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --