>And why oh why would you take seriously that outburst of sectarian
>bad temper that was
>passing itself off as an arguement in the WSWS article
Actual quotes from the piece <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/sep2001/rads-s22.shtml> as opposed to this strange caricature of it:
>This origin of the nation in the struggle for abstract
>ideals-democracy, republicanism-reverberated across the globe. The
>American Revolution played no small rolein inspiring the events that
>transformed France a decade later.
>
>Even after 200 years, the United States is still fighting through
>the political and historical implications of its own founding
>principles. The American population, polyglot and highly diverse, is
>obsessed with ideological problems, although its approach is often
>maddeningly pragmatic.
>In many ways all the vast problems in the struggle for socialism
>find their most complex expression in America. How could that not be
>the case? If one cannot find points of departure for a higher form
>of social organization in the US, in what corner of the globe are
>they to be found? What's more, the individual who sees no basis for
>socialism in America clearly has given up on the prospects of world
>socialism altogether. The Marxist has always been distinguished from
>the common or garden variety radical by his or her deep confidence
>in the revolutionary potential of the American working class. In
>this regard, the US ruling elite has a much greater insight into the
>true nature of American society than the blinkered radical. The
>American bourgeoisie inveighs night and day against socialism and
>communism, in a manner far out of proportion to the threat currently
>posed by the socialist movement in the US, because it understands or
>at least senses instinctively that in the most advanced capitalist
>society, all things being equal, socialism offers such a rational
>and attractive alternative.
>America is, at once, the most advanced and the most backward of
>societies. Its culture attracts and repels, but always fascinates.
>Official society and many ordinary Americans deny the very existence
>of distinct social classes, and yet the country is riven by the most
>profound and ever-deepening social differentiation.
>One might add that the finest products of American culture have also
>attracted and moved masses of people around the world, from Poe and
>Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne, in the 19th century, to Dreiser,
>Fitzgerald, Richard Wright and others in the 20th. Nor should one
>entirely forget the influence of American music, popular and
>otherwise. A few people, one imagines, have heard it speaking from
>the heart. This to say nothing of contributions with international
>implications in film, painting, sculpture, dance and architecture.
>Raven apparently counts upon her readers being so consumed by
>subjective venom and their own self-importance that they overlook
>obvious historical and cultural realities.
>
>It has always been an essential task of socialists in the US to
>awaken the positive and generous instincts that are so deeply
>embedded in the American population. There are, after all, two
>Americas, the America of Bush, Clinton and the other scoundrels, and
>another America, of its working people.
>The struggle against the policies and designs of the American
>government requires, in the first instance, the exposure of the
>latter's claim that it is the true voice and representative of the
>people. Socialists are obliged to explain that the US ruling elite
>is carrying out anti-democratic and rapacious policies, with
>inevitably tragic consequences, in the pursuit of which it falsely
>invokes the name of the American people.
>
>All this of course is a closed book to the smug middle class
>philistine and snob...