>I trust Steve's account with regard to the ideological composition of
>the student movement, etc. As for the WWP's position on the
>Tiananmen uprising, I'm not sure what it was either, as I only
>recently got to know the WWP, through the course of my activism
>against attacks on Yugoslavia.
This is exactly the problem with the WWP-style "anti-war left"- murder and war is okay if the victims have the "wrong" ideological composition. It's just Kissinger principles in reverse.
The problem is not just Tiananmen but the WWP's uncritical support for every variety of Stalinist butchering regime. They still think Kim Il Sung and North Korea are admirable models of socialism.
The whole nation-state "Global Class War" rhetoric of the enemy of my enemy (read USA) is my friend is a crock of shit that allies it with repressive regimes globally and creating a machinery of apologia that discredits the left more generally.
Hey, I'm a pragmatist-- I'll line up occasionally in the same coalition as WWP on occasion when for their own twisted ideological reasons they end up on the right side of an issue, but then I'll line up with their opposite numbers in areas like Kosovo when their self-interest makes them support the right side. But that doesn't mean that either has any humanistic or ideological principles that I share. Stopped clocks are right twice a day and you may take advantage of it with temporary coalitions, but that is very different from the real alliances that democratic socialists have to make globally with the forces fighting repression in all its capitalist, party machinery and religious authoritarian forms.
-- Nathan Newman