Revolutionary Defeatism

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at sun.com
Thu Mar 27 10:01:38 PST 2003


At 11:08 PM 03/26/2003 -0500, you wrote:
> >US leftists, as far as I can see, are as sophisticated in
> >understanding capitalism as leftists in nations such as France and
> >Venezuela who are far better organized and more powerful than here.
> >I conclude that US leftists are lacking not in what Marx was good at
> >but in what Lenin excelled.
>
>I don't see it that way. On the U.S. left, broadly defined, there are
>a lot of delusions about the charms of petty capitalism - the problem
>is more one of scale rather than structure. The "corporation" is
>demonized with little understanding of what a corporation is, except
>in a very legalistic sense. So if we could have locally owned
>businesses and locally traded currencies, proprietorships rather than
>large firms, everything would be all right. Fantasies that some
>malignant neoplasm called finance has grown on a fundamentally
>virtuous system of production are rampant. There's little
>understanding of the class relations of capital or of the origins of
>profit or of finance as a system of power. I think that kind of
>thinking is much less prevalent in Western Europe or Latin America.

I agree with Doug. There's very, very little class consciousness in the USA. There is deep, deep shame at being working class. Add to this the most awesome commercial propaganda machine in the world and mix in a good dollop of racism. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Joanna



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