I of course agree with this. My original post was a sort of bait to see who would grab it. :-)
I was browsing in quite old posts, and found the following which I wrote six years ago that seems relevant here.
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East Timor and Kosovo Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 12:04:53
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: The fundamental problem here (which W. Kiernan already pointed out to Chris) is why some leftists have begun to think _as if_ they were formulating foreign policies that they had the power to execute (when, as a matter of fact, they are not in power at all). Such a habit of thinking only belongs to the governing elite and their think-tank servants. Since e-lists are media of sovereign individualism, I suppose anyone is free to put forward as many proposals, with as much wishful-thinking, as s/he wants, but still it is an odd exercise.
[For Yoshie's whole post, see <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-September/015523.html> ]
In the 1970s I was associated with one of those groups which was in thrall to Chinese foreign policy -- that bizarre attempt by China to reproduce the international structure of the 1930s with new personae:
Nazi German = Revisionist USSR USSR = China England/US/etc = US/England/etc
The bad guys were trying to isolate China. The good guys were trying to force an alliance between China and the US against fascism. It led to really convoluted politics. During the Yugoslav war I pointed out that Chris's pathetic position was the last pale echo of this "Maoist" theory. One of the (im)practical results of this was that pipsqueak groups on the left were continually propounding what the U.S. should do to carry forward this program.
There was one thing to say for those grouplets: it was not wholly obvious that they were pipsqueak; it was not wholly irrational to see themselves as growing and coalescing into a new communist party in the u.s.
But now for the most part we don't even have groups with a (possible) future proclaiming complex programs for the imperialist states to carry out. We have pipsqueak individuals -- including individuals who proclaim their opposition to any party that might have an effective voice -- laying out such preposterous proposals for positive actions by the imperialist states.
Probably nothing individual leftists think at this time can make any difference. But whatever power we _might_ have must consist simply in saying NO! to the imperialists. Stop the bombing! Stop giving aid to Indonesia! Attemts to complicate those slogans result in merely private opinions the only effect of which is to give the individual a warm fuzzy feeling of his/her moral superiority. [Addendum May 2005: Say no to the Occupation rather than spin fairy tales about complex programs to turn Iraq over to the UN. The U.S. will probably do that as a way of covering its ass as it pulls out of the Mideast. Those leftists who call for it now are merely giving support to the Occupation, not opposing it.]
Such positions are frivolous except in one respect. They are _at this time_ the most serious kind of error a leftist or would-be leftist can make because they are barriers to the growth of unity within the left. Whatever other principles will (or may) eventually form the core of a united and growing left, a united No to the central imperialist powers must be one of them, a No uncluttered with the delusion that leftists can have any say in implementing foreign policy.
I don't know what will happen in East Timor if the imperialist powers stay out. I know rather exactly what will happen if Australian troops enter. To know that one need only read descriptions of life in Haiti at the present time. - Carrol
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The efforts to build resistance to the occupation in Iraq have been cluttered by leftists who "have begun to think _as if_ they were formulating foreign policies that they had the power to execute (when, as a matter of fact, they are not in power at all)." And the reason it is difficult to see presentation of revolutionary strategy is that revolutionary strategy is merely that of building popular struggle for reform (or for the degeat of particular imperialist adventures) rather than on wheeling and dealing with the DP. One of the first things I noted as I read through Lenin 35 years ago was how significant reform always depended on revolutionaries, while reformists were often the chief barriers to any reform!
Carrol
P.S. How are things in East Timor, incidentally?