I am not sure what your point is, except that we are irrelevant and powerless and our activism is irrelevant and we might as well not bother. Nothing we do ever makes any difference, the only thing the public responds to is the cost and the body count, which are independent of us. So we can say any damn fool thing we please and it's as if we were talking Sanskrit no matter what we said. Why do you bother, Yoshie? Why not finish a dissertation on Henry James or something like that? Me, I'm writing about attorneys' fees in common fund class actions.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/23/06, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Of course it makes no difference to Cuba. We are
> > totally irrelevant. I have no illusions about that
> or
> > any pretentions. But it makes a difference to us.
> And
> > since we care, it matters at least to us.
>
> People just continue living in parallel ideological
> universes, it
> seems to me, believing what they want to believe, no
> matter what
> anyone says. And I don't blame postmodernists or
> even Heidegger for
> this fact. :->
>
> The only thing Americans respond to is death and
> violence, lots and
> lots and lots of death and violence, like death and
> violence in Iraq.
> Even then, the response is weak, as it is not
> Americans who are doing
> the dying.
>
> On 12/23/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
> > On Dec 23, 2006, at 2:00 PM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote in response to
> > one of Yoshie's "it doesn't matter what we think"
> messages:
> >
> > > Of course it makes no difference to Cuba. We are
> > > totally irrelevant. I have no illusions about
> that or
> > > any pretentions. But it makes a difference to
> us. And
> > > since we care, it matters at least to us.
> >
> > It may matter to Cubans too. For all we know,
> there are sympathetic
> > Cubans who'd like socialism without repression
> someday, and looking
> > to leftists in the US and elsewhere for ideas and
> solidarity. I do
> > believe that's true of China (the lbo-talk
> archives get a decent
> > number of hits from China, as does my radio
> archive). Ideas don't
> > have to have "social force" behind them to be
> interesting or useful.
>
> In the end, though, we have to judge ideas either by
> results or lack
> thereof. Jim has a point in asking: if labor
> leftists have such a
> good idea, why have they not succeeded in taking
> charge of any union?
> And if American leftists have such a good idea about
> how to go about
> building socialism without repression, why have they
> not been able to
> build it or even social democracy here?
>
> We haven't even been able to lift a goddamn blockade
> against Cuba that
> has been going on for decades, though just about
> everyone in the world
> -- including people like foreign and even American
> corporate
> executives who have no affection for Cuban socialism
> but don't mind
> bringing tourists to Cuba, doing oil exploration in
> Cuba, etc. --
> thinks that the blockade is ridiculous.
>
> On 12/23/06, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > One of the few places it matters
> > what we sat about Cuba, etc., is in live
> > antinterventionist movements.
>
> There is no live anti-interventionist movement. :-0
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com