[lbo-talk] Yoshie: "dialogue" takes listening on your part, too

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 12 10:03:21 PDT 2006


Yoshie's approach reminds me of the Workers World Party (remember the ol' WWP, Becker, La Riva?) strategy of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

That is, anyone the US is putting pressure on MUST be doing something right -- or else the US govt wouldn't hate them. The WWP would strongly defend North Korea and other suspect places -- build them up into virtual paradises even, in their newspaper articles -- because the WWP disliked US imperialism so much they wanted to provide a kind of rationale for a counter-force, I guess. Even if North Korea or Milosevic, etc., weren't quite the socialist perfectionists the WWP would want, publicly the WWP made no concessions, and those countries were still built up into virtual model societies. A lot of wishful thinking, in other words, originating in probably a well-meaning desire to end US imperialism.

I'm just reminded of Seth Ackerman's comment that if we're going to ask Ahmadenijad to tap into his inner socialist, heck, why not ask the King of Saudi Arabia or any other key nation to tap into their inner socialist, too? Why not Bush?

-B.

Eric Beck wrote:

"[I can't read everything that goes by, but I've read enough of Yoshie's writings on Iran to know that I disagree with them. And I find it distressing to see a branch of MR, a publication with a long history of secularism and Marxism, be used as a transmission belt for apologetics for a reactionary theocratic regime. Yeah, so it's sweetened with a bit of populist economics, but populist economics are mostly pretty dodgy, as most Marxist economists would be eager to show.] "



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