ravi wrote:
>
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7333556703536657423&q=chomsky&hl=en
>
> My own rough transcript:
>
> We are all aware that right at this moment bodies are being torn to
> shreds by infernal weapons -- unknown number of people who have already
> been driven to the edge of survival by decades of murderous sanctions
> ... that may be facing starvation and slow death. Under these
> circumstances it is not easy to step back and ask why all this is
> happening, where it is likely to go and what we can do to shape the
> future, but that's what I want to try to do. About the last question --
> what we can do to shape the future -- the answer is straightforward.
> Quite a lot. In fact there is noone anywhere else who can do as much as
> we can. We are uniquely privileged. We have unusual freedom that's not a
> gift from on high; its a legacy that was won by centuries of constant
> dedicated struggle, and that's really the answer to what we can do.
Chomsky is making several errors. One is the implict claim that "we" can do a lot to stop that murder _right now_. But that is the mistake leftists have been making since 9/11, assuming that what they think or do can affect policy _right now_. Yoshie never shared that false premise, but her present impatience might have something to do with having that premise sneak into her feelings if not her thought.
Why can we not do anything _right now_ (or even next year or two years after that). Examine the periods in u.s. history (and it would be the same in any other core imperialist nation) when we _did_ do something _right now_. The first in the 20th century, the 1930s, were a period of vast economic collapse, a collapse moreover which was resisting all efforts to ameliorate it. The second, the 1960s, the civil-rights movement and the Black Liberation Movement led the way.
What now is equivalent in enormous impact to the economic collapse of the '30s or the black struggles of the 1950s and 1960s -- struggles which themselves owed much to the left-over cadre from the batrles of the '30s _and the ljosing battles of the '40s and early '50s? That is a rhetorical question. Nothing in the present remotely resembles the moving events of the '30s and '60s, and our political thought _must not_ ignore that fact and the severe restraints it puts on what we can accomplish. At the age of 76 I do not expect to be around for the next period when we _do_ have a direct and immediate impact on events -- but only those who recognize our current constraints can usefully enter into preparing for those future struggles.
Carrol