Of all the ideologies, the globally dominant one is political liberalism (with its language of equal individual rights), the one most consonant with commodity fetishism, and that is the ideology to which most leftists have come to subscribe and which makes it difficult for them to resist imperialism in any way -- hence to be resisted.
> > It's an obligation of all who live in the United States to stop
> > sanctions on Iran, to prevent what we have allowed Washington to do to
> > the Iraqi people from being done to the Iranian people. We are
> > failing to perform this obligation, as usual.
>
> Who's this "we," exactly? The "left" whose tininess you never tire of
> pointing out? Sometimes you write as if objective social conditions
> make any radical action impossible; other times, as if we just think
> the right thoughts hard enough we can change everything.
It's an obligation of those who stand on the broadly defined Left in particular and the working class general, of course. It is futile to speak about such obligations to rightists and capitalists. Where numbers of leftists are small, what they can still offer is clarity of thought.
> > "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
> > they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
> > circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
> > Then, the task is first to take stock of the existing circumstances,
> > transmitted from the past, under which we are making history.
>
> Again, no kidding.
<snip>
> > It's up to the Iranian people to change their government if they wish,
> > though I'd advise them, based on history...
>
> No kidding, for the third time. But that's not relevant to your
> cheerleading for Islamism because of its alleged virtue as an anti-
> imperialist force, or your weird and indecipherable position on the
> subject line, universal asceticism and social leveling.
It's incomprehensible to you because you are, unlike Marx, a moralist, so there is no such thing for you as description (of what is), explanation (of why that's the case), and strategic thinking (about what we can make of them) that are beyond, or rather specifically reject, the morality of liberalism.
Once you prioritize US imperialism as the biggest problem, especially for those of us who live here, everything else follows. Then, you think like Lenin, looking at various forces that have and can further weaken the hegemon as he looked at Japan as it dealt a blow against the autocracy of Russia. The liberal democratic US state is incomparably more stable and powerful than the fragile autocratic state of Russia, for most US citizens are still loyal to it, so forces allayed against the former can never do what Japan did to the latter, but, still, every little moves (from military to political to economic to cultural) against it -- even Iran's mere survival as an independent republic, for instance -- helps, for leftists here, and for peoples in the rest of the world.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/jun/09b.htm> V. I. Lenin Debacle
Published: Proletary, No. 3, June 9 (May 27), 1905. Published according to the text in Proletary. Source: Lenin Collected Works, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962, Moscow, Volume 8, pages 482-485. Translated: Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor Lasker
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Russia's naval strength has been completely destroyed. The war has been lost irretrievably. The complete expulsion of the Russian troops from Manchuria and the seizure of Sakhalin and Vladivostok by the Japanese are now only a matter of time. We are witnessing, not just a military defeat, but the complete military collapse of the autocracy.
With every new blow struck by the Japanese, the significance of this collapse, as the collapse of the entire political system of tsarism, grows clearer both to Europe and to the whole Russian people. Everything is up in arms against the autocracy: the wounded national pride of the big and petty bourgeoisie, the outraged pride of the army, the bitter feeling over the loss of hundreds of thousands of young lives in a senseless military adventure, the resentment against the embezzlement of hundreds of millions from the public funds, the fears of an inevitable financial collapse and a protracted economic crisis as a result of the war, and the dread of a formidable people's revolution which (in the opinion of the bourgeoisie) the tsar could and should have avoided by means of timely and "reasonable" concessions. The demand for peace is spreading far and wide. The liberal press is indignant. Even the most moderate elements, like the landowners of the "Shipov" trend, are beginning to utter threats,and even the sycophantic Novoye Vremya is demanding the immediate convening of representatives of the people. -- Yoshie