[lbo-talk] Marxists who take lands from peasants and shoot them

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Mar 19 01:06:21 PDT 2007


"Is it me or Marxists who take lands from peasants and shoot them when they resist, for the purpose of plain and simple capitalist development (not even in the name of socialism, national security, etc.), who are hostile to Marxism? "

I was a bit confused by this, Yoshie. Are you talking about China? Or maybe Robert Mugabe? Where are these Marxists who are dispossessing the peasants?

I was rather under the impression that there were no Marxist regimes or mass movements around.

All the same, I see that the peasants of the South are pretty good at killing one another, without the intervention of Marxists. Who were the Marxists killing peasants in their millions in Rwanda? Who are the Marxists engaged in raids on farmers in Darfur? Who were the Marxists in the civil wars in Somalia, or in the Iran-Iraq war? And who are the Marxists in the war between Shia and Sunni in Iraq? Was the Suharto regime Marxist when it attacked peasants in Aceh and East Timor?

There is one strand of Marxism that has proved pretty lethal, most especially to peasants, and that, curiously enough is the Marxism that oriented itself to the peasantry, Maoism. You do not have to accept Chang and Halliday's numbers to know that Mao himself was a dab hand at wiping out the peasants, and his protege Pol Pot seems to have been going for the record. I seem to recall that Mugabe was on the pro-Chinese wing of the Zimbabwean national liberation movements.



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