[lbo-talk] Regime Change and Paranoid Reaction

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/23/07, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On 5/22/07, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > Doug quoted from the Alien & Sedition Acts!
>
> Yoshie wrote:
>
> When you lose sight of capitalist imperialism, your vision gets
> blurred, and you begin to think that the IWW and Leon Trotsky on one
> hand and the United States government on the other hand, i..e.,
> left-wing revolutionaries and right-wing counter-revolutionaries, mean
> one and the same thing to the people of Iran, just because they are
> both "alien" to them (the claim that the government of Iran does not
> make today, no longer fearful of Soviet imperialism which is now a
> thing of the past).  What would the dead anarchists and socialists say
> about being equated with imperialists, plotting regime change to make
> the world even friendlier to the empire of capitalism than it already
> is, if they could come back to life?
> ********************
>
> My guess is that these alte Genossen would say (the ones who wouldn't vote war
> credits for their rulers in the run up to WWI), "We're not in favour of
> wage-labour, capital or the State no matter what the national flavour.  The
> proletariat has no country."  Bakunin would probably say, "A theocratic State
> opposing a capitalist-imperialist State--get rid of them both."

The anarchists and socialists who opposed WW1, I expect, wouldn't
support a capitalist-imperialist state's "democracy assistance" for
the purpose of regime change today, nor would they be happy to have
their revolutionary internationalism equated with liberal imperialism.


> That "left in form, right in essence" dogma is not this, still living, socialist's cuppa :
> it's an old formulae designed to keep the workers cheering for one ruling class
> against another.

Letting Washington pursue its regime change campaigns with impunity is
to keep the workers, especially the American workers, cheering for one
ruling class, especially the most ideological wing of the American
power elite, against others.  Keeping the American workers cheering
for them in no way helps to get rid of the capitalist state in either
the USA or Iran or anywhere.
-- 
Yoshie