rayrena:
> Let's look just as some of the people associated
with
> this list and events of the past few years. Lenin
and
> his SWP cronies declared, "We all are Hezbollah
now."
Ah, ok, I had forgotten that particular incident. Lenin is a member of a political organization that by virtue of being a political organization is also obligated to take concrete positions on these sorts of things, and then reduce those positions to agitational
slogans. That comes with the territory when you're a member of a political party. So does resort to legalistic terminology, which is why Lenin makes constant reference to Israeli's "illegal" this, and the Palestinian "right" to that, as if the correct communist analysis of a situation is contingent upon international law.
That is why I don't join those types of organizations.
> Yoshie has the institutional weight of Monthly
Review > attached to her pro-Ahmadinejad politics.
No, I don't share this assessment. I always thought Yoshie's professed "support" for Ahmadinejad was similar, but not the same, as Wojtek and Dennis's "support" for the EU: projecting political hopes/despair upon a distant agent. An actually-existing left would either be in a position of a) not needing those kind of projection screens or b) actually being in a position to lend material support to the object of choice.
> The antiwar movement that some here were associated
> with aligned themselves with France and Germany
> because they pretended to be against the U.S.'s
> design.
France and Germany did not "pretend" anything. There is a transatlanticist wing of Eurocapital, and a Euronationalist one. There are gradations in between.
The Euronationalists have temporarily lost hegemony, primarily because Europe as an entity is still too weak to pose any kind of real challenge to U.S. hegemony. Given that, Euronationalism of the Schroeder/Chirac kind is *at this point in time* nothing but a species of political idealism, rather than the geopolitical realism of the transatlanticists (or better, pragmatists acting in a transatlantic way) such as Merkel and Sarkozy, who at this moment in time can far better serve the interests of Eurocapital. But that can change, and I think it is quite probable that it will, but only over the long term.
> Open borders, if Jordan's definition is any
> indication, is a squishy, meaningless slogan.
Yes, I didn't like the definition that Jordan gave, especially his support for application forms and border patrols.
Let me formulate it this way: it should be axiomatic for the left that any human being should be able to live any damn place that s/he wishes. (and notice, dear comrade, that I even said "should be able" rather than "has a right". I, like you, despise legalistic terminology)