Eric wrote:
> Now everyone can return to quoting Lenin and Chomsky
> and talk about world politics as if it were all a
> question of analyzing the relations between states,
> especially the two major poles, and figuring out
> where the clients play into it. The cold war's back,
> and it feels good.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is a consequence of a non-reception of the critique of political economy in much of what passes for a "left", even in the self-described "Marxist" sectors.
In the Worldview-Marxism of the Second International and it's Third International offshoot, Marx's fundamental insight into capitalist society as the impersonal domination of reified social structures mediated by commodity exchange was completely disregarded in favor of a personalized of a conception of social reality as an unmediated conflict of personal domination and exploitation between two fundamental social classes.
Thus instead of an analysis of the political sphere that takes into account the independent logic of the state-form, you have all of these crude attempts to discern unmediated 1-to-1 correspondence between the actions of state actors and perceived economic "interests".
The extreme pathological form of this personalization was exhibited today on Louis Proyect's "Marxism" list, where a poster named John Wheat Gibson has posited that recent U.S. foreign policy is the result of the sinister influence of Jewish billionaires who have enslaved Washington to pursue their nefarious Zionist aims.
The list moderator, instead of slapping down this vicious anti-semitic conspiracy theory, chided the poster for spamming the list with banalities that are already known by the majority of list members anyway.
At times, the complete marginality and irrelevance of the Western "left" is a relief.