> Julio writes: "In effect, anti-racism and anti-imperialism
> overlap almost entirely."
> In what way, Julio? I'm thinking of the major anti-imperialist
> movements which emerged in India, Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba,
> South Africa, Palestine and elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and
> Latin America and I'm having a hard time recalling any of them
> as having equated "Western imperialism" with the "white race",
> which is what your comment about "overlap" suggests.
I mean overlap as in the intersection of two *different* sets in a Venn diagram.
I guess this is complicated, but in telegraphic terms my thought is this:
Communism, if it's going to happen ever, it's going to have to be built from the bottom up (hopefully while minimizing resistance from the top down) by a united and combative critical mass of working people all over the world, so much so that building communism *and* uniting working people may just be one and the same process.
The problem of course is that the path to unity is full of landmines. It is by removing those landmines that working people will evolve the human and organizational capacities to build their unity/communism. At this point, the biggest landmine, by far, is international wealth inequality. The huge international disparities in productive force and standard of living form the basis for the existence of imperialism, militarism, and all the crap that flows from them. It underpins the inability of states to sensibly and collectively address other global challenges (e.g. global warming).
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of "multipolarity" -- or, if you prefer, the rise of China, India, Latin America, and hopefully Africa and the Middle East, a phenomenon that goes back all the way to the struggles against colonialism -- is the most formidable (and the only real) challenge to international inequality, again the basis of imperialism. This rise doesn't necessarily trace out a line straight to communism, but it's a step in the right direction. Yes, at this point, for all we know, this "convergence" in productivity and standards of living is firmly embedded in a global capitalist frame. In a sense, it may just come as a realization of Marx's anticipation of capital as a uniforming force in the preface to the first edition of Capital. *In this sense*, some sort of "liberalism" (and I'm aware of how polysemous this term is nowadays) is coincidental with historical progress. (In passing, if we take the tenets or the practice of "liberalism" -- in any of its versions -- and multiply them by -1, we won't get Marxism.)
We radicals can talk all we want. Propaganda is not a bad thing. Personally, I'm much more comfortable supporting Chavez's or Correa's defense of the natural resources of their nations than I am defending the right of China to retaliate in a trade war with the U.S. or the right of Iran under Ahmedinajad to develop nuclear capacity. And the reason has to do with the fact that the former are advancing some explicit, conscious socialist platform, presenting their struggles under the banner of some "socialism of the 21st century."
But political leaders are -- as Chavez recently admitted -- more effect than cause. As a mass, working people only set themselves in motion out of necessity. They only tackle what they problematize on the basis of their own circumstance and experience, and on their own timing. So, if we step back and don't get too distracted by the specs of the political doctrines with which given vanguards or leaders make sense of their situation, rationalize it, or -- to be more generous -- articulate it consciously, i.e. if we focus on the raw human energy that fuels the social movements from the grassroots and enables those vanguards and leaders to emerge, we'll see that the rise of China, India, Latin America, and hopefully Africa and the Middle East, has very little to do with the Marxist high abstraction of "class consciousness" in any sense credentialed Marxists (e.g. Trotskyists) could recognize.
The raw human energy I'm talking about has almost everything to do with the secular vindication of -- yes! -- races and nations and genders. It's an *economic* vindication with roots in injuries suffered by one's ancestors in colonial times, the scars of which we carry with us. It's raw, it's touchy, it's deep. It's about having nothing of that anymore. It's about having the productive and consumptive force, the wealth and the power to face off or engage other races, nations, and genders on equal footing. The fact that capitalism can, in theory, accommodate the elimination of racism, nationalism, and sexism doesn't make much of a practical difference, because capitalism will not eliminate them unless it is forced to do so by a series of revolutions. And that is the real issue here: the struggle, the momentum of those revolutions. We may know where a revolution starts, which institutions it consciously reacts against or sets out to overthrow, but we never know where it ends. So, effectively, if masses of people problematize imperialism or racism or sexism, and capitalism resists jettisoning imperialism, racism, or sexism, then all the worse for capitalism!
I think this is the direction in which most working people in the world are effectively moving. It is in these struggles that effective unity can be forged. Survey undocumented Mexican or Central American workers in New York City. They will tell you one way or another that the big issue for them is anti-Mexican or anti-Guatemalan or anti-Hispanic or anti-color *racism* or prejudice or discrimination. I'm no expert on China, but it seems to me that the rule of the Communist Party over 1/6 of the human race has more to do with improvements in the productive force and the standard of living feeding into their ethnic and national pride than with any other thing. Marx and Engels wrote that the job of communists is not that of sects trying to overlay their ideology on the movement of the class, to dictate them what to struggle for. Instead, their job is to fight with the class while emphasizing their broader interests, their unity, and their longer term horizon.
You may legitimately ask what ever this has to do with the debate on Michaels held on this list. Honestly, I cannot tell, because I haven't had a chance to look up the entire thread. I just reacted to two paragraphs that Doug quoted. And I've narrowly stated the reasons why I do so.
I agree with Max. We are all coming at this from different angles. It takes a while to actually communicate, make common what is private.
Best to keep things cool -- to try to focus on the ideas, not on the personalities involved.