On Mar 24, 2011, at 9:10 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> [Like I said, I'm not sure what I think of this business, but
> Achcar's position is worth taking seriously.]
>
> http://www.zcommunications.org/libya-a-legitimate-and-necessary-debate-from-an-anti-imperialist-perspective-by-gilbert-achcar
>
> Libya: a legitimate and necessary debate from an anti-imperialist
> perspective
> By Gilbert Achcar
>
> "The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was indeed a compromise with the
> imperialists, but it was a compromise which, under the
> circumstances, had to be made. ... To reject compromises 'on
> principle', to reject the permissibility of compromises in general,
> no matter of what kind, is childishness, which it is difficult even
> to consider seriously ... One must be able to analyze the situation
> and the concrete conditions of each compromise, or of each variety
> of compromise. One must learn to distinguish between a man who has
> given up his money and fire-arms to bandits so as to lessen the evil
> they can do and to facilitate their capture and execution, and a man
> who gives his money and fire-arms to bandits so as to share in the
> loot."
> - Vladimir I. Lenin
But exactly who is compromising with whom? Does Achcar claim to be compromising with Sarkozy? The "Fourth International (whatever that is) with NATO? The heirs of Mao Zedong and Stalin with those of Richard Nixon and Winston Churchill?? Now we're getting somewhere. Nobody has disclosed the quid-pro-quos underlying the SC open-ended "authorization" when they could at the very least have insisted on a standstill ceasefire to be enforced by the SC itself.
Of course imperialists always are open to compromise among themselves. But why in the world should "Marxists" endorse those compromises whose most important terms are indeed secret from them? Is it the insane delusion that they always have to speak as if they were on bargaining terms with the class enemy, as if Achcar and Obama could speak on equal-to-equal terms like Trotsky and Hoffman?
My notion of Marxist politics is that the proletarian movement always advances its own program as the basis for political mobilization but never just says "yes but" or "no" to imperialists who don't give a shit about it.
My idea of a Marxist program in defense of the Libyan democratic revolution, as I have already expressed, is based on the concept of solidarity between the Egyptian and Libyan revolutions. Marxists should call for the formation of an Egyptian volunteer force (conscription produces a militarily trained working class) demanding that all necessary weapons be supplied by (or taken from) the Egyptian army, and that this revolutionary volunteer army would intervene in solidarity with the Libyans. I have no idea what resonance such a call would have (the present temperature of the Egyptian revolution being as hard to gauge from the media as the present temperature in the Fukushima cooling pools) but it would at least do something to heighten the antagonism between the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces in Egypt.
By cheering for the imperialist intervention, even to the measured measure of "two cheers," you just compromise *yourself*, without doing anything for the Libyans. And by hissing at it you keep your purity, without doing anything for the Libyans.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64