On 3/24/11 10:43 AM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
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