Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 21:03:31 +0000
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: M-I: MRTA Has History Of High-Profile Attacks


I don't know this. Neither do you.  All I know is that those people in
the embassy are risking their lives to save their comrades from Fujimore's
torturers; that the people they hold hostage are not workers and peasants
but their mortal class enemies. I don't need anything more to know not to
say a single bad word about these people, especially at a moment when they're
under the direct military and propaganda attack.

I also think that the forms of struggle like this one have their place and
function in the tradition of the oppressed. An act of revolutionary histrionics
in the moment of deep demoralization of the masses may have a beneficial 
psychological effect and cheer them up. The bourgeoisie has its Rembos, teflon
and real. Why can't the oppressed have their Robin Hoods? 

KARL: This is utter rubbish. All that this type of adventurist
activity does is tell the working class that it is nothing but a
passive mass incapable of engaging in active struggle that can
succeed in overthrowing the capitalist system. It tells them that an
"elite core" will do the thinking and acting for them. This is 
basically the Baader-Meinhoff mentality.

It is also used by the ruling class to promote the alienation of the
masses from revolutionary politics since the latter is falsely
identified by the bourgoeis propaganda machinery with this kind of
reactionary terrorism. The ostensibly horrific character of such
events provides powerful images for the bourgeois visual media to
exploit in such a way as to rally the masses around the ruling
class and thereby sustain the political disarmament of the working
class.

In short the reactionary character of this terroist event in Lima 
is a dialectical expression of both the lack of confidence in the ability 
working class to engage in independent action and a fear of its 
ability engage in such action: a contracitory unity. Consequently it 
constitutes a means to hinder independent revolutionary mass action 
by the working class.

This politics of the theatre must be opposed by marixsm. It is a
politics that ultimately has its source in the bourgeois visual
media. The immediate authors are merely stage actors that play out
the part: the modern movie stars. Indeed for many it becomes
increasingly difficult to distinguish between these media stars and
the Steven Segals. Fact and fiction become increasingly
indistinguishable so that all the world is a stage to borrow from
the supreme bourgeois Renaissance dramatist, Willie Shalespeare.
Under present day conditons Renaissance capitalism and imperialist
capitalism unite in the form of the politics of the theatre as 
caricatured form: the televesion event in Lima. Rwandan refugees,
Lima terrorists and Stevan Segal fuse into one another so that fact
and fiction are integrated into the one dimensional form of the
television image. One is as ephemarally exciting as the other. "All
is ephemeral save big bucks."

                      Karl Carlile




     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---