From: Zeynep Tufekcioglu <zeynept-AT-turk.net>
Subject: Re: M-I: Nationalism (Fwd from moderator)
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 16:20:01 +0300


Someone summed up what happened for two centuries in a few paragraphs,
concluding with;

>>This sums up the revolutionary heritage of  Marxism, Bolshevism and 
>>Trotskyism on this question today. It enables us to explain why in 
>>times of crisis, nationalism comes to the fore, as rival national or 
>>ethnic leaders compete for influence over terrritory which they can 
>>offer to imperialism as its local agents. 

With half a paragraph about what's happening today. I won't reproduce the
whole post to spare the agony.

That's exactly what I was referring to when I said "in this cyberseminar if
we get big abstractions, we'll have nothing".

I find this attitude incredibly stupid and unfruitful. Say we have a
complicated problem like the rise of political islam and its attraction to
many working class people and the urban poor in various islamic capitalist
nations? "Religion is the opium of the masses". What else do we need to know
anyway.

The author says:

>The result is the emergence of imperialist proxy wars in which whole 
>populations are mobilised by appeals to  nationalism  [Croat vs 
>Serb], ethnicity [Tutsi and Hutu], religion [Hamas vs Zionism] behind 
>the formation of bourgeois mini-states offering themselves up for 
>super-exploitation.. 

Right. That explains the whole phenomenon. No need to worry about the
details. The Hamas kids throwing rocks at Isreali APCs and getting shot want
to offer a bourgeois mini-state to imperialism, HADEP women marching with
the colors of the Kurdish flag are also in the line to offer a bourgeois
mini-state to imperialism.

I remember something about the Marxist method. You're supposed to start from
the concrete, before abstracting. This kind of stuff looks more like
abstract -> abstract -> abstract -> abstract (boring -> boring -> boring).

Zeynep



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