Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 10:22:49 -0400 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Black Man's Burden kbevans-AT-panix.com (aka boddhisatva): > I suppose that if I was a good Marxist I would read Monthly Review >and swallow any line of bullshit that some "people's" leader puts out, >instead of trying to sift the truth out of the news. lnp3-AT-columbia.edu (aka Rabbi Teitelbaum): Is that what you were trying to do? Sift the truth out? Here at my workplace you can pop your head in any cubicle and hear the same crapola as your's about Kabila from my co-workers: how dare he ban demonstrations, murder Hutu refugees, make women wear skirts, etc. It is simply the message that the mass media wants people to hear. You are not sifting anything out. You are simply parroting what Dan Rather, McNeill-Lehrer and Newsweek want you to. You are a very average brain-washed American citizen and are marching in lock-step to official propaganda. The advantage to having you on a Marxism list is that it allows us to have a clinical study of mainstream thought. For all of your libertarian-syndicalism, you are all too conventional in your understanding of the way imperialism frames the issues of democracy in revolutionary societies. For instance, Nicaragua was not "democratic" because it censored La Prensa and curtailed the activities of some rightwing Catholic priests. El Salvador was "democratic" because it staged what Chomsky called demonstration elections. People like you who rely on the bourgeois media for their information found this line easy to swallow. Chomsky observed that in the case of the Gulf War, people who made a point of following the mainstream media had more incorrect ideas about the war than those who didn't read anything at all. When you posted yesterday, you failed to provide any context for Kabila's moves against Tshisekedi and his followers. The key question is the legitimacy of the constitutional assembly that elected him Prime Minister in 1991. While this assembly was obviously more representative than Mobutu's one-man rule, it was not inclusive of the great mass of the Congolese people who belonged to no party and who were tortured or murdered if they went too far politically. It is simply too much to expect a "democracy" to be established overnight in the Congo. The reason for this has nothing to do with Kabila's merits as leader. It is a question that historical materialism must address rather than moral philosophy. Parliamentary democracies can only succeed in societies where a bourgeoisie has emerged. The reason for this is obvious. Parliamentary democracy is the quintessential instrument of bourgeois power. Societies that lack a bourgeoisie, which is the case for most severely underdeveloped nations like the Congo, simply can not produce parliamentary democracy on demand. A related problem is that they also can not produce socialist democracy on demand since they lack a powerful working class. Based on backward peasantries, they exist in a contradictory transitional state. The only hope is to transform the peasant mass as rapidly as possible into an educated working class without alienating those being transformed. The record has been very uneven. Over and over again the peasantry has resisted the modernization project. In Mozambique, the Renamo guerrillas burned down every health clinic and school it could get its hands on even though many of these guerrillas were at one time involved in the struggle to liberate the nation from Portugal. Peasant consciousness is difficult to transform. This has been the undoing of many socialist experiments of the 20th century. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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