File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9705, message 96


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.








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