Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 07:39:47 -0500
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Indigenism`


James Heartfield:

I wish you would consult the list archives where you'll find refutations of
all your arguments. Better still, do a little reading of the classical
works if you are going to talk about them.

"And did these giants of self criticism and clarification ever say, I was
wrong, the Jewish Question was mistaken, or the Critical Remarks on the
National Question were mistaken? No, because there is no contradiction
between these various texts. The child's game of 'many Marx's' like that
of 'many Lenin's' is just a way of avoiding the real meaning of what was
said."

I don't recall Marx or Lenin admitting very often that they had been wrong
about anything. They just submitted the new analysis. Lenin did precisely
that on the national question. In the 1914-17 articles which I discussed in
"Evaluating Imperialism" (Sci. & Sci. 1997, posted to this list last
summer) he laid out a new theory of appropriate to the era of imperialism,
"an era of the oppression of nations on a *new historical basis*" and he
never again repeated -- what he had said many times in 1899-1914 -- that
assimilation was progressive. He understood that assimilation in the new
era is forced assimilation and is reactionary. (I have quotes, if you're
interested, in my old book *The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory
of Natiolnalism*, Zed 1987.) M & E admitted they had been wrong in their
analysis of Ireland.

"The thesis is simple enough: they were communists and internationalists,
they did not advocate the contonisation of humanity into separate
nationalities and cultures as their ultimate goal."

Did they favor the destruction of the cultures of smaller nationLITIes in
order to force them to assimilate into the larger, imperialist
nationalities? Would they have approved of the US Indian Schools where
children were forceably taken from their parents and put in boarding school
where they were forceably Americanized? or the US policy in Puerto Rico up
to c.1940 of trying to force teachers to do all their instruction in
English? 

Somewhere Lenin says, late in life, that individual cultures will persist
long after communism has been attained across the world. 

"They favoured support
for the democratic demand of self-determination as the proper response
to national oppression. Only on the basis of freedom from national
oppression, could the possibility of a true union of peoples be
undertaken. The ultimate goal was to overcome national particularities
and hostilities. Self-determination was a necessary pre-condition of a
voluntary union."

This is all pre-World War Lenin/Stalin/ Luxemburg/Radek. Lenin stated
strongly that peoples have the *right* to self-deteermination for their own
goals. He attacked Radek (I think) for talking about self-detrmionsation as
though it were only -- as you imply asbove -- a slogan.

"To erect the means, independence, into the end, national hostility is to
mistake Stalin for Lenin, Garibaldi for Marx."

You've got your Stalin all mixed up. He, like you, was for assimilation,
forced assimilation. Lenin rebuked Stalin severely for his assimilationism
("autonomization, Georgia policy, etc.).

Your great undifferentiated culture into which all other cultures have been
melted smells English.

En lucha contra toda ignorancia

Jim Blaut   


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