Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 17:35:34 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: Cold war ('Imperialism has never had it so good')


At 10:34 PM 7/16/96, Hugh Rodwell wrote:

>In an amazing piece glorifying the accomplishments and invincibility of US
>imperialism, Doug H turns me into an ism:

You remind me of Seymour Melman's idiotic dismissal of me as an "apologist
for the Pentagon" when I tore apart his inflated views of the economic
malignancy of U.S. military spending. Glorifying? Fuck you, comrade.

>Like, I'm still waiting for an answer on the policy conclusions to be drawn
>from your line on Iran etc for comrades fighting in Iran etc.
>
>Would Zeynep be better off fighting for a theocratic Muslim Turkey if she
>really wanted to hurt imperialism? I mean, what's a workers' state compared
>to bourgeois nationalists who turn the oil tap off for American companies?

This thickheadedness is just a rhetorical ploy, right? These questions,
just rhetorical? An anti-imperialist regime is quite capable of being
bloody awful, and imperialism can have occasional positive side-effects.
This is basic Marxism, no?

>In general, if US imperialism is doing such a great job of empire
>management and has never had it so good, according to Doug, who writes:
>
>>What pit is that? From the point of view of U.S. capital it has done very
>>well. Its enemy of 75 years collapsed, and there is almost no corner of the
>>globe impenetrable to capital. Capital's ideological enemies are in dire
>>shape, quoting 60-year-old texts to speak to their diminishing hordes.
>>Profitability is up; all major obstacles to multinational capital - whether
>>socialist, social democratic, or national-capitalist - have withered. The
>>dream of NSC-68 came true. What more do you want?
>
>If this is true, why is it proving so difficult to establish a stable
>bourgeoisie in the ex-Soviet Union?

Christ, they destroyed the damn country; who said it would be easy to
manage the victory? If you can't see the disappearance of the USSR as a
truly spectacular victory for world capital (U.S., senior partner), then we
have nothing more to say. Getting Yeltsin "re-elected" was no mean feat,
either.

>Why are US initiatives in places like
>Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia so trivial and ridiculous?

Ridiculous from whose point of view? A revolution was destroyed in Grenada;
the canal was kept in safely friendly hands; and Haiti, superficially
"democratized," is under the IMF's thumb. No one in power really gives a
damn about Somalia, and Bosnia is Europe's problem.

>Why
>is working class resistance (the French rail strike, the half-million march
>in Bonn, the events in Turkey, the strikes and occupations in the ex-Soviet
>Union, even the formation of a new Labor Party in the US, etc, etc) growing
>and becoming more and more explicit?

Because capitalism sucks, and because it will always provoke resistance.
But it does no one any good to deny the fact that the working class is
politically the weakest it's been since maybe the 1920s, and that the
prestige of socialism is the lowest since before 1848.

>Are you characterizing as 'socialist' the Stalinist regimes of the
>ex-Soviet Union? Do you consider Swedish Social-Democracy to have been an
>obstacle to multinational capital?

Swedish SD was most certainly an obstacle to multinational capital. The
attack on SD over the last 10-15 years is clear proof of that.

>The only real threat to the revolutionary workers' movement has been the
>real undermining of the existence of the workers' states embodying the
>economic and social gains of October. But again, this is not so much a
>defeat of the organized working class in direct struggle as the result of
>capitulation by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The political defeat of the
>Soviet working class was accomplished much earlier during the Stalinist
>Thermidor counter-revolution. This was later compounded by the capitulation
>of Pablo to the bureaucracy and the failure of the Fourth International
>under his influence (and later Mandel's) to try to develop
>Bolshevik-Leninist parties in countries under Stalinist regimes.

Yadda yadda yadda. You Trots are more catechistic than Catholics I've known.


Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
USA
+1-212-874-4020 voice
+1-212-874-3137 fax
email: <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>




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