Re: [A-List] Populism or Neoliberalism?

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/24/07, Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > Ahmadinejad is not a socialist, but neither are most people in the
> > Middle East today, nor are others in the rest of the world for that
> > matter.  Nor were populists who came before him, like Khomeini,
> > Nasser, Bhutto (Zulfikar Ali, not his daughter), Peron, and so on.
> > Populism is not socialism.  But when people choose populism rather
> > than socialism or liberalism, what are communists to do?
>
> I am somewhat puzzled by your question. People chose FDR in the 1930s
> but I would have been with A.J. Muste or even the Trotskyists raising
> hell. Being a revolutionary means swimming against the stream. The big
> problem is that swimming against the stream ideologically has often
> meant descending into sect and cult habits. I have spent the better part
> of 20 years trying to fight these habits, but I will never budge an inch
> on principle.

The question is whether your program in fact makes things better for
people than those that you criticize and whether you can win a
critical mass of people to your program so you can actually put it
into practice.

Saying that populism is not socialism is neither here nor there.
People already know that (except the Venezuelan situation has
objective and subjective ambiguities, as it is not a settled one).
--
Yoshie