Re: AUT: Re: Palestione, Israel and other ghettoes

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris, you continue to use a completely inconsistent
argument against me. On the one hand, you dismiss the
strategy of permanent revolution and the military bloc
as class collaborationist, conflating it in your
latest post to Stalinism's political bloc. On the
other hand, you advocate an openly
class-collaborationist, Stalinist two-stage approach
to revolution in Palestine and South Africa.

If the idea of the SACP making a military bloc with
the ANC to achieve permanent revolution in South
Africa ten years back is absurd, because the SACP is
bourgeois and workers' revolutions can't be effected
by bourgeois actors, then how much more absurd is your
offering of the SACP-ANC post-apartheid government as
a model for the Palestine in the immediate future?

If the Bolsheviks betrayed the Russian workers with
capitalist policies, why would the Palestinians
workers benefit in the short term from independence
under a capitalist government?

As far as I can see, there are only three basic
approaches to revolution in economic semi-colonies
with cross-class national liberation movements.
The first is the Stalinist one, which involves a
political bloc of classes (and often, these days, a
call on UN intervention) to establish a 'new
democatic' capitalist government in order to
strengthen the workers and peasants for a real,
anti-capitalist revolution in the future. Thiago is a
representative of this stagist approach.

The second approach, which I argue for, is that of
permanent revolution, which wants the workers to make
a 'military' alliance with the national bourgeosie
only to defeat imperialism, and then to turn the
defeat of imperialism into a socialist revolution, a
revolution which must be spread to many other
countries to be successful in the long term.

The third approach, which Harald and Peter J argue
for, says that the whole idea of a bloc of any sort
with other classes and a national liberation struggle
is wrong, and that a revolution has to take place
across a whole region or even the whole world to be
successful anywhere.

The problem with your arguments is that you invoke the
third approach to criticise me, then switch to the
first approach when you make the positive parts of
your arguments. I think you should make it clear where
you stand on the question of blocs with other classes.
Do you support them, and if so under what
circumstances? If the criteria of the military bloc
are useless, what alternative criteria do you advance?


Cheers
Scott




 --- cwright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >
> > Chris, I think Lenin, Trostky or Spain (1936-39)
> have  very
> > little to tell us about the current situation of
> the East
> > Mediterranean.
>
> Indeed, Harald, I agree in so far as repeating their
> formulas has very
> little to tell us about it.  That was my point,
> which I intended to
> elaborate, but apparently failed to do so.
>
> > Neither you nor Scott seem to have even given a
> thought
> > to the possibility that when I say East
> Mediterranean, I
> > mean precisely an East Mediterranean perspective,
> and
> > not a narrow, stupefying, and hopeless,
> Israeli-Palestini
> > one. We are not talking about an island.
>
> Could you develop this.  I actually said nothing
> about it because I found it
> intriguing and largely agreed with it, but I also
> was not clear on where you
> were going with it.
>
> > With viable I mean precisely viable, as something
> with
> > a possible future other than self-destructive.
> Which
> > perspectives being promoted makes a difference.
> > When you write; "I assume viability is an issue
> since we
> > are thinking of an achievable demand less than
> > immediate workers' power," you assume wrong.
> Certainly
> > not in  that actually achiving something is a
> point , and not
> > in that "immediate workers' power" not being on
> the agenda
> > (there exists nothing even close to ripe social
> revolutionary
> > conditions) but in speaking as if the demand in
> itself,
> > taken in isolation, was the crucial, and not the
> radically
> > different perspective in entails, and the
> possibilities it
> > opens for.
>
> So we actually agree that the intent of the demand,
> not the demand itself,
> is what matters, that it shifts the focus from a
> very narrow situation to
> one which is broader and about offering different
> possibilities.  I really
> meant no more than this which is why I focussed on
> the issues of
> self-organization and not on a single demand per se.
>  Maybe I am missing
> something, but I don;t see us as disagreeing, but if
> you feel I missed
> something, please go on.
>
> It could easily be extended and put within the
> > context of an advocacy of direct democracy, and
> not
> > only in words but in organizational forms. And
> even
> > if far less than this is accomplished, it none the
> less
> > has the potential of preparing the ground.
>
> If I understand you correctly, we are talking here
> about the fact that
> revolution is not something which pops up on the
> morrow, but which requires
> the development of practices in the here and now
> which change the terms of
> existing struggles at whatever level.
>
> > Nor is it a perspective necessarily so foreign to
> many
> > Palestinians and other Arabs in the region, even
> if such
> > voices do not get much coverage, and tend also to
> be
> > beyond the compreshension of not only mainstream
> > journalist but also "leftist" in "the West" and
> other
> > consumers of images of "third world heroes and
> martyrs".
>
> As I see it, the pan-Arab impulse is one which is
> not simply
> pan-nationalist, but means a sense of not being
> simply people facing
> 'national' problems, but an already existing sense
> of a broader, regional
> sensibility which can also be played out in class
> terms.
>
> > "Our task," (as you phrase it) to me is simple
> saying what
> > seems to make sense, nothing more spectacular than
> that.
> > Libertarian communism makes sense to me, and
> acting
> > in ways and promoting ideas that are compatible
> with
> > such and end, likewise.
> >
> Ok, I am not sure we disagree so much as I prattled
> on too long.  Btw,
> saying what makes sense is usually a rather
> spectacular activity, as we live
> in a world which generates vast masses of non-sense
> posing as sense.  In
> that, I was actually supportive of your points on
> this and hoped I was
> supporting them and building on them.  Maybe I
> talked past it.
>
> On the rest, I agree.
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>
>
>
>
>      --- from list
> aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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