Re: Aussie/NZ Imperialism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Well, this is the crux.  How to turn stuff against *our own* ruling class.
>It's dead easy in Australia and NZ to whip up some hostility to the French
>or the US.  The real challenge is finding ways of exposing the imperialist
>nature of our own ruling classes and their states.  Unbtil the blinkers are
>removed from the eyes of the masses on that score, we won't get very far in
>developing any genuinely *revolutionary* politics.
>
>Cheers,
>Phil

The hostility was not to the "French or the US". It was to nuclear war. The
protests were not just happening in New Zealand. They were world-wide. The
largest demonstration in the United States since the end of the Vietnam war
was organized by the anti-nuclear movement. The first activity I got
involved with after leaving the Trotskyist movement was Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility because they were organizing around
Star Wars. It was absolutely obligatory for Marxists to fight for
unilateral nuclear disarment. If I was a Marxist in New Zealand in the
1980s, I would have pushed for this and against calling for some kind of
equivalence between the west and the USSR.

In the 1950s some of the new young cadres of the Trotskyist movement came
out of SANE, the middle-class antinuclear movement. They were attracted to
a class-based oppositon to nuclear war. In the 1980s, when Reagan began
pushing for an increase in nuclear weapons and for Star Wars, it was part
of a strategic move to put the Soviet Union on the defensive militarily and
economically.

It is a serious sectarian mistake to denigrate this movement. If another
like it arises, I would expect serious Marxists to act as the militant
left-wing.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)