Re: A defense of Lou was Re: A defense of NACLA

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a A defense of Lou was Re: A defense of NACLA,
el 9 Dec 00, a las 6:39, Gary MacLennan dijo:

>
> What is especially annoying is that the battle ground is now.  People will die
> and die horribly if a solidarity movement is not built with the poor of Latin
> America.

Correction: people are _already_ dying horribly in Latin America. The urgency
of the solidarity movement is still greater than you suppose, dear Gary. And,
if you allow me to give my opinion, let the solidarity movement be not only
with the "poor of Latin America", but with Latin America and its right to
autodetermination. Maybe this will sound less "humanitarian" and thus we shall
lose some help in that movement (those good-doers who just cry at poor people),
we shall ground it on more serious soil.

> The editorial Board of NACLA has a deep responsibility in this
> conjuncture to get their analysis correct.  Obviously perfection here is
> impossible.  Epistemology is doomed to be relative.  But what should not be at
> all relative is a clear understanding that American imperialism must be 
> opposed.

I would also make a correction here, which is that "the national and social
revolution in Latin America must be supported" rather than "imperialism must be
opposed". I guess that this would help showing people in the core countries
that our struggle is also _theirs_. It was not due to opposition to British
colonialism, but to rejection of slavery, that the British working class
supported the North during the American Civil War.

...

>
> Now the rot about the "National Industrial Leftism", "romantic
> revolutionaries" and nostalgia for the Russian Revolution amounts to
> nothing more than cant.   Cant from a bunch of academics who do not want to
> address the central issue of what their responsibility is when their own 
> ruling
> class is about to launch a new war against a disadvantaged peasantry.

Not only that. It should be understood that although there is an agrarian
question to settle in Latin America, this does not mean that the only
disadvantaged ones here are the peasants. Most classes in our formations are
"disadvantaged": urban proletarians; masses of jobless with petty bourgeois,
peasant or even bourgeois (particularly agrarian bourgeois) origin; farmers
producing for the domestic market; the lowest sections of the "bourgeoisie",
particularly those which own some small manufacturing shop; middle classes
(lawyers, physicians, clerks, technicians...) who face the absence of a
national economy where they could put their skills to work; military who are
taught to defend the Homeland but when they have to do it discover that either
they have no homeland left or that they have to shoot their own folkspeople;
women who are left alone by husbands that roam across the country in search of
some job or another, and finally get lost; children in the cities, who have
never had any contact with the countryside and who are increasingly
incorporated to the armies of beggards; "buscavidas" (lifeseekers, in
Argentinean slang) who spend their day trying to enforce on a penniless
audience on the public transport system some bad quality screwdriver or torch
made in Taiwan or in Korea;  a Pacific Ocean of toothless and sick shantytown
dwellers encircling the privileged and guarded "suburbia" of the new rich; and
on and on. None of these are peasants, and in many countries (not only in
Argentina, in Chile, Uruguay or Mexico too) are the bulk of the disposessed.

Perhaps if this horizon is shown to the potential supporters in the (social)
North they will not only feel pain for other humans, they will also realize
that "the story is told about them too"...

>  Like the
> English Left Liberal intelligentsia around the Irish Question, these NACLA 
> types
> will always squirm to try and avoid the place of decision.
>
> Of course they will heap opprobrium on anyone who dares point out exactly
> what they are doing.  Meanwhile the dead are many.  And that unfortunately is
> not elsewhere.

Yes. And I should add that their influence on our Leftist milieux is also a
powerful weapon of imperialism. A weapon that is known as cultural colonialism,
as ideological penetration.

I am not surprised that an Irishman can see these things. They have been
deserved the honor of being the testing ground for any iniquity that the
bourgeoisies at the core could imagine.

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx