Re: Malvinas

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 14 Oct 2001 13:24:35 -0400, Xxxx Xxxxxx wrote:
>Jingoistic bourgeois nationalism. Argentine
>capital, that is the ruling class, has no
>interest in the oil and gas reserves around the
>islands? What utter nonsense.

It is hard to figure out whether Xxxx's poor grasp of the national
question is rooted in the Ted Grant school of Trotskyism, or simply
flows from his own inexperience. In fact, Marxists understand that
control over resources is an essential part of the national question,
whatever the character of the government embroiled in a dispute with
imperialism. Of course, Xxxx believes that the categories
"imperialism" and "semicolonial" do not apply to Great Britain and
Argentina respectively, so this point might not be grasped by him.
The rest of us would understand the need to defend the seizure of oil
wells by Mexico in the Yucatan peninsula, or Nasser's determination
to take over the Suez Canal, etc., but Argentina apparently has not
received his go-ahead to do something similar.

What is lacking in Xxxx's "analysis" is a historical materialist
approach to Argentina, a nation that he groups with Canada, New
Zealand and Australia for some reason understood only by him. His
"analysis" does not rest on a Marxist reading of Argentine history or
any other radical scholarship. It seems to rest on a cursory review
of websites, which I strongly suspect are from places like the CIA
yearbook or the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Xxxx is too much of a cocksure sectarian to even realize that he is
embarrassing himself. The last time I ran into such overweening
self-confidence was the old days of the grandfather of this list when
people like Hugh Rodwell and Bob Malecki would pontificate
ceaselessly about Nicaragua without even a cursory understanding of
the relevant social, economic and historical data.

Over the past 50 years, Argentina has experienced the kind of turmoil
and repression that typifies the rest of Latin America. It has had
coups, military dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, semi-insurrectionary
working class uprisings in places like Cordoba, death squads, etc. If
Argentina is to be grouped with Canada, etc., one might have an
obligation to explain why putatively similar socio-economic
foundations have not launched identical reactions. To try to answer
this question, Xxxx referred us to CIA interference in Australian
politics when opposition to a Labor candidate was financed from
abroad because he was seen as insufficiently deferential to
Washington. The key point here is that Australia never spawned
insurrectionary movements. The CIA has interfered with European
elections as well, but this in itself does not settle the question of
whether semicolonial is a relevant category. For that matter, we can
assume that the CIA has interfered with USA politics. Does this mean
this country should be grouped with Chile, Guatemala or Iran?

In fact the only relevant comparison to Argentina in such quarters is
Quebec, which did undergo pitched battles in the 1970s. Obviously
national oppression was a factor in this development, just as it was
in Argentina. Xxxx seems to have some kind of superficial
understanding of national oppression based on poster art. Unless you
have shoeless peasants firing AK-47's at B-52's, then the category of
national oppression would not occur to him. In reality, you can have
industry and blue-collar workers and still experience national
oppression. In many ways, the French-speaking workers of Quebec and
the Spanish speaking Argentinians are oppressed in the same way. When
I was at work at Mobil on a consulting project in 1982, all of the
British consultants routinely referred to Argentinians as "dagoes".

>This much is true, had capitalist relations been
>overthrown on the island the tenor of the action
>would have been quite different. But how could a
>bourgeois reactionary Argentine ruling class
>been expected to allow for islanders what it
>denied to the mainland?

This boils down to Daniel DeLeon type socialism, where every question
devolves into whether a specific reform or struggle is "socialist" or
not. In many ways, this kind of ultimatism is the reverse side of the
coin of reformism, or the "water and gas socialism" that Phil
Ferguson referred to.

>I believe a call for a socialist federation of
>Argentina and the islands would have been a
>correct call, indeed it was a call which
>Militant supported as counterposed to Nestor's
>call to support the bouregois government in a
>time of war, believe its propaganda rather than
>reveal its true agenda and support it with a
>call to jail opponents of the war.

This call for a socialist federation is abstract propagandism of the
worst kind. If Trotsky knew that sects in his name sought neutrality
between the second most powerful imperialist nation and a country
that had been on the receiving end of financial, military and
diplomatic subversion for over a century in the name of "socialism",
he would have let them have it with both barrels.

>That's not at all what I said, it seems though
>that Nestor believes that the ruling class in
>Argentina is somehow less capitalist, less
>bourgeois, than the ruling class in Britain and
>is thus worthy of his critical support at times
>of military adventure.

The Mexican ruling class was just as capitalist as the American
ruling class in the 1930s, but Trotsky sided with Cardenas. Your
refusal to support anti-imperialist struggles is absolutely
disgusting.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 10/14/2001

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org


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