Barnes Loses It

["Ellie Marx" <marxellie@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Below is an excerpt from a Militant article which calls into question the
sanity of Barnes et al. I cannot believe that such callous statements can be
made by so-called Marxists. The most disturbing quote is the one with
regards to human psychology. Now, Barnes tells us, it goes against our very
psychology as human beings to grieve for others.

My whole life as a political activist centers around caring about others and
feeling angry and remourseful for senseless loss of life. This coupled with
hope is how people are spurred to activism in many cases. The heartless talk
of Barnes and the statement by their New York mayoral candidate, which
didn't offer a single word of condolence, only go to further prove that this
once great anti-war marxist organization is dying an agonizingly (for the
rest of the left) slow death as it decends into the depths of cultdom. What
person in their right mind, having lived through this, could not feel a
sense of loss due to the number of innocent civilians that were killed? I
felt the same anger and sense of loss when Yugoslavia was bombed and have
felt it time and again. The only difference now, is that it was happening
all around me and it was a lot harder for others to ignore.

Barnes then amazingly goes on to talk about people grieveing as a part of
the "pornographication of politics", comparing it to the reaction to the
death of Princess Diana. How much further away from activism and social
justice can this guy get? He tears down the very reason, the basic good in
humanity, that many of us have any hope for the future. Instead of looking
to grieving and caring about others as a positive example of human
solidarity, it is somehow made out to be some kind of patriotic gesture
practiced only by idiots who have no concept of class struggle and are
selling out to the media and capitalist class. He even goes so far as to
call the WTC tragedy grieveing an "engineered spectacle" designed to make it
so that people don't care about the struggles around the world.

I don't know about others, but I have seen an increase in interest of middle
east issues among co-workers and others since the attack. These are people
who could've cared less about politics prior to the event. It is an
excellent time to be talking to people about why the US shouldn't be bombing
Afghanistan. Having witnessed the horror or death and fire firsthand, the
images on the tv look too familiar to be ignored. But of course, in an
effort to be completely different than everyone else, or just out of pure
madness, Barnes invents this unbelieveable position. How sad it is to
alienate yourself from your own species for lack of human compassion.

If it wasn't clear before, it is now. The SWP is finished.

- Ellie Marx



{snip from "Communists and the struggle against imperialism today" October
22nd, Militant}

Over the previous weeks, Barnes said, the employing class in the United
States had organized moments of silence, blood drives, volunteer rescue
brigades, ceremonies, and other such "civic" displays in order to play on
human solidarity to mobilize the population behind the rulers' war drive.

"They put Oprah on a stage in Yankee Stadium to turn on the tears before
millions over nationwide television," Barnes said. "But human beings don't
grieve for people we don't know. That's a fact of human psychology;
otherwise none of us could ever function.

"For self-serving ends, the rulers and their shameless media propagandists
have ripped away privacy from thousands of people who did lose family
members and friends on September 11. They are cynically exploiting concrete
individual weeping in order to turn it into general patriotic fervor."

But none of this has anything to do with human solidarity, Barnes said. It
is part of the capitalists' political preparations to maintain their inhuman
social system, restrict the rights and drive down the conditions of working
people at home, and inflict unimaginable horrors on toilers abroad.

"It's part of the 'pornographication of politics' that has accompanied the
deepening crisis and instability of the world capitalist order over the past
decade," Barnes said.

"The rulers barrage working people with sensationalized stories of
individual corruption, 'decadence,' sex, divorce, and tragedy, all of it
turned into group emotion. Whether it's the sex life of President Clinton or
Prince Charles; the death in a car crash of Princess Diana; or the private
mourning for friends and loved ones killed at the World Trade Center or the
Pentagon--the effect of such engineered public spectacles is to take our
eyes off the exploitative class relations that are the source of social ills
and human misery under capitalism."{snip}



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