Re: "Bringing down the final empire"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann quoting the Militant:

> This is not because of the particular intentions of the
> current occupants of the White House and Congressional
> seats. The problem is the system itself--imperialism, a
> system built on the exploitation of workers and farmers at
> home and the subjugation of oppressed peoples throughout
> the world.
Pathetic. Back in 1967 when I was being courted by both the Maoist
Progressive Labor Party and the SWP, I was always being told by the
former that the latter was not revolutionary enough because it refused
to "turn the antiwar movement into an anti-imperialist movement." With
all the ultraleftism that was beginning to emerge in the student
movement, I found myself wondering whether this was true. I approached
Dan Styron, an SWP party leader who committed suicide about 20 years or
so ago, with my concerns. As a veteran of the Berkeley student movement,
he was not only sensitive to the needs of the mass movement but
particularly good at refuting ultraleftism. He explained to me that the
antiwar movement was *objectively* anti-imperialist even if the slogans
were focused on the war itself. If the movement could effectively help
to stop the war, which it eventually did, it would make it more
difficult to organize imperialist interventions, which is actually the
case. Since the end of the Vietnam war, the USA has been forced to limit
its interventions to proxy low-intensity affairs or to go up against
much weaker opponents in circumstances that favor its own advanced
military technology, like the first Gulf War. When casualties begin to
mount, as they did in Somalia or when a terrorist bomb leveled a Marines
barracks in Saudi Arabia, the White House is under enormous pressure to
avoid "another Vietnam".

That people who went through this experience in the 1960s, as most of
the veterans of this small sect did, can go along with this insane
sectarian abstentionism and the ultraleft bombast that underpins it
without protest is truly pathetic.

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org




~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.