Re: [Marxism] Skewering "Fahrenheit 9/11"

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ian Pace wrote:
>
>
> I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet (it opens over here soon). Nonetheless,
> the accounts I've read suggest the following conclusion: any critique (like
> that of Moore's) that can't posit some plausible alternative will itself be
> an exercise in vanity and self-delusion, fodder for faux-progressives who
> want their consciences cleared but actually have a vested interest in
> nothing changing. But that depends whether you think that the election of
> Kerry or Nader is in any sense better.
>

Look at the film as one-half of an agitational leaflet. The other half
has to be distributed by members of anti-war groups leafletting outside
the theatre. I presume that the purpose of the left is to involve more
and more people in active resistance to imperialism; I also presume (or
at least hope) that there is no one on this list whose idea of agitation
and recruitment resembles the Weatherman tactic of 1969 of approaching
people on the beach, in drive-ins, etc. with the challenge, "Are you for
imperialism or against it! You have 60 seconds to make up your mind."
(Incidentally, that is how Mark Rudd got his jaw broken in a drive-in in
Milwaukee.)

I personally haven't voted for a DP candidate since 1964, and I don't
plan to break that record this fall.

BUT, practically everyone I am working with in the local anti-war group
is hot for Kerry, and while I have never concealed my personal views, I
would be out of my fucking mind if I didn't work with those people. And
I would be equally stupid if I disrupted work of the group by arguing
over the DP or Kerry now. There is too much other important work to do.
I seriously hope that some of them will, in the next two or three years,
move towards marxism, and that even more of them (not to speak of new
people reached) will move towards a position of principled opposition to
U.S. imperialism. Now it is more than sufficient that they work against
the occupation of Iraq; we can began to worry about Kerry next January.

Most of the people who have made revolutions in the past, and I see no
reason this will change in the future, have not been revolutionaries,
they have been people mobilized in struggles against particular evils
who discovered, at some point, that the only way they could continue
that struggle was to rally around the standard of the minority of
revolutionaries within their ranks. More, I suspect a majority of
marxist revolutonaries have not been marxists; they have merely
discovered in their collective struggles that the minority of marxists
in their midst usually have the best advice to give on tactics and
strategy. That is our job, and if we do it well we will find that we are
also doing well in recruiting new revolutonaries and new marxists among
those revolutionaries.

Carrol


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