Re: [Marxism] Re: THE MILITANT looks at the boom times coming ahead

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Fidler wrote:
> 1. The armed resistance in Iraq and the Mideast regimes have in common a
> "bourgeois" leadership; they are not revolutionary socialist. But there
> is a huge difference between a bourgeois nationalist who is engaged in
> an armed confrontation with the imperialist occupier and a bourgeois who
> collaborates with the imperialists or stands aside, at best wringing its
> hands.

Leon Trotsky on on the Sino-Japanse War:

Lenin wrote hundreds of pages demonstrating the primary necessity of
distinguishing between imperialist nations and the colonial and
semicolonial nations which comprise the great majority of humanity. To
speak of "revolutionary defeatism" in general, without distinguishing
between exploiter and exploited countries, is to make a miserable
caricature of Bolshevism and to put that caricature at the service of
the imperialists.

In the Far East we have a classic example. China is a semicolonial
country which Japan is transforming, under our very eyes, into a
colonial country. Japan's struggle is imperialist and reactionary.
China's struggle is emancipatory and progressive.

But Chiang Kai-shek? We need have no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek,
his party, or the whole ruling class of China, just as Marx and Engels
had no illusions about the ruling classes of Ireland and Poland. Chiang
Kai-shek is the executioner of the Chinese workers and peasants. But
today he is forced, despite himself, to struggle against Japan for the
remainder of the independence of China. Tomorrow he may again betray. It
is possible. It is probable. It is even inevitable. But today he is
struggling. Only cowards, scoundrels, or complete imbeciles can refuse
to participate in that struggle.

(Text from Internal Bulletin, Organizing Committee for the Socialist
Party Convention (New York), no. 1, October 1937)


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