[Marxism] The Point Blank workers' exposure of company crimes

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frankly, I don't see how we can be in favor of or neutral on the
deliberate provision of death-dealing protective equipment for Gis.  I
don't remember Lenin ever taking this position toward the Russian army.
It is humanly-alienated abstract radicalism at its worse.

Of course, we are opposed to any equipment provided for Gis, or to their
being sent anywhere, or there being any army for them to be pressed or
conned into joining.

We are actually not advocates of maximizing casualties on either side,
even when we favor the victory of the oppressed nation. dBut of course
why should we not exploit exposures of how the bosses are sending the
Gis unprepared into war -- another piece of evidence that points toward
their responsibility for all the deaths.

If it were not for the fact that the Militant has refused to stand with
the fighters against the US troops in Iraq, has hailed their real or
alleged defeats, has allowed US generals describing the resistance as
"fleeing like rats" to basically speak  for the paper's assessment of
the war, and has hailed the war for unintentionally winning "political
space" for Iraqis -- were it not for these salient characteristics of
the Militant, I think the legitimacy of this kind of exposure would be
clear for most of us.

In order to cover up THIS deep-going treachery (and it would be sort of
attempted treachery even if NOBODY AT ALL read the Militant which is not
quite true yet) the Militant now has to abandon the workers who exposed
the cheating as reactionary super-patriots who deserve only criticism or
silence for exposing the employers' ways of making money by making war.

It is wrong to consider it prowar to be concerned about the fate of US
Gis. Ths can be one of the starting points of proletarian
internationalism, antiracism, and all the rest of it.

And what does a revolutionary worker do if  similar criminal misconduct
is exposed in their plant.  Vote to hush it up on the grounds that we
don't want to "look" patriotic or because we want as many Gis as
possible getting theirs?  How do you justify keeping a lid on it?

All the while, if you are a supporter of the Militant, also being for
killing as many of the resistance "rats" as possible in order to
unintentionally preserve "political space" and exposing the "exhaustion"
of Islamism and bourgeois nationalism?

Sort of the wife's neutral position from old Abe Lincoln joke: Go it,
husband! Go it, b'ar!


I guess the confusion we are experiencing is inevitable if we try to
examine an incident in the class struggle from the vantage point of its
treatment in paper with a crackpot line. I know of no alternative in
this instance, but in the future maybe I will try to dig out the local
press when the Militant tips me off about something. Fred Feldman



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