RE: [Marxism] Morales's first post-electionTVinterviewwiththeforeignpress

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joaquin quoting David:
 
David writes: "I suppose one could ask why you immediatly defend every 
populalists or radicals positions without looking at them first."
 
Response Jim C: I think both David and Joaquin  have a good point here. For 
example, Alexander Cockburn ran a piece praising as a "Blackfoot Rosa Parks" an 
individual who is known by those who live in Blackfoot Country as an 
out-and-out traitor and shill for the BIA while pretending to attack them; he 
picked upa superficial piece off the net, read and interpreted it 
superficially, did not bother to check with anyone actually living in Blackfoot 
Country and ran a superficial piece that could of done some damage if  
Counterpunch was indeed relevant to anything real or read widely. Parlor 
diletanttes, sitting behind keyboards and sumarily making pronouncements about 
struggles, personalities and conditions--for or against--they obviously know 
nothing concrete about and have never seriously investigated, do real damage to 
real struggles with their House Marxianism, parlor dilettantism, 
know-it-all-ism, sectarianism etc.  The issue is not what something appears to 
be, the issue is what it really is and what it really does--for whom and 
against whom; all sorts of crypto and even outright reactionies can assume and 
have assumed "populist" facades.

On the other hand:

My question, not to David, but to list members, is why every time Third World 
peoples, and especially in Latin America, find expression in a national 
movement does this automatically lead some folks in the Trotskyist tradition, 
especially in the imperialist countries, to start decrying "populism"? Perón 
got the "populist" label, so did Fidel, so do now Chavez and Morales.

What exactly is it that you understand by "populism" -- or is it like "regime" 
which means "a government we don't like very much"?

Joaquín


Response Jim C:  I think the point by Joaquin has merit. At a time when the 
Vietnamese, for but one example, were fighting for their very survival and 
undergoing heroic sacrifices, here we had some of the nominal "left" in the 
U.S. and in Europe, spending far more time denouncing the Vietnamese as "a 
deformed worker's state" and  as "Stalinists" than really giving any tangible 
support to their just struggles (other than selling their poorly-written, 
legend-in-their-own-minds and irrelevant rags at demonstrations they usually 
had little influence in organizing and carrying off or in engaging in vitriolic 
faction fights in the post office boxes they were small enough to occupy) 
 
Sometimes I am frustrated that what goes on on the net about oppressed Peoples 
never reaches or is answered by those oppressed Peoples who are the targets of 
"analysis" of some the cyberwarriors or  represent some House Marxian's market 
niche and CV, and yet sometimes I am glad they never get to see it and that 
most of the more ill-informed and even treacherous cyber noise gets a chance to 
do some damage that it could potentially do if it were disseminated widely and 
given any credibility by those who are being written about.
 
Jim C
 
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