[Marxism] "While we trade abstractions, people are dying?" (was, me bear-proof?)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sayan wrote, beginning with a quote from Nestor:
"And if Mugabe is overthrown, be prepared for something worse."
 
"Really? I heard on the radio a few days ago (on BBC I think) that life
expectancy is Zimbabwe has already reached among the lowest in the
world.
 
"While we trade abstractions, people are dying."
 
I understand Sayan's frustration and feel it also, but nonetheless I have
come to think of this as an empty criticism. Whether we have discussions,
build parties, participate in mass demonstrations, sell papers, participate
in trade union struggles, wage guerrilla war - it is simply a fact that
human beings die completely unnecessarily while we are doing so of disease,
killed by cops or the gun thugs of Mugabe and many others, or needlessly die
in other ways.  There are quite a few countries where life expectancy is
declining and infant mortality is on the rise.
 
Sayan finds it hard to imagine that life expectancy could continue to
decline in the post-Mugabe era, that the removal of Mugabe by the current
international campaign could SOLVE NOTHING but I don't.  For Patrick Bond,
there can be nothing worse in Zimbabwe than Mugabe just as their can be
nothing worse in South Africa than Mbeki.  Perhaps my imagination is more
vivid.  I can imagine things getting a lot worse, and I think in Zimbabwe
this is the trend as I read the political lineup unless some new force
intervenes.  This is why I appreciate the ISO and their political break with
the MDC as overall positive, and I found aspects of their analysis
enlightening.
 
But why imagine that the current opposition coalition, with the backing of
the US and Britain, will improve matters? I really see no sign of this.  To
the imperialists, they promise to be much more consistently neoliberal than
Mugabe, to the masses some of them - maybe house leftists, I don't know what
- promise that they will be less neoliberal than Mugabe.  And I know how
this works out in practice.  Life expectancy is low.  That doesn't mean it
can't get lower.
 
What is needed is to learn from Latin America, from Chavez and Morales et
al. Africa desperately needs what Joaquin perceptively called movements of
national salvation, not calls for socialism or even labor parties built
around the interests of a single sector or so on.  Mandela's course in the
struggle against apartheid has a lot of positive lessons in my opinion, but
there is only one government in Africa that I know of in recent years that
really had this specific character: The government of Thomas Sankara in
Burkina Faso.
The material published by Pathfinder Press on this, including the writings
and speeches of Sankara, need to be read and circulated widely.  Ernest
Harsch, a talented journalist who was a member of the SWP at the time, and
has remained interested in this important revolutionary experience, is
someone I am hoping will decide to write more about it and its relevance for
Africa today.  I plan to contact him but I hope he is lurking for the
Zimbabwe discussion.
 
There is an alternative.  Frankly I don't see the current opposition, with
their reliance on sanctions against their own people, as offering any better
way out but only a road to deeper breakdown and chaos - not to mention the
improbable but really existent possibility of an imperialist occupation.
Well, after all, anything is better than Mugabe!
Fred Feldman
 
 
 

 

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