Re: [Marxism] Brazil's Lula meets Fidel Castro, offers credit

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann wrote:
> It's like a conditioned reflex, like Pavlov's memorable canine. If we
> get some news that some government or leader somewhere is favorable to
> Cuba, will trade with or lend money to or invest in Cuba, the Militant
> Army of Illusion-Busters will leap forward to warn us against any of 
> this. They constitute a "tut-tut-tut" brigade. It's as if they had 
> memorized Emily Dickenson's poem in which a mother warns her daughter
> against swimming:

Nobody has argued that Cuba should not take credit from Brazil, or from 
Merrill-Lynch for that matter. My objection is in seeing Petrobras in 
the same light as Venezuela's PDVSA. Lula, acting on behalf of the 
Brazilian capitalist class, simply sees Cuban off-shore oil as an 
opportunity--in just the same way that he confronted Bolivia when it 
planned to re-nationalize the nation's gas fields.

> "Know-it-all" ism is one of the diseases from which radicals who live in
> the so-called "advanced" capitalist countries at times suffer from badly.
> It's a mental propensity which we all need to be cognizant of, I think.

So what's the solution to that? Taking yearly vacations in Cuba and 
wrapping yourself in the Cuban flag?

> How can we learn anything if we think we have all of
> the answers already? No es facil (it isn't easy), as Cubans sometimes
> are known to say.

And you know what Turks say? Bok!

> These self-appointed guardians of the public consciousness claim they
> are fighting hard against illusions. THEY, of course, are completely
> free of illusions. They know everything. They have no illusions about
> ANYTHING. Perfectly perfect perfectionists, that's what they are.

This is what Freud called projection.




________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism