Re: [Marxism] J. Robert Oppenheimer documentary to air on PBS tonight

[David Thorstad <binesi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Huh? Since when and by what Marxist criterion was opposition to World 
War II by revolutionary socialists or anarchists "ultraleft"? Not only 
Trotskyists, but people like Daniel Guérin as well, opposed the war from 
a left revolutionary point of view. Many European
Trotskyists were murdered for their opposition. Eighteen leaders of the 
U.S. Socialist Workers Party went to jail for opposing the war on 
precisely these grounds, honored by being the first victims of the Smith 
Act. The CPUSA at the time regarded their opposition as "ultraleft" and 
a betrayal of CP support for the war, so urged Roosevelt to lock them 
up. A decade later, the act was used against the CP itself, a kind of 
perverse poetic justice.
    The "Allied cause"? What kind of Marxist notion is that? Or doesn't 
Cod regard that war as one of interimperialist rivlary? Ever since I got 
a political brain, I've understood revolutionary opposition to that war 
to be merely an attempt to turn imperialist war into civil war by 
mobilizing the masses against their class enemy. That still seems like a 
laudable goal, even if in our current imperialist wars the working 
populations of the imperialist countries, in the US of A especially, are 
mostly in thrall to their own bourgeoisie and its putrid goals.
    If this outlook is "ultraleftist," I welcome the label.
David
==============================================================================================
Tom Cod wrote:
> even if we take
> for granted the ultraleft position that the Allied cause in WW2 merited no 
> support.
>   

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu