[PEN-L:9565] My Ideologies

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>They'd become rich, successful semi-peripheries, just like Spain,
>Portugal, Ireland, and the Visegrad countries, and a lucky few -- like
>Finland and Italy -- would have joined the core. Eurocapitalism has its
>faults, but carpet-bombing its main export markets is not among them.
>
>But pay me no mind, I'm just another reedy ideological flack for Mephisto
>Mitteleuropa Holdings Gmbh.
>
>-- Dennis

Actually, this raises an interesting question. The European social
democracies were one of the main sources of material aid to Nicaragua, even
more so than the Soviet Union. It is not well-known, but the FSLN was an
official party of the Second International. One of the main complaints of
the Sandinistas was that they were not even being allowed to become what
Dennis calls a "semiperiphery". They wondered why the US wouldn't trade
tractors for Nicaraguan beef?

If indeed the US had a government like the Swedes had in the 1980s, this
might have been the outcome. Of course, you have to analyze how the Swedes
ended up with such an enlightened social democratic government. Is it
because the Swedes are less violent and greedy as a race? That they never
had a frontier where Billy the Kid shot people behind their backs, or where
Apaches were never hunted down by Rough Riders?

Actually, the social democratic governments in Sweden were the result of an
extremely violent general strike that broke out over a confrontation
between a right-wing government and coal miners in the town of Adalen in
1931. (There's a movie titled "Adalen 31" which recounts this tale, one of
the finest movies about the labor movement ever made.) While this general
strike did not lead to a revolution, it did provide the fuel for a long
string of socialist governments. It is entirely possible that if the CPUSA
had not supported a capitalist party in the 1930s, but had thrown their
weight behind a labor party, the same results would have obtained here.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)