No retreat in Doha

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 No retreat in Doha
by Sabri Oncu
05 November 2001

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I tend to agree with Ergin Yildizoglu, who wrote in a few articles in the
Turkish Daily Cumhuriyet newspaper, that ideologically we are back in 1830s.
It is as if we, where with we I mean those who _still_ believe in the
possibility (not certainty) of a libertarian, egalitarian and fraternal
world, have not learned anything from our experiences over the past 170
years or as if we have not been in existence for that long or even much
longer. Now there is this talk that we now live in a totally different era
in which everything is new in almost every sense and that we need to start
from scratch and build a totally new left movement in our struggle for a
"better world". Sure there are so many new things: that we are fast
approaching an environmental catastrophe was not the case 170 years ago, for
example; or that we are now facing an additional problem that we may call
deprolaterianization, that is, the creation of an army of unemployables, as,
for example, it is happening in rural Turkey with the destruction of
agriculture, is new; so forth.

))))))))

CB: But don't we have to watch out for throwing the baby out with the bath water, and treating a historic defeat as a total defeat ? The liberation movement has a significant element of trial and error, learning from mistakes and sucesses.There have been many successes in the socialist movement in the last 150 years, not just defeats.