|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Here we review the accuracy of various views of anti- Amerikanism with quotes from revleft.com, a patriotic youth group of the imperialist countries masquerading as "revolutionary left." Revleft.com has mostly imperialist country users, but users from Third World countries as well. Most of the people at revleft.com know nothing of international asset distribution and believe that they are speaking for a proletariat in the imperialist countries, instead of an exploiter class of petty-bourgeoisie. As such, revleft.com-ers fail to acknowledge and understand why Al Qaeda has struck such a deep class chord among the world's exploited.
The revleft.com started as a cult of Third World revolutionary martyr Che Guevara, but changed its main name to revleft.com from che- lives.com, which is a good thing, because Che was pro-Stalin unlike revleft.com. With quotes from this youth organization, we can learn much about the extent of de facto patriotism in the imperialist countries and how that patriotism warps the information imperialist country youth feed to other Third World bourgeois youth with Internet access. Revleft.com is strategically placed to show us how the left-wing of parasitism binds youth to imperialist fatherland.
We call the revleft.com reliably patriotic, because it has been banning the followers of organizations that believe the Third World is the crux of the class struggle. They started with banning followers of Stalin until MIM objected and pointed out that they were isolating youth who ended up in fascist clutches. Yet even in 2008 there is an ongoing discussion of banning people who put forward the labor aristocracy thesis (1) that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao all used.
Here is a typical quote on Al Qaeda or any Third World struggle.
"Tiny, secretive cells of religious fighters such as 'al qaeda' are equated to the working class of Islamic country's?" "I don't know where to start. good luck establishing a global revolution on that basis."(2)FACT: At this moment, Osama Bin Laden enjoys a 46% approval rating in Pakistan, compared with the 34% of the president, Musharaff. Bush's approval rate in Pakistan is 9%.(3) Pakistan's population is approximately 165 million, which means there is an eight-digit figure of Pakistan's people alone that approve of Bin Laden. By comparison, the combined socialists and communists in the united $tates, including all the ideologies seen at revleft.com plus the ones they banned would be less than 100,000 people, a five-digit figure. So as a matter of fact, we can equate Al Qaeda to the working class of Pakistan, contrary to our revleft.com, blinded by patriotism.
The International Herald Tribune also summarized an even more pointed finding from an earlier poll done by the Pew Research Center: "In fact, feelings are so intense in the Islamic world that Osama bin Laden was chosen by five Muslim publics - in Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority - as one of the three political leaders they would most trust to 'do the right thing' in world affairs."(4) We can be sure no Trotskyists, Luxemburgists or other exotic plants made it into the top three.
The role of the bitch stream at revleft.com is to express ambivalence about anti-Amerikanism and thus pave the way for Uncle $am's boldness in wooing the left-wing of parasitism. As it stands, the State Department knows this all better than revleft.com, because the State Department does polls by country too. There is now a whole book on how the State Department polled on anti- Amerikanism and systematically exploited ambivalences among the oppressed during the late Eisenhower administration, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations.
The loyal patriots of revleft.com are in the business of denying the facts of Osama Bin Laden's popularity, because it hurts their feelings as imperialist country parasites and their lackeys. The imperialists in the State Department have to deal with reality more than revleft.com, an example of how much Karl Marx's scientific method has been obliterated by revleft.com. When we find places like revleft.com less scientific than the State Department, we need look no further for why there is no communist movement success in the imperialist countries since Lenin. Those of us in the proletarian camp have to pierce the bourgeois delusions, not spread them.
"AQ, [Al Qaeda--ed.] on the other hand, consists of wealthy or at least well-off petit-bourgeois fanatics who enjoy very little actual support on the ground, even in Muslim countries."(5)
Where did revleft.com get this idea left unrebutted? Could it be from president Bush or neo-conservatism?
"It is a common myth that revolutionaries and terrorists are spawned by poverty, and thus have an understandable desire to overthrow the system or global order that they feel is responsible. . . . a look at the biographies of leading revolutionaries and terrorists makes clear that they come from middle and upper class families, and are usually well educated."(6)The above is a quote from a web page for the Iraq War. The first first web link is to Daniel Pipes, one of the top academic authorities of neo- conservatism. Together Daniel Pipes, Bush and others have often drawn attention to the fact that radical leaders are petty-bourgeois or even capitalist. The reason for this is that the imperialists realized long ago that identity politics for workers is favorable to U.$. imperialist interests, so they use it, the common sentiments at revleft.com being excellent material for Bush to work with. The identity politics for workers comes up every five seconds at revleft.com. Here we have concern with individual identity raised to "love it or leave it" by revleft.com: "MIMites should move to the third world and if they feel so guilty of being labor aristocrats."(7) This again proves that the real reason that these revleft.com types cling to their wrong analysis is that they want a patriotic strategy and won't let it go. An organization really admiring Marx would think of banning imperialist country patriots, not MIM.
The above quote is also opportunism, because no class struggles so far have succeeded in an anarchist-pacifist or council communism style. The most successful class struggles have all ended up mediated by capitalist leaders, people who would be bribed by imperialism, as Gorbachev and Yeltsin were for example. The anarchist-pacifists and council communists also end up mediated by the capitalist class, but are too dense to be able to recognize that since they more or less see capitalism as a lifestyle, not a mode of production that they have failed to change.
Labor laws even in imperialist countries have gone through capitalist parliamentary institutions-- rich people--so to make some big deal about Al Qaeda having rich or super-educated leaders is opportunist, because the same applies for how class struggle has advanced in the imperialist countries generally--through capitalist mediation unfortunately thus far in history. This kind of opportunism is like saying "the sun rises and MIM does not know it." The people making such accusations are the ones who stand exposed.
Anyone needing any confirmation that the revleft.com attacks on MIM are about racism and chauvinism got it directly in the same thread Nov 1 2007 at revleft.com denouncing MIM on Osama Bin Laden: "I wouldn't use the Black Planthers as a good example of anything, but a racist reactionary movement." (8) This persyn and others like him are not up for banning, but MIM is; even though, MIM does not participate at revleft.com and hasn't in years! (It's another funny thing about oppressor nation paranoia, especially the anti-Leninist party kind.)
Piercing illusions surrounding this point is all the more difficult because the academic honchos backing revleft.com-style bitches also support identity politics. The people at revleft.com will be the ones publishing books about anti-Amerikanism in 20 years. Now, let's do some market research on revleft.com. What is it that appeals to revleft.com by the racial signals of the ideas possible for discussion?
FACT: Within the first 14.5 hours of January 14, 2008, revleft.com had 15 threads discussing "Trotsky," whose movement has not led a single revolution in the world since the death of Lenin in 1924. In contrast to the thread per hour discussing Trotsky, we would have to go back to December, 2007 before we found 15 threads discussing "Al Qaeda." There are comments on revleft.com that Al Qaeda fighters once had CIA aid against the Soviet Union, but the fact is Trotsky volunteered testimony for the House Un-American Activities Committee and exposed Soviet defense plans. So the question is, why is something called "revleft" discussing Trotsky more than Al Qaeda? Political purity is not the reason.
Trotsky was white. He believed Europe would free the world's colonies and predicted Hitler's movement composed of workers would turn the guns around for socialism in the midst of World War II. He eventually became an utter white nationalist crackpot, with lots of internationalist rhetoric to cover it up. We would not find Al Qaeda discussed 15 times at revleft.com without going back to December, 2007. Then again, Al Qaeda is not white. Neither is the Black Panther Party, which did in fact achieve plurality Black support in the 1960s in the united $tates, according to a network television poll.(9) Yet, there too, we would have to go back to December 2007 to find 15 threads discussing the Black Panther Party at revleft.com.
Readers at revleft.com will see that the revleft.com participants constantly invoke sizeism in opportunistic attacks on more popular organizations, the quotes above on Al Qaeda being proof. They also attack themselves, but in the end, all the sizeism does not prevent the people there from being Trotskyists or Luxemburgists. Most of them are coming from countries with no sizeable anti-imperialist movement, so the real end result of the sizeist critique is simply profession of faith in Amerikans, British, etc., that are not yet communist, socialist or anti-imperialist. It amounts to comparing their organizations with the size of the population they have faith in. Such professions of faith have a disproportionate negative impact on attention paid to organizations for the oppressed and exploited, not just in words, but actual practice.
Trotsky's followers have not achieved majority public opinion approval in a single country in all that time. Yet in a board flooded with such adherents of Trotsky and similar imperialist population utopianisms, they say that Al Qaeda has "little support on the ground." It shows a clear Amerikan empire bias dragging along poodles in England, Australia, New Zealand, I$rael etc.
The real reason that Bush's bitches-in-training at revleft.com like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and some anarchist thinkers is that all believe the revolutionary class struggle centers in the imperialist countries. Some believe that consciously, the followers of Trotsky and Luxemburg for example. The rest believe it unconsciously through repeated testaments of faith in the lovability of their imperialist countries, especially the united $tates.
Al Qaeda claims to be anti-capitalist and fighting colonialism and U.$. occupations. Indeed, it is again in the news lately for releasing pro-Malcolm X statements to guide Amerikans.(10) An unbiased teaching and discussion curriculum regarding anti-capitalism and anti- colonialism would include Al Qaeda at least as much or more than Trotskyism. The reason this is not happening is the patriotic bias in the imperialist country left-wing of parasitism. Rosa Luxemburg died for her mistaken idea of internationalism; yet, her works have been co-opted for patriotic use at revleft.com, where they have yet to notice that since 1945 there has been no inter-imperialist war like the one Rosa Luxemburg experienced. There is no proletarianization of that kind going on, but patriots continue to latch onto Rosa Luxemburg for her values, namely her opposition to Lenin's theory of party, and her faith in Germans and Poles. For this underlying racial identification and anti-communist reason, Trotsky and Luxemburg eat up much time at revleft.com. The point at revleft.com is to appear to want to discuss internationalism, communism and socialism--just as long as it is in any fashion that has not been achieved and is thus safe for imperialism's existence. The 2004 election for Democrats came down to "dated Dean and married Kerry." The revleft.com is dating Trotsky with a future married to neo-conservatism. People calling for specific tasks to do with Al Qaeda are probably cops, but there is no excuse for not knowing what Al Qaeda is saying relative to what Trotsky is saying.
Notes:
1. http://www.revleft.com/vb/marx-engels-lenin-t62589/index.html
2. http://www.revleft.com/vb/mim-endorses-osama-t65655/index4.html
3. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jLQ6MIkQ8UdTvBotLfxVFVjYR3XA;
http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20070923/OPINION/109230121
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C09%5C24%
4. http://www.iht.com/articles/98482.html
5. http://www.revleft.com/vb/mim-endorses-osama-t65655/index2.html
6. http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/04/no-poverty-is-not-cause.html
7. http://www.revleft.com/vb/marx-engels-lenin-t62589/index7.html, which is
a thread in which not one persyn refers to Lenin's and Trotsky's definition
of proletariat and semi-proletariat cited repeatedly on MIM's web page.
Again, the reason is patriotism comes first, definition of class second.
If
If we read this thread of this footnote carefully we will see a whole stream of people use the word "proletariat" as if it came with the implicit assumption in Lenin's writing of "proletariat in one country." Again, there is a patriotic reading of Lenin, based in a lack of effort. Obviously for Lenin, "proletariat" was an international class, and in no context could it be defined as "the majority of your country," which is generally how the word is used in revleft.com opposition to MIM.
Read this for what is NOT included in the proletariat by Lenin and Trotsky both:
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/semiprol.txt
8. http://www.revleft.com/vb/mim-endorses-osama-t65655/index2.html
9. Philip Foner, ed.,
10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/09/wlindh09.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
15Oct2007, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/us/15net.html?pagewanted=2&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bin%20Laden,%20Osama