[DEBATE] : FYI - Implications And Consequences Of The Global Financial Crisis To The People's Anti-Imperialist Movement

[peter waterman]

Yoshie:

If what you are trying to say here is that Marxism is responsible for
Sison, you are pushing at an open door.

Marxism is no more virtuous, universal and eternal than is anything else.

If, as Marx claimed, 'all things solid melt into air' this - as Marshall
Berman said five years or more before the USSR collapsed - must also be
true of Communism.

This may be disorienting to those who, surrounded by crisis and confusion,
still depend on Marxism and Communism as the rocks of certainty on which
they can build their future.

I have myself long abandoned this church. But I still think that what Jose
Maria Sison and his ilk (and they are legion) have done with and to
Marxism is to deprive it of its emancipatory elements. This needs to be
said - particularly when Marxism is used as a justification for the murder
of comrades and of innocents.

Sison belongs to a generation of 'Marxists' that began with Stalin and
continued with the self-proclaimed Presidente Gonzalo (Abimael Guzman) of
Peru's Shining Path (by way of Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung and Son Company
Limited). History will not absolve them.

Peter W


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Peter Waterman
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On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 12:52 PM, peter waterman
<P.Waterman at inter.nl.net> wrote:
> To put Jose Maria Sison together with Marxism is to misunderstand either
> Sison or Marxism. Or both. Any notion that 'Sison is a Marxist' is an
> oxymoron (contradiction in terms).
>
> Can anyone fish out 'consequences to...the people's anti-imperialist
> movement' from this piece of 50-year-old automatic writing?
>
> I can't. Unless it is: do what North Korea, Cuba, Iraq have done, what
> 'Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Peru,Brazil, Nigeria, Philippines, Turkey,
> India and other South Asian' countries are (surely highly differentially
> and problematically?) doing.
>
> Sison, the self-pronounced, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung of the
> 'national-democratic' movement in the Philipines (but wisely resident in
> the jungles of Utrecht, Netherlands), has missed every call for effective
> action since before the fall of Marcos.
>
> What he proposes may have to do with radical nationalism, populism and
> thirdworldism. What it has to do with Marxism is totally obscure. And
> irrelevant.

It may be convenient for Marxists today to say that the show trials in
Moscow, the famine during the Great Leap Forward, and so on had
nothing to do with socialism, just as it is convenient for capitalists
to say that fascism, imperialism, continuing denial of clean water and
sanitation to nearly half the people of the world, and so on have
nothing to do with capitalism.  If we don't buy that about capitalism,
though, why should we buy that about socialism?

Yoshie
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