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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 2:00 PM, peter waterman <P.Waterman at inter.nl.net> wrote:
> 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.

I've heard a number of socialists say that socialism has never been
tried, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc., not to mention Pol Pot, has nothing
to do with the emancipatory essence of socialism.  This argument
reminds me of Ayn Rand, who held that capitalism is an unknown ideal,
for its emancipatory essence has not really been put into practice.  I
don't find either line of argument convincing.

Yoshie