[Debate] Stratfor on the Neither-Liberal-nor-Democratic ArabSpring

[grinker at mweb.co.za]

OK Peter, I'm forced to defer to your much greater experience of and invovlement in failed emancipatory projects. Yes, Africans have no right to decide on their own futures free from foreign domination. The right to self-determination is 'so last century'!






From: peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com
Sent:2011-08-23 19:14:09
To: grinker at mweb.co.za
Cc: 
Subject: Re: [Debate] Stratfor on the Neither-Liberal-nor-Democratic ArabSpring
Yup,  Russell, quite right; and the Dic of the Prol came before the State of the Whole People and the Withering Away of the State; Socialism before Communism.

This is now called 'stageism'. Stageism in temporal terms goes along with Binary Oppositions and Manicheism in logical ones. .

Hampstead, London, YCL, 1951 we had our gender version of stageism: After the Revolution the Men will have all the Babies. The Revolution was far enough off for us not to bother too much about the girls always being assigned the tea making and the washing up.

In the 1970s, however, came the feminists, the ecologists, the regional and ethnic rights movements. And each of them insisted either a) on the priority of their alienation, their movement (thus reproducing the Priority of the Prol) and demanding their rights NOW! Or b) recognising the inter-relationship of the alienations and the struggles.

It has now, surely, been adequately demonstrated that 'national independence' without meaningful democracy reproduces rather than surpasses the core capitalist model - sometimes the core or peripheral feudal ones. 

Moreover, capitalism has become not only global but also infinitely more complex and rapidly-changing.

Which is why we now ought to recognise the multiple faces of alienation/emancipation, and the necessity for struggles that are overlapping and that therefore need to be intimately interlinked or the basis of mutual recognition and dialogue.

Pw


On 23-8-2011 14:56, grinker at mweb.co.za wrote: 

It used to be widely understood on the left that attainment of national self-determination was logically prior to the resolution of other democratic and social transformation issues. 

Now apparently it's the other way round: western domination needs to be reinforced/reimposed (with the support of the humanitarian imperialist left) before we can move on to deal with these issues.



Waterman wrote:

  

If and when the Gaddafi regime falls, I am, however, confident that this temporary coincidence will come to an end. And that I, like most of the international Left, will concern itself with a) exposing the imperial project here (your primary stock in trade) and b) supporting radical-democratic women's, trade unions, intellectual and street movements within the country.
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