durruti02 said:
yep soz see update .. rushed OP
but the point here is that what DID it acheive for those people? anti imperialism does NOT confront capital .. people in former colonies have replaced imperialism with submission to global capital ..
anti imperialism is teh stalinist stages theory .. deal with empire befire dealing with capital .. imho opinion this is wrong .
Sorry completely missed this- or migh haqve given a very hurried reply before rushing out and not looked at thread since- until now, sorry.
You are right in many ways I think that anti-imperialism does not directly confront capital- though the capitalists feared the movements becuase it showed how the working class and indeed peasantry could organise against a coloniser power. However, it was easy enough to buy off the anti-imperialist struggle by simply chaging the public face of the bourgeois- in many cases the real controlling forces continued to be capital from th eimpeiralist heartlands now with a comprador client native bourgeois and rulling class.
So yeah I get what you mean.
durruti02 said:
and so i totally do not underestimate anti imp actions .. i see they have zero affect .. please show me otherwise
I'm not sure about zero affect but certainly a stageist approach- first kick out the British or first overthrow apartheid and only later get on to class questions is completely wrong.
In fact, many on the very small Marxist left in Ethiopia I know (well I don't know very many of them but I have met a few Marxists when I lived there) have a bleif first democracy later socialism and actually advocate joint action with bourgeois politicians!
We should say that actions such as the overthrow of apartheid or the Birtish empire or the expulsion of the Italian fascists in Ethiopia (or indeed the overthrow of the emperor or the butcherous semi-fascist derg) show tht the working class and the working farmers have power when we organise but that we shouldn't stop at changing the personnell of those who rule us but demand real changes in our lives.
The demad for democracy is a progressive demand but we should use it to say we want better living conditions, better pay, more food, rights for women, rights for children etc.
We should form democratic forums of struggle which press forward these immediate practical measures but can also become organs of power.
When I spoke to students in Ethiopia about this they were pretty enthusiastic. Indeed many I knew were involved in a life and death struggle over such basic issues in the campuses and they fought a strike and won.
In miniature this provided a model of how everything can be transformed.
Why shouldn't a college be run by the students and workers? Factories and offices should be run by the workers and wider community.
Why shouldn;t the land be run by the workers- land to the tiller was a popular slogan in the 70s but though some estates were broken up now priave huge farms are reappearing and many peasants have plot sizes too small to get anywhere. We should argue for the private famrs to taken over by the workers and run as model farms and then with investment from the urban centres buy machinery, transform the land and have voluntary collectivisation. Again farmers I spoke to (my wife's father is a peasant) were enthusiastic about this.
Every one should be able to bring there demands and there rights to the table. It would mean an explicit political fight against the servitude of women- who in Ethiopia are brutally treated, abducted, raped and beaten (as long as it's by thier husbands). However, a popular liberation movement based on real democracy and a fight for socialism would have to include overthrowing sexism and racism and all other divisions- even a fight against homophobia and the church (both with an iron clasp on popular culture- particulalry in the countryside- Ethiopia is 805 rural. But when I spoke to famrers about this they had never heard of socialism or communism but said if it meant more food they were for it! it's not to underestimate the huge political struggles needed but with the self-organisation of the masses it can be achieved I beleive from my experiences in a small Ethiopian town and the countryside (n absolutely marvellous but also barbaric place where people die everyday because of zero health care and appalling shcoking things go on- my wife's uncle one day looked sad- when I asked him why he said because he'd beaten his wife so badly she couldn't get up that day. He seemed genuinely sorry but only becuase he'd beat her too hard.)
This provides a model of how the whole country and indeed continent and world can be transfomed by ordinbary people organising to take power ourselves, not waiting on leaders, but having an uninterrupted revolution to take power for ourselves and run our own lives.
So that's my answer for now. What do you think? Sorry for the delay in replying.
