As usual, Frank, you have parsed things very succinctly. In passing, Abrams appointment is playing very well in Israel, where it is seen as the Neocons winning out over the State Department people, to get to the path to partition that Sharon wants to use.
Harris points out in his article that the failure of Marxism to handle the lack of impoverishment of the workers ("immiserized") by Capitalism, and therefore showed the failure of Marx's Socialism, was handled in 1953 by Baran and extended by Wallerstein in 1974, with the concept that Capitalism "Immiserized" third world countries. This concept had not existed before in Marxist thought. It was seized upon by Marxist Intellectuals, taught, and became common currency in Western Thought.
It has now become one of those "Everybody Knows" ideas that is used as Gospel by Environmentalists, Anti-Globalists, and various types of people, right and left, who don't know any better. It is demonstrably wrong, but that never stops an idea that sounds good and makes the wanted point.
In addition, it was grabbed with both hands by Third World Leaders of all types who needed a reason to explain the poverty in their Countries, and by Muslims who wanted an explanation for the failure of Islam to enrich their Societies.
The problem we have with "Name Calling," that we dance around here, is caused, IMO, by the fact that there are people on the far, far, left who think "that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity." They use the same criticism's of our present War efforts as our Liberal opposition, they just push it much further. I think Chomsky is a good example of this, John disagrees. In any case, I am not going to pretend that there are not American Citizens out there who don't like this country and want us to lose.
Many of the younger anti-war people have been envious of the "Vietnam Left," who had an acceptable cause to fight for, and now are jumping in to make this the same kind of "Us vs Them" that the '60s was. This causes a lot of the pro-war people, who felt that the '60s protestors "Lost" Vietnam, to jump in and contest them. I could go on and on breaking out various groups of people who are "Pro" or "Anti" for other reasons.
So we will go on "Labeling" positions on these issues as "Right" or "Left" because it works to do so. In order to get along here, we just have to be damn careful to stress that we are attacking the Ideas, not the Poster, and be polite about it. |
