[Peace-discuss] Who opposes the war?

[C. G. Estabrook]

On Tue 24 Jan 2006 Morton K. Brussel wrote--
>
>Hey, Carl, are you left, right, or center?  --Mort


Mort, I'd have thought I'd made it tiresomely obvious to this
list that I'm a yellow-dog Chomskyan, but your posing the
question gives me an excuse (perhaps) to offer a long and
self-indulgent answer.

Chomsky calls himself an anarchist (see "Notes on Anarchism,"
<http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/notes-on-anarchism.html>),
and he equates anarchism with "libertarian socialism."  That
is a "left" position (perhaps the only left position) and is a
critique of, say, Marxism-Leninism *from the left.* 

As we discussed at least once before on this list, the use of
the terms "left" and "right" is fraught with difficulty. 
Here's <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook01172003.html>
how I proposed to sort it out: 

"It's a commonplace that the distinction between Left and
Right is fraught with ambiguity. (When the Democratic party is
spoken of as on the Left, it's gotten pretty silly.) And it's
also generally accepted that the terminology arose from the
seating arrangements in the French National Assembly of 1789.

"But if we want a consistent usage for the Left/Right
distinction, we might think of political parties ranged along
a line according to how authoritarian or democratic they are.
The further Right one goes, the more authoritarian the
parties, and the further Left, the more democratic. (At the
far Left end are the socialists, who want not just a
democratic polity but a democratic economy as well --
investment decisions made not by corporations but by elections.)

"Lenin's Bolsheviks, then, must be seen as a right-wing
Marxist party, as must all twentieth century communist parties
in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, owing to their
authoritarianism.  And they were indeed so described by
left-wing Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek."

My academic training, such as it was, was in history, and it
seems to me that historians can't escape being Marxists any
more than astronomers can avoid being Copernicans or
biologists, Darwinians.  (Some of each, of course, try.)  The
old man in the British Museum (one of the last and greatest
sons of Aristotle) produced an account that one really can't
go back on.  But politically, given the marxist tradition, one
would have to speak of "left-wing marxism," as Chomsky does,
and he (almost) equates that with his own position -- as I
would.  

Finally, there is of course one area in which I disagree with
Chomsky (and Cockburn).  He has no time for religion (in spite
of having made acute exegetical comments on, e.g., the Hebrew
prophets and the story of Ahab in the Hebrew bible).  I'm a
theist and a Catholic, and I don't think theology and
politics belong in separate departments of human life. 
Christianity (indeed all the Abrahamic religions) properly
understood is anarchist (and of course a good deal more). 

Incidentally, Eric Anglada of the local Catholic Worker house
(who I think is on this list) is organizing a conference in
C-U in August on "Anarchist Christianly."  I'll be giving a
talk on "A Primer on Christian Anarchism" (the phrase that    
I prefer, for reasons that I suppose are clear).  So these
matters are on my mind.

Regards, CGE