[Peace-discuss] Who opposes the war?

[Morton K. Brussel]

Thanks Carl for your reflection of my whimsical question.

I would only comment that left-right political determinations might  
include, in addition to degrees of authoritarianism and democracy,  
something about economic and social rights, such as the right to have  
lodging, food, health care, decent living conditions, education,  
culture….  Democracy in its political sense does not necessarily  
include these aspects of human life and welfare.

I may be more with Chomsky than even you, since like him, I too am  
atheistic. Sometime I would like to have you describe your theism,  
your concept (definition!) of god. From what I can gather, god means  
all things to all people, although my liberal theologian ethics  
professor at Yale (Theodore Green) said (that for him) it was that  
ethereal thing embodied in "love"—a hard-to-grip definition that  
would hardly satisfy staunch believers of the literal Bible.

Regards, Mort

On Jan 26, 2006, at 1:16 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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