[Peace-discuss] on the debate over the DSA et al Socialism conference & US foreign policy

[Robert Naiman]

The debate over the Greyzone piece and response caused this nice piece of
text to arrive on my computer, author unknown.

"there is a substantial portion of the semi-academic civil society/NGO
apparatus in this country – AKA ‘the Left’ – which is personally,
politically, and institutionally invested in a politics at odds with
anti-imperialist internationalism.

That politics operates through four mechanisms: (a) it focuses far more on
the crimes of targets of US imperialism than non-hot spots; (b) does not
believe that the primary task of US leftists is to build opposition to US
crimes; (c) embraces analyses which beyond frequently being incorrect,
fundamentally prevent the coalescence of internationalism in the US context
by demonizing every large-scale left project to build a better world, from
Venezuela under Maduro to Bolivia under Morales to the Philippines Maoists;
(d) attacks those who attempt to highlight media fabrications and the
operations of US soft power as ‘Stalinists,’ ‘Assadists,’ or other terms of
thuggish abuse which very quickly lead their targets to the unemployment
line and the victims of soft power to the graveyard.

Are these differences of opinion? Of course. Are they debates between
comrades? That depends on one’s perspective, where one draws one’s red
lines, and whose perspective one shares. Is publishing a book in support of
US Right to Protect interventions, as Haymarket did, a difference of
opinion, or an error? Is platforming Venezuelan socialists, Marea
Socialista, who met repeatedly with Juan Guiado, an error? When those
holding one position in the debate find themselves writing in the Atlantic
Council website or publishing op-eds in the NYT, we are entitled to
question whether we are dealing with legitimate differences amongst
comrades, or a performatively ‘left’ position which in fact reflects the
interests of those who own the NYT and the Atlantic?

And when do ‘errors’ in aggregate become a political line, when does a
political line reflect Eurocentrism? When does a categorical refusal to
deal with the national question in times of imperialism become a form of
complicity with the imperialist apparatus, unwittingly or wittingly? And
when does it become a question not of what we think our intentions are, but
what we should know of the effects of our stances and actions? Do we want a
Left that looks to the substantive dissolution of hierarchies between
nations and thinks internationalism starts at home, or a left that shrugs
at questions of location as ‘US-centrism’? These are the questions before
us, including the DSA, which has gathered in its ranks tens of thousands of
activists full of real commitment to changing the world. But we were
raising them well before July 2019."

===

Robert Reuel Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1
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