The FARC-EP: Red-headed stepchild of 1st world revolutionaries. Good, bad or just keepin it real?

I think there's an interesting question here. I agree with ernie's assessment of the Viet Cong but from my limited knowledge of the history I'd have said that Cambodians would probably have been worse off if Vietnam hadn't invaded. I'm not sure how this fits in with libertarian arguments and I'd be interested in other people's views.

Which states do you have in mind? If you are specific it makes it easier to debate the issues.

jony - CONGRATULATIONS ON NOT ANSWERING ANY OF THE VERY SIMPLE QUESTIONS I'VE REPEATEDLY ASKED for the purpose of understanding your position ...

you do know that Orwell was a revolutionary (kinda soft trot with anarcho sympathies) who remained committed to revolutionary change but had a bitter hatred of Stalinism, as he saw what it did to revolutionary class struggle given the chance (i.e. the two accounts of barcelona in homage to catalonia). i can see why you're tetchy, given as advocating massive state-led social engineering ("beginning the decades-long process of changing gender relations") and wholesale nationalisation ("Aligning national resources to meet the people's medical, food, transportation, housing, culture, and recreation needs") puts you pretty close to stalinism, save perhaps for a rejection of 'socialism in one country' that on your description is still pretty close to post-WWII USSR foreign policy.

well i think this is the crux of a lot of this, you seem to think seizing the state and transforming society from above is a revolutionary act, in fact not even replacing the 'bougeois state' with a 'popular state' á la Chavez, but simply changing the role of the state. meet the new boss ...

that would be very helpful - not venezuela though, we've done that to death. if you answer the questions i asked as well we might even have some sort of a two-way discussion ...

really? i mean they should be able to accumulate pretty well, what with the disciplined labour force and all, but really? you see i'm skeptical, because you've also just described the north korean state as "democratic centralism"

Are you suggesting that anarchists are or were free to "work together and debate" in North Korea?

Johnyflash just postulated that the USSR was socialist in the '70's and 80's!!!! WTF.

North Korea is democratic centralism in action? Yeah, centralized democracy in the hands of the few against the many, oh yeah, that's dictatorship of some proletarians.

Johnyflash, socialism can not come from above, as it's the transition stage from capitalism to communism, and therefore is contingent upon a direct fight to communism. The goal of communist revolution is the dissolution of the capitalist state, capital, and capital's social relationship. A quck rereading of The German Ideology, The Civil War in France, The Economic and Philisophical Manuscripts, and even Capital, for that Matter, all clearly punctuate the fact that the social relationship of capital is predicated upon the specific alienation of labor. The alienation of labor comes from the fact that capital must valorize itself the the constant division and dispossession of labor. The specific relationship whereby capital is allowed to valorize itself is the state centralizing power and authority in the few and a specific vehicle used to facilitate the centralization of power.

I am saying this to point out the fact that even if you take Marx's analysis, which I'm sure that in some ellipitically obtuse way you're doing, there is no way that you can support North Korea, The USSR of the 70's and 80's, and the FARC.

Joseph K I think your assessment of Orwell is not correct, he openly defended WW2, poured for much pro-war propaganda and if I am correct, and I could be wrong, but I think it came out a couple of years ago that he was working for the secrete services.
Jonny I thought you would bring up the way the KR was supported by the West this is very very true, and something that is kept well hidden. But to say that the aim of vietnamese imperialism was humanitarian is wrong, it was a simple imperialist policy of trying to extended its influence. It did put a stop to the KR but that was an excellent cover for its imperialist policy, all imperialisms claim to be defending humanity through their slaughter.
On the question of North Korea and your defense of it, the following resolution passed at a conferences of internationalists in South Korea last year [url=http://en.internationalism.org/node/2042
Denounces the imperialist ambitions of all those involved in the tensions over the NK's nuclear weapons.
Taking about US imperialism who do you square your support of the IRA death squads with the fact that the IRA was supported by US imperialism, if I remember correctly under Clinton the IRA had an office in the Whitehouse and they were certainly allowed to fund raise for decades. They were a nice handy tool for good old uncle sam to apply pressure on British imperialism. Given this may be you should start to support British imperialism because it has suffered at the hands of Uncle Sam through the IRA campaign of terror?

that's correct actually - i think he provided lists of suspected 'communists' (stalinists) to the british state. he's a complicated character always somewhere between liberalism, trotskyism and anarchism - so yeah 'revolutionary' doesn't adequately cover it, though of course he risked his life in Spain for roughly the right ideas. the point stands however, that his most famous novels - animal farm and 1984 - are not anti-revolution per se but anti-totalitarian (anti-stalinist mostly, attacking totalitarians claiming to be revolutionaries), written in a period of horrific bloodshed and class defeat when pessimism must have been easy (he was himself chased out of spain by stalinist secret police).

anyhow, i'm interested to see how jonny fields the above responses re: north korea

!984 is not about the future. It was written as a parody of Britain in 1948. Orwell originally wanted to call in 1948, but his publisher wouldn't let him, so he turned the numbers round.

Johnny, this might be more interesting if you replied to Joseph's questions. It is part of the way that discussions work. You just come across as ranting.

Ernie, I don't think that the first part is at all true, and whilst the second is they were allowed to raise money in the UK too.

Devrim

well that's just outright wrong chronologically ... there's not much on the net but it seems his list of pro-stalinsts was "one of the last things Orwell wrote before his death from tuberculosis in 1950", i.e after he'd seen stalinism's openly counter-revolutionary nature in spain, and had trouble getting his critique of stalinism (animal farm) published because stalin was an official ally of the british state. i didn't realise you were so principled on issues of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' ...

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism [what you call 'democratic centralism', to the chagrin of trots no doubt] and for democratic socialism, as I understand it"

Animal Farm is counter-revolutionary propaganda if you consider Stalin to be a revolutionary, which apparently you do. nuff said.

anyway, a bit of a tangent, but like i say the guy's complicated, snitch and revolutionary both apply, though in my opinion not in equal measure.

so i'm a state asset now? any luck coming up with an answer to some of the simple questions i've asked?

you have quite a knack for citing sources which undermine your position ... i don't think anyone doubts that military totalitarian governments can initially achieve great economic growth by massively accelerating the primitive accumulation which forms the basis for further accumulation that took decades in the earliest capitalist economies ("North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other Communist regime in the 1950s.")

The article you link by no means exonerates North Korea, but simply points out that many other 'Communist' states were similar at some points, and that the US proxy-government in the south could also be completely repressive fuckers:

which would be a great come back, if anyone here was pro-south korean state - which nobody is! south korea has been forced to liberalise by working class struggle (e.g. the Kwangju uprising; "though it was bloodily suppressed it helped ignite a chain of similar rebellions across Asia, winning people many democratic rights.") would you support similar struggles against the north korean state? apparently not, because once more you're conflating the state with the working class in a way that would make most leninists cringe ...

If I remember correctly, Orwell's lefty defenders say that he gave a list of 'fellow travellers' of the CP to a close woman friend (someone he had previously proposed to) who worked for the intelligence services. He wasn't paid for this or employed by the secret services, as jonnyflash claims. But Orwell was by this time despised by the left for his criticisms of Stalinism and his exposure of their role in Spain, and it's said that all on the list were people he had already publicly named and criticised in his journalism for their pro-Stalinist roles . Still pretty shoddy behaviour on his part, but he was at the time working in the BBC's war propaganda dept., so par for the course. On the other hand those on the list were a bunch of Stalinist scum who would have cheered loudly if the KGB had icepicked Orwell for telling the truth about their show trials and Stalinism's counter-revolutionary role in Spain.

Orwell had Winston write in his diary; "if there is hope, it lies in the proles". But he also said; "Until they become conscious they will never rebel,
and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious." (1984)

For all his faults Orwell was honest and brave enough to go to Spain and then publicise the real truth about the situation in the face of extreme hostility, mainly from an oxbridge intelligentsia who cheerleaded Stalinism from the safety of their Hampstead drawing rooms.

yup.

I would agree with most of Ret's assessment: Orwell never abandon what he termed "common decency" ( he offered this as his reason for going to fight in Spain), and in any case, his very deep political errors do not take away his quality as an artist and 'reporter'. I would recommend Homage to Catalonia to anyone as an honest attempt to understand what was happening in Spain, even if I can make many criticisms of his political views.

However, it must be said that the 'shopping' of Stalinists to the secret services was more than just shoddy behaviour; and even more serious was the fact that he adhered wholeheartedly to the British war effort, closely paralleling Trotskyism in his advocacy of a real 'people's war' against Hitler (if I am not mistaken, he thought that Dad's Army could be transformed into a workers' militia). But at this level, Orwell's trajectory (ie towards enrollment in anti-fascism and imperialist war) was one taken by the majority of his generation in that period of profound counter-revolution.

"Those LibCom-ers really dedicated to their own narrow ideological sect's gang mentality......" (jonnyflash)

I take this to mean that libcom as a whole is turning into some kind of dogmatic ultra-left sect, quite possibly of a cultish nature.

(Aside: at last, my cunning plan is coming to fruit!)

I would assume it was more correct and logical to assume that orwells politics shifted from establishment to liberal left in the period prior to the spanish civil war, then over to the revolutionary left during his time in spain then to a rabid anti-fascism and anti-stalinism which in the end i think he realised the errors of and switched over to nihilism with a vaguely socialist slant towards the later stages of his life.

He did provide lists, which while wrong obviously was largely due to his post-spain bitter hatred of the daily worker editorial staff and other elements the british leftist intelleligensia, for whom his contempt can be clearly seen in HTC.

yeah that works. i'm still waiting on jonny to answer those questions though. it's like paxman v howard, but anarcho v tankie

But is it as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?

Shoddy, despicable etc, take your pick of adjectives, Alf. I mentioned his working for the BBC war propaganda to show he'd already left any radical perspective behind so in his terms shopping stalinists was as logical as (and part of) supporting what he presumably saw as an anti-totalitarian war effort. I think cantdo's assessment of his political development is quite accurate.

Joseph K; your questions to jonnyflash have obviously been airbrushed out of history.

a great book: the commissar vanishes. contains JK's pics above

Yeh, the same retouching happened in China (and elsewhere in other workers' paradises, no doubt). In China it reflected which competing faction of the ruling elite had the upper hand at the time.