Before I respond to YTMX, I want to point out he's managed to completely bury and forget the topic of the thread.
The fact is, Hezbollah's class composition has nothing in common with the class composition of the "Chinese and Cuban national liberation movements". YTKMX has dropped any claim it does, in favor of a general peasant-bashing-fest. Apparently he prefers the bourgeoisie - what other conclusion can ya draw, when he endorses bourgeois parties and rejects the worker-peasant alliance?
The fact is that Hezbollah doesn't fight for land reform or anything else that challenges the interest of the propertied classes, even within bourgeois-democratic limits. And the historic fact is, that has always been a characteristic of national liberation movements.
Originally posted by
[email protected] 31 2006, 08:16 AM
In both China and Cuba, the revolutionary forces were drawn largely from poor peasants - rural exploited toilers. There was also an element of wage-workers, especially in Cuba where much of the rural population was proletarian (sugar), and where a general strike clinched the revolutionary victory!
Silly.
Peasants are not "exploited" in the Marxist sense of the word.
Wage-labor was only one form of exploitation. There's a chapter of Capital where Marx compares forms of exploitation under capitalism, feudalism, and slavery.
But I'll try to not to do too much quotesmanship....poor peasants produce wealth - in some period of history, they feed the rest of society. Today, working farmers produce huge amounts of wealth.
They receive a relatively small amount of that as their own income. The rest of it is appropriated by banks - as interest, by landlords - as rent - and by agribusinesses that buy and sell from farmers - who have the leverage to set unfavorable prices.
That is precisely "exploitation, in the Marxist sense." Value - necessary-value = surplus-value.
Apparently the British SWP does no Marxist education at all.
Peasants don't automatically have the same interests as the working class.
True! For one thing, rich peasants are exploiters - of tenants and hired laborers. Peasants are a spectrum of classes - at one end shading into the bourgeoisie, at the other into the working class.
Poor peasants have many interests in common with the working class. You should read a guy called Lenin on this. His strategy - of allying with the peasants, against the landlords and vacillating bourgeoisie - proved better than Trotsky's.
Yours - of rejecting alliance with working farmers in favor of an alliance with the bourgeoisie - wasn't Trotsky's however. It was the Menshevik approach. And heck, at least they had the excuse of dealing with a semi-feudal country.
(Before 1917, Trotsky was somewhere between the two, organizationally and politically.)
As for the "general strike" clinching "victory". Castro was always calling general strikes. Most of these never happened, precisely because the middle class leadership and the peasant base was totally alienated from the Cuban proletariat.
Um, no. One general strike failed. (Which was a major setback for the revolutionary forces.) There were, IIRC, 3. Including, again, one at the moment of the triumph of the revolution, which completed the downfall of the regime and blocked all the plans for a coup and/or other maneuvers to get rid of Batista while saving capitalist rule.
You don't know anything about the history of the Cuban revolution - and worse, you don't want to. If you did - I'd suggest you take a look at the Santa Clara uprising, also. But if you'd prefer to repeat mindlessly that workers were not part of making the Cuban revolution....
Land reform is a PEASANT demand. The fact that Castro ceded this demand proves the "influences" he was under.
Similarly Lenin? And how about those peasant soldiers in the October insurrection, not to mention the Civil War?
(Severian)We start by asking what increases the confidence and strength of working people - not necessarily, or first of all, what weakens imperialism.
(YTMX)The two are inseperable.
I'm sorry, but that's obviously not true, if you'll just take a moment to, figuratively, look around you at the world.
There are more than two forces in the world. Some of them may weaken imperialism - heck, conflicts among imperialists can do that - without benefitting working people.
Has the Iraqi resistance, in its attacks on imperialism, strengthened the Iraqi working class? On the contrary, it's terrorized, attacked workers - and divided the class along deepening sectarian lines.
Sometimes the enemy of my enemy...is also my enemy.
But you clearly just don't care. Certainly the interests and class-consciousness of working people is not where you start from, in any of your arguments.