[Marxism] US "Militant" greets NATO-backed rebel victory in Libya

[Louis Proyect]

On 10/27/11 10:18 AM, Fred Feldman wrote:
> http://www.themilitant.com/2011/7531/753102.html
>
> Rebel forces take Tripoli
> in Libyan civil war
> (front page)
>
> BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
> Rebel forces have taken control of most of Libya’s capital city of Tripoli
> as the Militant goes to press, ending nearly 42 years of the tyrannical
> regime of Moammar Gadhafi. Backed by thousands of other opponents of
> Gadhafi’s government, armed rebels stormed his fortress compound in the
> center of the city, holding most of it after a fierce, daylong battle,
> according to press accounts.

I wonder why Fred would take anything this newspaper writes seriously. I 
understand that he spent 36 years in the group when it was quite 
formidable but today it is a hollowed out shell consisting of 
glassy-eyed cult members. If Jack Barnes woke up one morning and decided 
that the earth was flat, nobody would challenge him.

Lately the paper has decided to subject SWP members to public exposures 
as inadequately Bolshevik:

<start>
Another Militant article, in the August 8 issue, quotes Chris Hoeppner, 
Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Congress in New York’s 9th 
District, as saying funds for such a jobs program “would come out of the 
bosses’ profits, which they take from the wealth working people produce 
with our labor.”

This inadvertently gives the tip of a finger to the capitalists’ 
mystification that a federal jobs program is an enormous cost to social 
wealth, one that—whether pro or con—reinforces “big government.” The 
truth, as SWP candidates explain, is that putting millions back to work 
would create value on a massive scale.
<end>

--and--

<start>
An apology to readers

The article “Explosion of ‘interns’ is attack on wages, solidarity” by 
Seth Galinsky in the July 25 Militant quoted Roger Hodge, a former 
editor of Harper’s magazine, from an issue of Bookforum. Hodge said 
interns in Washington, D.C., not only do clerical and other tasks but 
“sexually gratify more established political figures.”

The scurrilous claim that interns provide sexual favors as part of their 
unpaid labor has nothing in common with journalistic integrity in any 
publication, let alone in a socialist newsweekly published in the 
interests of working people. The Militant apologizes to readers for 
repeating this anti-working-class slur.

—Steve Clark, editor
<end>

These people are stark raving mad. Fred might as well go Dada on us and 
cut up NY Times articles, throw the fragments in a hat, and put them 
together back again randomly. They would make about as much sense.