Yes, the ICTY. Who I never called “imperialist stooges” anymore than you called the US Air Force “paragons of virtue”. I guess when you make stuff up about people’s positions, it’s clever irony.

Anyway, as for the shouting: “genocide”, as defined in international human rights law (ie, in such a way it can apply for example, to a massacre of 8000 people in Srebrenica) is not what most people think of when hearing the word (the holocaust, the genocide in Ruanda, etc.). I therefore believe that in this context, employing the term amounts to shouting.

This is even more so, since there will not be any tribunal ever judging the (far larger) crimes committed by the US and allies in Iraq, thereby allowing you to say “a pox on both their houses” in that case. Let me ask you: if, by some miracle, a tribunal did come into existence and declare, say, the destruction of Falludjah “genocide”, would you then retroactively demand support for the resistance? After all, you claim one can’t stay neutral in the face of “genocide”.

If so, then I suggest that Marxism is irrelevant. Center-left parties talk about “class” all the time; even in the U.S. Democratic pols will go on about the middle class, and many people will vote Democratic because they think they are better for the working class, or the middle class. But these aren’t really Marxist classes, based on one’s relationship to production. (For that matter, I’m not really sure, without reading the sources you cited, what kind of classes they’re referring to either.)

And I have my doubts about the situation in Britain, specifically. The class struggle is the British equivalent of religion in the U.S. Sure, people go to the voting booth, vote, and then tell pollsters that the class struggle is alive and well and that they are participating in it. Is that what Marxism means these days? A sort of MTV Rock The Vote special?

The End of Class Politics? Class Voting in Comparative Context, Geoffrey Evans (Editor), Faculty Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford

Abstract: [...] This book presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross-national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion.The strengths of the book are the following: (1)a combination of breadth and depth, which uses both comparative analysis of up to 16 countries and detailed analyses of several of the more critical cases; (2) methodological sophistication: a particularly high quality is attained in the measurement of class and voting, and in the statistical analysis of their relations through time; (3) an interchange of skills and knowledge from political science, social stratification research, and the sociology of politics; and (4) an international collection of established and in some cases extremely eminent contributors.On the basis of the evidence presented, it is argued that in many cases class divisions in voting have not declined. …

Social Class and Voting: A Multi-Level Analysis of Individual and Constituency Differences, Robert Andersen and Anthony Heath, Centre for Research into Election and Social Trends, Oxford

ABSTRACT This paper extends previous work on the changing importance of individual and contextual social class in Britain. We adopt a multilevel framework for analysis, linking surveys from the 1964-97 British Election Studies with Census data on the social class composition of constituencies. The goal of the paper is to test whether, net of individual social class effects, the social class composition of the constituency in which the voter lives has declined in importance over time. We found that contextual class effects were consistently significant and fairly constant throughout the period under study.

Class Voting in Capitalist Democracies Since World War II: Dealignment, Realignment, or Trendless Fluctuation? Jeff Manza, Michael Hout and Clem Brooks Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 21, (1995)

We conclude that despite the absence of a clear consensus in the field, theories asserting a universal process of class dealignment are not supported.

For this purpose Marxism has been satisfactory so far. I suppose God would work too, but I am not religious.

If you’re (it sounds like) an activist, you’re certainly right that you can expect making a bigger impact by joining more popular rather than less popular movement. Good luck to you. Seriously.

And no, I for one don’t want to wait 40 or 50 years and then check again. In 40 or 50 years I will be dead. The people who want to sit and wait for the class struggle can join those waiting for the Second Coming.

Of course Marxism has time-honored answers to this—false consciousness and so on—which come down to unfalsifiability. You can no more prove that class struggle is not the hidden truth than you can prove the nonexistence of God. But as a predictive theory, intended to guide the struggles of the left, Marxism has failed.

J Thomas, let me suggest this metaphor: the moon was right there in the sky for a couple of hundred years, big, bright and obvious. Then in the last 15 years or so it got a little blurry and hard to see (at least from some places; if you care you’ll still find it shining bright a few miles to the South) – and so: the moon must be gone forever now.

Well, again, I’ll say: give it some time, let’s check again in 40-50 years or so.

No, I’m just reminding Christian that the International War Crimes Tribunal determined that what happened at Srebenica was genocide (which is why Ed Herman, Diana Johnstone et al. now have a little cottage industry devoted to Srebenica-denial, and Johnstone speaks venomously of a “Srebenica mourning cult”). More generally, noting that the refusal to intervene in Rwanda effectively weighed in on the side of the Hutu. And as I’ve noted before in bloggy disputes about such things, “intervention” in Rwanda need not have been military; simply jamming the radio station would have made a world of difference. But then, this argument rarely gets anywhere with people who like to pretend that I think of the US Air Force as paragons of virtue.

Oh, come on, abb1. Class struggle has a specific meaning. It doesn’t mean that a) there is no conflict within society, b) that everyone in society has the same economic interests, c) that there are no rich people and no poor people, d) that rich people do not attempt to oppress others, etc.

But what, specifically, are those 3/4 of British people who think that there is class struggle actually doing? Voting Labor?

That’s right! A whole lot of people feel like their theories are validated because there are systems that work.

It’s like believing that newtonian physics must be correct because the moon doesn’t fall out of the sky. But we had thousands of years of watching the moon not fall out of the sky before Newton ever explained it. If people tried to use newtonian physics to keep the moon from falling out of the sky and the result was that the moon did fall out of the sky, there would be reason to think something was wrong….

But then, if there was a severe recession then all kinds of crackpot theories would start sprouting. Lots of americans would say that it was because of government intervention. They believe there’s never ever a recession unless government intervention makes it happen.

Would we be better off with less government intervention? Well, homeopathic medicine got its start because doctors were doing things that killed their patients. Utterly ineffective homeopathic doses were better than standard treatment. Sometimes it’s that way with government too. I’m pretty sure the US economy would be better off today if Bush had spent 8 years doing nothing at all.