[Marxism] A clarification of my view of Kosova independence andKosova "independence"

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Mehmet Cagatay
<mehmetcagatayaydin at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Adam Berg wrote:
>
>  "The 98% of the Albanians that voted for independence in 1991?
>
>  A rather inventive and ingenious definition of "ruling elites".
>
>  ...
>
>  Sorry for being not intentive enough to acknowledge the universal demand
>  for independence with a sleight of an abstraction.
>
>  ...
>
>  "If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the
>  ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an
>  independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or
>  those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves
>  about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we
>  thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of
>  the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the
>  aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were
>  dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom,
>  equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be
>  so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians,
>  particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up
>  against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e.
>  ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality."
>
>   http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

But, by the same logic, one could dismiss the Cuban masses who
overwhelmingly prefer Fidel or Raul Castro, or the Venezuelan masses
who prefer Chavez -- on the grounds that they are merely reproducing
the "ideas of the rulers" in those countries. The marxist
counter-argument to this, of course, is that Fidel or Chavez do *not*
represent the global ruling class -- the capitalists in Venezuela or
the Miami right-wing represent the ruling class.

So, one would have to look at the relation of the elite to global
geopolitics in order to understand whether they can be considered
"ruling class". Mechanistic application of this paragraph will not do.