Date: Sat, 02 May 1998 08:33:54 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT:Louis on Reeves


Kathe Pollitt:
>Still, if you want to talk about the sociological and material basis of
>the left, now or in the past,you'd find "trust fund liberals" fund a
>great deal of it, including the uncritical third-worldist Latin American
>solidarity work you yourself engage in.  When I visited Nicaragua during
>the Sandinista years I met quite a few of them.

Kathe, when my organization provided skilled volunteers to the Nicaraguan
government, including the electrical engineer who almost single-handedly
repaired power-stations after the contras blew them up, we established a
certain amount of credit with the Sandinistas. I am not a "Sandalista," but
a Marxist. I made my Marxist views clear to people like Carl Oquist, who
was the "responsable" to Tecnica and in charge of economic planning in
Nicaragua. The Cuban Communists also made their criticisms known to the
FSLN, all along the way. These criticisms were made on a peer to peer
basis. The sort of baloney that Reeves is writing, and you accept
uncritically, is just patronizing advice from afar. It has a left rather
than a right spin of the sort Paul Berman specialised in, but it amounts to
the same thing.
 
> I appreciate that you exempt me personally from your scorn, but  these
>insults still seem to me a substitute for real intellectual work.

My idea of "intellectual work" is to debate out the post-Marxist illusions
of people attached to the Zapatista cause, like Harry Cleaver. He seems
reluctant to engage in this, but that is no problem. He is a very busy man
doing productive work.

>Charles Reeve and Sylvie Deneuve , an electrician and a secretary, both
>working class by birth and entirely self educated, both with many
>decades of leftwing organizing and analysis to their credit, currently
>involved in the movement of the unemployed in France, are exemplary
>figures on the left. 

I don't care what they do for a living. I am a computer programmer who was
raised by wolves in the Adirondacks. They may be "exemplary" in France, but
they have enshrined Jerry Lewis and Jean Baudrillard as well.

You may not agree with them, you may not think they
>know enough Mexican history or whatever.  But to tar them with the brush
>of wealth, dilettantism, liberalism -- it's really unfair. 

My beef is with the arrogance of leftists in imperialist countries
functioning as Monday morning quarterbacks for struggles in third world
countries. The shoddy state that the unreadable Nation is in today is a
topic for another day.

Louis Proyect 



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