From: "Harri Kulju Erin Winslow" <harry.y-AT-swipnet.se>
Subject: SV: <alter-ee> Re: AUT: (en) A call for anarchists and other left libertarianssupporting  "unity" with Leninists/Trotskists
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 12:56:39 +0200



----- Original Message ----- 
From: Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Cc: <a16-international-planning-AT-egroups.com>; <antiimf2000-AT-egroups.com>; <infoshop-news-AT-flag.blackened.net>; <alter-ee-AT-most.org.pl>; <caravan99-AT-ecn.org>; <caravan99-AT-list.free.de>
Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2000 11:00 AM
Subject: <alter-ee> Re: AUT: (en) A call for anarchists and other left libertarianssupporting "unity" with Leninists/Trotskists



> Oh, come on. Lenin and Trotsky and Makhno and Kropotkin and and and ...
> have been dead for nearly twice the time that I've been alive.

Why, oh why do people think that history is irrelevant?!!! Or that you cannot LEARN from the past? History will not repeat itself in the same precise manner, but the same ISSUES will keep coming up. Authoritarian versus libertarian. Control versus freedom. Who makes decisions? What recourse is there when someone abuses his/her power? These are issues that every society must work out.
 
> To now state, as some anarchists in London apparently did prior to
> May Day 2000, that Trotskyists should be expelled from discussions
> because "they'll shoot us like partridges" in a revolutionary situation is
> to ignore the fact that no one - not the anarchists, not the Trots, not
> the left-anarcho-situationist-post-syndicalist-revolutionary-collective,
> is anywhere near shooting anyone else. . . 

Speak for yourself!!! Of course, maybe they won't actually *shoot* us. Maybe they'll just invite us to dinner and *poison* us - like Trotsky did to Makhno's comrades. That was a major social faux pax at best.

 
> . . . (by the way, I started off my political life as a Green, and then migrated
> into a group whose politics were a democratised, less-dogmatic type of 
> UK SWP Trotskyism, and now consider myself broadly to be a 'modern-style
> communist' who looks to the autonomous Marxist tradition for ideas, while
> realising we're just as unlikely to see another France '68 as we are to
> see a Russia '17 - just setting down the facts, so that I can classified
> and criticised by the book)

OK, so you are wishy-washy. That is your prerogative.
 
> . . . But looking suspiciously at "strange partners", and waving around the
> corpse of Nestor Makhno (and his comrades), is letting ideology rule
> supreme over common sense. 

Looking suspiciously at people who have used and manipulated you in the past IS common sense!!! Telling them to fuck off is even more sensible! 

I fully expect that many people with a
> background in Leninism and Trotskyism will start investigating autonomist
> ideas at the moment. 

Yeah, because they are opportunists who'll do anything to gain "followers." Lenin/Trot types have far more in common with fundementalist religious movements than they do with anarchism. The fundies have the same leader-worship, persecution-complex type mentality as well as the "don't think - just do what you're told" crap. 

After all, Trotskyism is where many, many people
> started off in revolutionary politics (there are still no autonomist
> groups in South Africa, and only a handful of syndicalists, who are mostly
> centred in two cities - historically the wide range of Trotskyist groups
> - some of which used to have membership in the hundreds . . .

So what is your point? That anarchists should be opportunistic little shits too? I have better things to do with my time! 

Erin Winslow
harry.y-AT-swipnet.se









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