Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 23:56:34 +0100
Subject: M-G: Confusionism and the power of Marxist analysis


A while back Gary M was moaning on about Trotskyism having all the answers.

This accusation is about as off beam as moaning that scientists have all
the answers. Yet no one would raise an eyebrow at the incredible accuracy
of scientists' forecasts relating to the orbital paths of heavenly bodies
or satellites, or scientists' claims that they understand the processes
involved.

The scepticism underlying the continual revolutionary questioning behind
such scientific accuracy has nothing whatever to do with the kind of
fundamentalist confusionism pushed by many of our opportunists, who confuse
scientific certainty with the absolute and groundless claims of religious
faith, and thereby chuck out the scientific baby with the religious
bathwater.

What Marxism and Trotskyism does is give an analysis of social and
historical processes that allows us to understand what's going on and more
importantly to intervene in what's going on and change it.

The things preventing so many subscribers from understanding this are also
accounted for by our method. Mainly social loyalties outside the
proletariat, but usually in the form of social pressures within the labour
movement itself mediating external pressure. Accepting Marxist and
Trotskyist principles for one thing blows all concessions to Stalinist
methods and objectives into little pieces, and if people have been devoting
a lot of their lives to this kind of accommodation, they'll be very
unlikely to change it on the urging of a little logic. The same thing goes,
in diluted form, for those interested in setting up some kind of bloc, not
with workers in mobilization influenced by Stalinist ideas, but with
organizations and movements controlled and monopolized by Stalinist
leaderships.

Gary himself openly admits he's drifting towards Stalinism. Let him read
about the fate of the feted fellow-travellers of the 1930s and take
warning. It's the kind of filth that'll never wash off.

Cheers,

Hugh




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